The Lone Wolf's Rejected Mate (Five Packs #3)(30)

It’s bullshit that shifters heal faster than humans, that we’re less susceptible to infections and human disease, but we feel pain just the same. That’s Fate for you. She won’t even cut you a break when it defies logic not to.

Three stitches in, my hand begins to shake. I misjudge where to prick and the suture kind of breaks through the mangled skin. The tears that never quite stopped begin to stream down my cheeks.

“Mari—” Una says. I shake my head and line the needle up again. I blink to clear my vision.

Quiet steps come to stand beside me, and tentative fingers dab my cheeks with a wadded paper napkin.

“Thanks, Annie,” I say.

She pats my forehead like a nurse, even though there are no tears there. She stays by my shoulder while I finish the job, jabbing my own flesh, breathing through the sharp, piercing pain as I tug and pull with the needle driver to tie off the ends.

When I tie off the last suture, I collapse back in the chair and examine my handiwork. The stitches are uneven. The knots are a haphazard mess. There’s no bloody, gaping gash in my side anymore, though.

Annie pads back to the kitchen and returns with a tray and tea. Una joins Kennedy and me at the table, and Annie passes out the cups and saucers. Abertha, who had been keeping a respectful distance, drops her bag on a chair and ventures over to sit with us.

I’m too exhausted to ice her out.

Annie pours. Abertha takes a small silver flask out of her brassiere and splashes whiskey in hers. She holds it up to me. I shake my head.

A trail of blood drops has beaded on the hardwood floor from the door to this table. My blood. I shiver. I can’t seem to warm up.

After she empties the pot, Annie grabs a throw from the couch and wraps it gently across my shoulders before going back to the kitchen for more hot water and a plate of cookies.

For several long minutes, the others sip and munch in silence while I keep staring at the jagged line running diagonally from my highest rib to about two inches from my belly button.

Everyone in the pack always says I look like a human doll. When I was little, Rowan and Haisley and their crew always wanted to play dress up with me. They’d put pink bows in my hair and tug my corkscrew curls so they bounced like springs. I loved it. It was attention, and they were older and cool.

Now I look like a doll that someone tried to rip in half, sewn back together by a drunk or a child. The rest of my skin is as milky smooth as it’s always been, but there’s a jagged, pink-edged tear, long enough that someone could shove their hand in and pull out my heart. Or the bond that’s still inexplicably inside my chest, throbbing and dark and sour.

If I were a doll, I’d tear my own stuffing out.

But I’m a grown female. I reach for my tea. I dunk the bag a few times and wring it dry with its thread around the spoon. I make myself keep going, hold it together. The only way past is through. I learned that years ago.

I half-listen as the others begin to speak.

“It was a bobcat,” Kennedy lies to Abertha. “Probably rabid.”

Abertha glances at me, silver eyes narrowed.

I stir my tea. Click. Clack.

“If you say it was,” she says.

Annie’s gaze darts from me to Kennedy to Abertha. “It wasn’t a bobcat? You think it was something else? A feral? Last Pack?”

“It was a bobcat,” I say and blow across the tea to cool it. “It’s gone now.”

“There’s no need to tell the alpha.” Una levels her gaze at Abertha. “Kennedy’s wolf killed it.”

“Did he?” The corners of Abertha’s mouth curve.

Annie’s brow wrinkles. She knows something’s going on, that we’re all talking around it, and I’m sure she’s torn between her anxious curiosity and her instinct to avoid anything that could be trouble.

“It’s nothing to worry about.” I pat her hand. “It’s done.”

“Is it?” Abertha skewers me with her gray witch’s gaze. I don’t know whether it’s a challenge or a warning or a genuine question. I don’t know what Darragh is to Abertha or why she’s really here or why any of this happened to me.

I don’t know how a male can reject his fated mate and how his wolf can try to kill her.

But I don’t need to understand. I learned a long time ago that people do things that are incomprehensible, and in the end, there is nothing you can do but rely on yourself.

You have to dress yourself, tie your own shoes, make your own way to the brand-new alpha’s cabin, knock on his door, and tell him your dam is dead, and you’re hungry, and you don’t know what you’re supposed to do.

You have to sew yourself back together again.

I finish my tea, shuffle to the sink, rinse the cup, and leave it in the drain. I take a shower with my body half out of the spray, a towel over the stitches. I wash my face and go to bed. I lie there, staring at the reflection of the fairy lights in the gilded mirror that I traded a bushel of apples for at the farmers’ market.

At some point, hours later when the night is nearly over, the adrenaline has seeped out of my pores, and I’m left shivering despite the thick quilt, I hear a sound. A footstep on packed dirt, so faint I know I haven’t really heard it. It sounded through the bond that I’m desperately blanking.

Like a ghost, I rise from my bed and wander into the living room. He’s out there. I can feel him.