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Amora

The grass lookedsoft when I knelt down, but in actuality, it’s prickly as fuck against my bare legs. On the bright side, if I focus on the sandpaper-like roughness beneath me, I can somewhat ignore the way the rest of me feels right now.

Sucking in a deep lungful of air, I uncurl and lean back against the trunk of the nearby tree, breathing through the tight ache in my chest. Pressing two fingers to the knot of anxiety that seems to sit just behind my sternum, I try to massage it away, but I’m pretty sure it’s here to stay.

It’s not really pain. Not like how the shadow poison turned my body against me, giving me seizures and cramps and bone deep agony. The broken mate bond feels more like an absence of feeling. A void inside me, sharp and cold, where something was cut out that should still be there. Phantom pain from a lost limb.

A limb you didn’t need, I remind myself darkly.

Leaning my head back against the bark, I draw in another deep, calming breath and count to five. Then I let it out slowly, mindful of every ounce of air exiting my lungs. I do it again. And again. After the third breath, I feel more balanced and less like I’m going to explode out of my own skin.

For three years after Kian fucked me and left me in that hotel room without acknowledging the mate bond, I spent every day building up the walls I needed to survive. Walls to keep my emotions at bay and to strengthen my convictions. I didn’t need Kian. I didn’t need a mate. I didn’t want a mate.

That hasn’t changed.

The three men did me a favor by breaking our mate bond. Without unbidden longing and affection weighing me down like a fucking ball and chain, I can return to my original goal: annihilating them.

I push myself up to stand, brushing grass and dirt off my bare ass as I rake my gaze over the almost invisible ravine. I’m not going to find them out here. Whatever bullshit they were up to when they shifted to human form on the edge of that crevice, they hid it right afterward with their shadow wolf forms. They’re like wraiths in that form, light-footed, swift, and completely undetectable by scent.

Fuckers.

There’s no use leaping ten feet down a crevice only to find out what I already know—that I can’t trace their scent any farther.

Hefting the oversized pack, I drape it over my shoulders, then shift into wolf form. The straps tighten around my broad chest as fur sprouts all over my body and my torso expands to that of a large wolf’s. Pushing off with my back legs, I turn and head back the way I came.

I find the path the men and I took when we were headed through the ravine toward the Tree of Life, then I pick up our wolf scents and follow the trail away from the magic tree and toward the Devil’s Teeth.

Zigzagging through the underbrush, I keep one eye on the ground and another on the passing shrubbery. Was it only a few hours ago I walked this path with them, feeling assured that I could reform the three feral shifters? Clearly, I was wrong. They planned to cut me off from them from the beginning. They didn’t just happen to coincidentally have a special potion with them meant to break the mate bond. That shit was planned and executed like a goddamn murder.

I shouldn’t have let go of my hatred. The witch, Gwen, warned me that my mates would destroy the world, and through the two and a half years I spent tracking them down, I never lost sight of that. But then I met them and spent time with them, got to know them.

And I got weak.

How fucking embarrassing. I’ve never been weak. I’ve never been swayed by a pretty face and a set of washboard abs before.

That won’t be happening again.

Several hours later, I slow my pace a little as I descend the other side of the Devil’s Teeth—which is composed of half a dozen sharp-pointed peaks in a close cluster, as if the earth has teeth and is eating the sky. But I come to a stop entirely when I spot what I’ve been looking for.

Fur.

I shift and drop my pack, then pluck the fluffy hunk of wolf fur off a bramble bush and roll it between my fingers. White, which can only mean Frost. Kian and Malix have much darker coloring. It feels like satin between my fingers and summons up memories of the man it belonged to.

His fur makes the void inside me scream.

I think of Frost with his silky soft, pale blond hair sweeping against his sharp cheekbones. Those piercing blue eyes like the heart of a glacier. Or the heart of an iceberg, more aptly, given how destructive he’s been in my life.

I sank just as easy as the fucking Titanic.

But it doesn’t matter now. It’s fine. I’ll fix my past mistakes and get back to my mission.

This will work.

I crouch next to my backpack and open the front pocket, digging around for something to store my prize in. Finally, I settle on shoving the tuft of white fur deep inside my small folding wallet, then putting the whole wallet in the bottom of my backpack where it’ll be safe.

Then I shoulder the pack again, shift, and resume my trek down the mountain.

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