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After pouring my own drink, I sat beside her. “Okay. Instead of worrying about all the awful ways we might die here, let’s think of how to take down this stupid show. First, though, if we’re going to be friends, tell me about yourself. Your background and whatnot.”
“Okay. Um, my life’s not very exciting, though.”
“Trust me, sometimes quiet, boring lives are way better than the exciting ones. I mean, being on this island is exciting, but that’s not a good thing, right?”
Chelsey chuckled. “True. Okay. I’m from the Twelfth Pack. We didn’t come from a lot of power.” She glanced at me and smiled awkwardly. “I guess you get that. Being from the Eleventh Pack, I mean.”
“Yeah. Kinda rough at the bottom, right?”
She looked relieved that I didn’t take offense at her comment. “I paired with this amazing guy. I couldn’t have asked for a better fated mate. He was charming, gorgeous, smart, and kind. Iliterallyfell in love with him at first sight. The problem,” she said with a sigh, “was that he was in the First Pack. His parents were disgusted by the idea of him being mated to someone in such a lowly pack. They talked him into rejecting me. They did it in front of an audience. News cameras and everything.”
“Oh my gosh, are you serious?” Being rejected in front of friends and family had been bad enough. I couldn’t imagine how bad it would have felt if it had happened to me the way Chelsey’s had.
“Yeah,” Chelsey said, looking world-weary. “Ben sent me away, and I never saw him again. Not that I didn’t try. Like an idiot, I went by his house twice. The first time, his mother called the cops on me for trespassing. No one was home the second time. He even changed his phone number and email address. I was fully and completely ghosted. I’ve been walking around with a broken heart ever since. I signed up for the show on a whim when Von made that special announcement.”
“Same here,” I said with a laugh. “I didn’t even watch the show other than when my friend Zoe wanted to watch it.”
Chelsey laughed, and this time, it was a real laugh. “Neither did I. I think I watched a few seasons when I was a kid, but for the most part, I ignored the whole thing, especially after I was rejected. It would have been too painful to watch. I wouldn’t even let anyone talk about the show around me. It’s pretty weird we ended up here when there are people drooling over the chance to be on this show.”
“Drink up. You have to finish that before you get any more. We’re supposed to be getting drunk, right? We’re shifters—we have to drink fast, or we’ll burn it all off before we get there.”
“Oh. Right.” She slammed back the last of her drink and winced. “Whew. Ready for more.”
“That’s my girl,” I said, pouring her another.
“What about you?” Chelsey asked. “What was your rejection like? They didn’t talk about it much on the show, from what I saw. Only a few hints here and there.”
“A complete shitshow.”
I told her about Jayson and our relationship, or lack thereof. I didn’t paint the best picture of him, which was what he deserved. I told her how he and his family orchestrated my termination from the Tranquility operatives, and that my own pack was pushing my father to banish me.
“You know,” I said, as a thought occurred to me, “I waswithmy fated mate for five whole years before the ceremony, but I never really felt like he was theone.” I was starting to feel a little tipsy. “He was such a dick to me all the time. How could that douchebag be my real fated mate?”
My words startled me. I paused, thinking about what had come out of my mouth. Had I just stated what Gavin had been preaching all along? Deep down, beyond the outrageous nature of the revelation, I truly did believe it. Jayson couldn’t be my fated mate. The blood test had to be wrong. That possibility, touted by Gavin, meant that one of Heline’s temple acolytes had made a mistake.
Could that have happened? Did some person, overworked and exhausted, accidentally swap my name with someone else’s? Could it be that simple, or was something else going on? Regardless, it felt good to say it out loud. I decided to repeat it.
“He was not my fated mate,” I said. “I don’t give a damn what the test said. It took a while, but I finally realized that here on this island, I had to stop pining after what I’d lost. Especially when I knew that if I’d gotten what I wanted, I’d have spent the rest of my life miserable. And you know, people have been saying for a while that they think the fated mate connections are messing up, and I think they’re right. No one wants to say it out loud, but I think everyone is beginning to notice it. I’d love to know who my true fated mate is.” I sighed sadly. “I guess I’ll never find out at this point.”
“You’re right,” Chelsey said. “It seems like there are more and more fated relationships that are backward or ill-paired. And I think you hit the nail on the head. There’s this weird undercurrent among the packs where everyone is starting to notice it, but no one wants to say anything. Maybe they’re afraid of pissing off Heline or something. That’s what made what happened to me and Ben hurt so much. We had arealconnection. I’m angry and hurt, and all I want to do is hate him for what he did, but my wolf still wants to be with him. She refuses to let me move on. I dream about him at least once or twice a week. I want to move on, find a new mate, and leave Ben behind, but even saying that makes me ache all over. I don’t know how I ever will.”
Draining the last of my drink, I poured another and sipped at it. This poor woman did not deserve to be here. She was pure and unassuming. This show was a chainsaw, tearing through people like timber. Wyatt and I were highly trained and capable operatives, but the dangers and drama were almost too much for us to handle. This woman deserved to be home with the love of her life. She deserved to have someone who would never reject her because, unlike me, she was a decent shifter who wouldn’t do awful things.
When I told her all that, she scoffed at me. “You act like you’re some kind of monster, Kira. You aren’t. You’ve proven over and over again that you’re a wonderful person.”
Maybe she had a point, maybe she didn’t. I’d been struggling with what I did the night of my first shift since I was a kid, when I could barely go a month without having a nightmare of waking up, covered in blood. To this day, I wondered exactly what happened and why I did it. Whatever I did as a child didn’t make the deaths on this show my fault, but part of me kept thinking I was cursed or something.
I downed the rest of my drink and poured another, gesturing for Chelsey to do the same. We were going through the drinks fast enough that even our shifter metabolism couldn’t hold back the effects. My brain had gone fuzzy and a little numb. We were well and truly drunk. We spent an hour drinking more and brainstorming ways to fuck with the show. Chelsey even had the idea to purposefully cut ourselves and smear the blood on our skin to tempt Von into attacking one of us live on air. I wasn’t sure that was a good idea.
“What about this?” I said, forcing myself not to slur my words. “Von’s, like, really important, right? What if we, like, uh, do something to make him not be good and important no more?”
“Huh?” Chelsey squinted at me through glazed eyes.
I thought about what I’d just said and devolved into cackles of laughter. Chelsey followed suit, both of us collapsing on the bed, unable to stop laughing at my drunken, incoherent rambling. We lay there, trying to catch our breath, and within minutes, we were both asleep, the near-empty bottles sitting on the table beside the bed.
Chapter14
Wyatt
