The Lone Wolf's Rejected Mate (Five Packs #3)(74)

“You won’t let me heal you,” she says.

I jerk my chin. I don’t like that she knows my mind, but she’s right. I don’t want to owe her anything.

“Your mate and I aren’t lovers, you know.”

My heart drops, but I’m such a physical mess, I don’t think it shows.

“I mean, back in the day, once upon a time, we, uh, were known to make the beast with two backs on occasion, but that was many years ago. At least, uh—” Her brow wrinkles, and she looks at her fingers. Is she counting back?

“I don’t need to know.” I feel sick.

She shrugs a shoulder. “Probably not. You were a pup. It was very casual. Very much two ships passing in the night.” She pauses like I’m supposed to say something. My eyes burn.

“Yes. Well. That’s all better left unsaid.”

Please, let her shut up.

She takes a breath and plows on. “But there are things you need to hear, and even though I’m much more hopeful now that things will, er, sort themselves out, I’m not inclined to” —her mouth twists in an odd smile— “to trust in Fate, as it were.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“To meddle or not to meddle, that is the question.” Abertha raises a hand like she’s on a stage before letting it drop back to her lap. She looks at me expectantly.

I stare back. “Is that a human saying?”

Her laugh quickly trails off, and she gets a faraway look in her eye. “It’s so hard to know what’s hurting and what’s helping. Maybe it’s impossible to know. Maybe Fate decides everything, and what we consider meddling is just us enacting the inevitable plan of a capricious god.”

This time, my brow furrows.

Abertha sighs, and then perks up and leans forward in her chair. “Or not. Like I said—so hard to know.” She locks her silver eyes on mine. “I’m going to tell you a story. It’s not mine. I have no right to it. And if you tell Darragh that you know, I don’t know what he’ll do.”

I push myself up in the bed, my arm muscles aching so much that I can hardly prop myself higher. “You shouldn’t tell me then.” I’m instantly dying to hear, but I don’t trust this female.

“Probably not. But let me ask you—” She leans closer. “If you could know—and I can’t tell you—but if you could know why your mother and father did what they did, would you want to know? Would you want to know the truth or would you prefer to cling to the story you’ve told yourself?”

The air has become thick. It’s choking me. The clean room with its pristine beds and neat shelves and silent machines feels cavernous and alien.

“How would you know what I tell myself?” My voice is thick, too.

“When we’re young, we all tell ourselves the same thing. We were wronged. Those who hurt us had choices. We weren’t enough for them to choose differently.”

“And that’s not the truth?”

“Hardly ever.”

I hug my shoulders. The sheet is too thin. “What do you know about me?”

“Very little. But Darragh Ryan and I go way back.”

My wolf growls. Abertha’s lip twitches, but only once.

“So do you want to know, sweet little Mari?”

A sense of foreboding settles on my chest where the bond pumps like another artery. No, I don’t want to know. I want to be the small, sweet one tucked away in the farthest cabin, ignored, protected, but from a distance, lost in daydreams, secure.

I want to be one of the ones who barely remembers life under Declan Kelly, who’s untainted by the past, who has no shadows behind her eyes.

A pretty doll with a princess canopy, fairy lights, and little fucking bows on my little pink shoes.

I want it to be a fairy tale. Beauty and the beast, at the beginning, when Beauty’s intentions are pure and nothing is her fault, nothing is complicated. It’s a good premise—the innocent girl and the terrible beast—but that’s not how the story ends, is it?

And I’m not that sweet little doll anymore. I never was.

“Okay,” I say. Under the sheet, I draw my knees tight to my chest.

Abertha gazes across the bed at a window. The blinds are closed. Somehow, the angular planes of her face soften like when you’re looking at someone at dusk on a hazy humid summer night.

“You know that Darragh’s parents died when he was young?” she asks.

I nod. “Wasting sickness.” Another specter from the past that haunts the older packmates.

“His mother died from wasting sickness, but his father fell in a challenge to Declan Kelly.”

I lift my chin. “I didn’t know.” I hate that the witch is telling me about my own mate, and I feel petty for being hurt about it.

“You remember that back in those days, there was no unprotected female cabin.”

I remember. That’s why I was passed from family to family after my mom was gone.

“You were young. Do you know how unprotected females like you ate in those days?”

I shake my head.

“The lucky ones found a good mated fighter who’d keep them on the side. The unlucky ones ended up in the lodge basement.”

I’ve heard whispers, quickly hushed. Jokes that I never understood that would make a female burst into tears, or a male throw a chair or his fists.