Reclaiming His Mate

No! I trembled with fear for my brother, now the target of Gavin’s wrath. Despair mounted inside me with each stride Gavin gained on Colt. If Catrina allowed him to hurt my brother, I would never forgive them. I could barely watch. Even from afar, I wanted to keep Colt safe. I couldn’t stomach being so helpless, seeing Gavin get closer and closer, his teeth bared—Gravel crunching on the driveway up to Hexen Manor ripped me out of the scene. I gasped, dropping my binoculars and twisting around to see a black truck pulling up to the house. That was Alpha David’s truck. He was home two hours earlier than he said he’d be. If he caught me out here, I’d be dead meat. Shaking, I stood up on the branch inched my way closer to the trunk that the branch split from, then stuck my leg down, searching for the gall in the tree bark I had used as a foothold. Bark scratched my skin as I hastily climbed back down, my ears ringing with fear, making me dizzy. This was the bravest I’d been in a long ti

In my periphery, I glimpsed David turning the corner out of the corridor and into the parlor.He stuck his hands in his pockets as he looked us over. “I’m pleased to see you’ve had a successful hunt,” he said.“You should’ve been there,” said Catrina. “Gavin was the star of the show.”I didn’t want to acknowledge them.“How about some wine, hm?” She crossed the dinette into the open kitchen overlooking the backyard, disappearing through a door leading down to the wine cellar.I got ready to help carry the elk down the stairs into the basement where the carcass would be bled out and butchered, when David’s casual clearing of the throat implied he had other plans for me. “Gavin, why don’t you let the hunters take care of that?”My anger from earlier that evening was still red-hot. I abruptly released the elk and looked up at him, but my eyes were drawn back to Colt, who’d been standing across from me with a deep gash across the bridge of his nose. I had made that.Colt avoided my eyes an

On my bedside table, the smartphone David let me have buzzed. ‘Go help Colt butcher that elk,’ read his text message.The evening’s events stung me so much I didn’t even want to leave my room. I texted back, ‘Okay,’ and watched as David marked the message read, then pulled away in the truck.The manor was eerily quiet, with everybody gone. My bare feet padded down the hardwood corridor on the second floor, past Catrina’s room and Colt’s room, and the master bedroom belonging to Alpha David, all with doors closed. I paused outside of Colt’s room and found the smell permeating from under the door to be the most pleasant: musky and piney like evergreen sap. His room never used to smell that way, so I wondered if what I had been smelling was a new cologne. Gingerly, I continued through the manor, pausing at creaking floorboards and harsh gusts of wind out of fear that I’d be ambushed again. When I finally made it through the basement door, I stepped onto cold cement and was smacked by the

Grunting, I startled awake with my head still in the cooler. I scrambled to my paws and backpedaled, disoriented from the dream—I must have gone unconscious after chewing through everything in the cooler. It was a miracle the campers hadn’t returned. Night still closed around the campsite, but my vision had returned crystal clear, my thoughts now articulated with human awareness. The aftermath of what I’d done lay scattered around me, and the sight of it was as harsh as the revelation I’d just emerged from. That was the Moon Goddess leading me through my Moondream, at long last showing me who my fated mate was. She was out here in these woods, lost and injured, with pain in her feet that I could feel too. But I didn’t want to go to her.What I had done here was despicable. It made me hate myself, and knowing I was bound to someone who knew me for my savagery and cruelty only made the hate worse. The Moon Goddess had done this to punish me.Although my instincts screamed to return to H

Colt laughed. “That’s why the elk carcass made you sick, huh?”“Yeah.”He sighed slowly and dwelled on his thoughts. “I was so worried about you last night. You didn’t even close the porch door when you left. I thought you were running away.”I didn’t want to tell him how I’d been considering it.“Then when I found you after you’d transformed, I almost couldn’t believe it was you. You were a wolf. Curled up like a little puppy… You were really a wolf, just like us.”I heard the smile in his voice without looking up at him.“What did it feel like?”A tear dribbled down my cheek. I wiped it away again and sniffed. “I don’t remember much. I think I tripped while I was still human, then I blacked out. I don’t remember anything in the dream except running and seeing Gavin.” Just speaking his name left a sour taste in my mouth, tugging my lips into a frown. “The transformation back to human was a blur, the whole night, it was… confusing. I barely remember anything.”“It happened pretty fast