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Accepting the please as his due, Ryker scratches the underside of his jaw. “Are you asking me if we’re having the ceremony during the next full moon?” At my nod, he says, “That’s three days from now.”
No shit. Every single one of us knows the cycles of the moon intimately. As shifters, we can change shapes whenever we want, but we’re so much closer to our beasts when the moon hangs high in the sky. Mates will rut like wild animals, young pups might finally trigger their first change, and it doesn’t take much for the wolf to take charge.
I know when the next full moon is. What I don’t know is if he actually plans on going through with the ceremony.
Despite how they feel about me being Ryker’s intended, every new packmate I’ve met this past month has gone out of their way to assure me that the ceremony was happening during the next full moon even though there hasn’t been any planning for it. To a shifter—especially when one was the Alpha—the Luna Ceremony is like a highly anticipated human wedding. There should have been some planning involved, right?
Then again, the lack of it makes total sense if he’s trying to weasel his way out of the deal he made with my dad. Ryker agreed to mate me because I’m supposed to be his fated mate. But what good is that if he already has a mate he chose for himself?
I need to know. I need to hear it from him.
“Yes.”
“No.”
I refuse to let him see how much that simply stated no tears at me.
“Because of Trish?” I ask.
His face is expressionless as he thinks it over for a moment. And then—
“Yes.”
He’s… he’s not lying.
And I would know. Deception has a stink of its own, and I’ve always been able to tell when someone was being dishonest.
Call it a quirk of what I am. I don’t know—I can’t know since I’m the only female alpha I’ve ever met. My mom figured out that I was different when I was just a pup, and she spent the next twenty-five years protecting me from myself and my kind.
My whole life, keeping my true rank a secret has been drilled into me. In all of pack lore, there’s only been one other female alpha that I know of: the great Luna who is both our goddess and the moon incarnated into fur and skin. The stories about her are legend.
Like how she can control any packmate, including the Alpha, with a single howl. Or how any male she took to her lair became an alpha after she gifted him her body whether he was beta, omega, or rank and file wolf before she fucked him. Not to mention how the lucky wolf who she eventually accepted as her bonded mate became a god in his own right…
Is any of that true? Considering I’m still a virgin at twenty-five, I haven’t got a clue, and I never wanted to find out the morning after that sleeping with me did something to other wolf shifters. Not that that’s the only reason I’ve stayed away from casual sex, either. Ever since I was fifteen and I saw the seventeen-year-old future Alpha, I knew—just knew—that he was my fated mate. Fooling around with any other guy seemed like cheating to me when I’d end up Ryker’s forever mate sooner or later.
Damn shame he didn’t seem to think the same about me. How could he? He chose Trish.
Because he definitely wasn’t lying when he said that another pack female is the reason why our mating isn’t going to happen—just like how she was being truthful when she said that Ryker told her that he would stay away from me.
I didn’t want to believe it. After weeks of dealing with her snarls, her nasty whispers, and her dirty looks, I’d finally given in to my temper earlier when she showed up at my borrowed cabin. It was bad enough that she encroached on my territory, but she went a step too far when she smiled as she said that I was never going to be mated to Ryker.
She’d found a weak chink in my armor and gone straight for the kill. I was already a little worried that Ryker was having second thoughts, getting cold paws, you know? I finally convinced myself that he wasn’t in any rush and that was okay—until Trish gleefully confessed that his hesitation had everything to do with him choosing her instead.
Because I might be his fated mate, but I’m not the one he wants. And until he performs the Luna Ceremony, I’m not his fully bonded mate—which leaves him free to be with anyone else.
I spent a decade waiting for Ryker, but he obviously didn’t wait for me. I can’t really blame him for that, though. It’s another one of those rare alpha female things, that I recognized him as my mate long before the moon herself blessed the new Alpha with the name of his fated mate.
However, I can sure as hell blame him for letting me believe that my long wait was finally over. The adopted daughter of a pack leader, I always knew that a future Alpha’s mating was a pack affair. He wouldn’t take a bonded mate until he was installed as Alpha.
Which he was, months ago. And we’re still not mated.
Now I know that we won’t be.
So, trying in vain to ignore the way my heart feels like it’s shattering, I push for some kind of closure.
“You didn’t answer me before.” Call me a glutton for punishment, but I need this. “I’m supposed to be your intended. Do you actually plan on mating me at all or is this just some kind of joke?”
If so, I’m not laughing.
No one is.
