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As I approach the gates, I note the disturbed soil. It’s not Leandro’s body as he’s closer to the house. It looks like Kade buried Claudine as far away as he possibly could.
I couldn’t have picked a better spot myself.
“Whatever you have to say, say it and go.”
Mateo Desidario, the man I refuse to call Father, straightens his spine, as imposing and as intimidating a presence as always. “I’ve come to bring you home. The Desidarios are without—”
I take a step toward him, refusing to be cowed. “Home?I don’t give a fuck what they are with or what they are without.” I study this man who resembles me in every way but for our eyes. Mine are green; his are an almost black deep walnut brown. “You lied to me.”
He blinks. “If I told you an untruth, it was only for your own good.”
My bark of laughter couldn’t be any further from amused. “For my own good.”
I let my smile slide off my face as I close the distance between us, forcing him to retreat so his white silk shirt brushes the black metal gate. “You told me my wolf would turn feral if I left Claudine.”
His eyes search my face as if wanting to know how much I know—or how little. “What of it?”
“You lied,” I bite out.
He angles his chin up. “The mate bond is—”
It’s a battle to keep my voice down. “Do you know how I felt when I watched Kade rip her throat out?”
He startles. He’d have felt her death as the rest of the pack would. But he wouldn’t have known how or who was responsible. Rage flares in his eyes. “Where is he—”
“Do you know how I felt to see him paint my mate’s blood on our entryway floor?” I ask quietly when I want to roar.
Silence.
I lean toward him and whisper my next word into his face. “Relieved.”
He stares at me, disbelieving. “Then your wolf must truly be feral for you to—”
“All these years, it’s felt like someone attached an anchor to my ankle and launched me into the sea. Claudine was that anchor. I could never have done it. My wolf couldn’t have, either.”
“Claudine was your mate. She—”
I cut him off. “In what way did she ever behave as if she were my mate? When she was busy fucking Leandro? When you had her bent over your desk? Please, tell me, when did she ever give a single fuck about me or my wolf?”
Silence.
His nostrils flare, and he briefly looks away. “I see how this is. You meet another woman, and once she’s spread her legs for you, you forget your mate, forget your pack, and you forget your family.”
“When have you been any of those things to me? The answer is never. My wolf craved family, a pack, a mate because he hadnone.” I lean into his face. “Because of you. All because of you.”
“Claudine—”
“Was beautiful. But she was never real. She was nevermine.”
My wolf wanted Saige.
My wolf clawed up Kade’s back, trying to get to her. Not because he wanted to kill her. But because he wanted to touch her. She soothed the loneliness that was eating my wolf up from the inside out.
I never listened. Not once did I think what it would feel like for my wolf to be trapped in my body, deprived of all the things I could touch, taste, and feel.
Not fucking once.
I take in the man who failed me in so many ways, here to drag me back to a life I walked away from, not because I mean anything to him, but because he needs me to do something for him.
