Chapter 5

Chapter Five

Hazel’s POV

The linen curtain slipped from my fingers.

For one stupid second, my brain tried to protect me. It told me I was looking at strangers. Two men I did not know, tangled together on the low bed, skin slick under the lamplight. Then Drake grunted, that low sound I knew better than my own heartbeat, and the lie collapsed.

Drake. My Drake. Behind Lucas, gripping his hips, thrusting into him hard enough to shake the bed frame. Lucas’s hands were fisted in the sheets, his head thrown back, his mouth open. The smell of them rolled over me, sex and sweat and the cedar oil Drake always wore, the one I bought him for his birthday because I had saved for two months to afford it.

I stood there holding the curtain like an idiot, waiting for the picture to change.

It didn’t change.

And then the worst part happened. The mate bond stirred in my chest, warm and golden, responding to him the way it always did when he was close. Except this time it carried his pleasure back to me. I felt an echo of what he was feeling, right there in my own body, while he was inside my best friend. My own bond forced me to share it. My own soul made me a witness.

Something in me tore loose.

“What the hell is going on?”

The scream ripped out of my throat before I could stop it. High. Ugly. A sound I didn’t recognize as mine.

They froze. Two heads turned toward me at the same time, and I watched Drake’s face travel from shock to irritation. Not shame. Not fear. Irritation, like I had interrupted a phone call.

Behind me, the hall went quiet. Then not quiet. Feet shuffled closer. The curtain I had pulled open framed us like a stage. Whispers caught and spread, dry grass in a fire.

Drake pulled out of Lucas slowly. No rush. He took a cloth from the edge of the bed and wiped himself down like a man finishing a workout, and when he finally looked at me, his eyes held nothing. Not one thing.

“Why are you embarrassing me and yourself, Hazel? Right here?”

Embarrassing him.

I looked down at my hands. They were shaking so hard the little beaded bag I carried rattled. I had painted my nails for tonight. I had worn the red heels he said he liked, the dress I couldn’t afford, because tonight was supposed to be ours. Our first public appearance as mates. I had practiced smiling in the mirror.

“Drake.” My voice came out small. A child’s voice. “You’re my mate.” I turned to the bed and my chest caved in all over again. “Lucas. Lucas, what is this?”

Lucas wouldn’t look at me. Fourteen years of friendship. He taught me to swim in the creek behind his mother’s house. He held my hair the night I cried over my father’s grave. He was the one who told me, grinning, that Drake had been asking about me. And now he stood there with his eyes nailed to the floor, saying nothing, and his silence hurt in a different place than Drake’s cruelty. Deeper. Somewhere I didn’t have a name for.

Drake laughed. Short. Mean.

“Second-hand woman. That’s what you are.” He reached for his pants. “A nobody from a classless background. Did you really think I would taint my family’s image with you?”

Phones came out. I saw them at the edge of my vision, little black rectangles rising, red recording lights blinking on. Somewhere behind me a girl giggled and shushed herself.

The room tilted. My knees buckled and I grabbed the curtain rod to stay standing, because the one thing I would not do was fall down in front of these people. Tears burned down my face anyway. My body refused to obey me at all.

“Why?” It cracked coming out. “Why, Drake? What did I do?”

He zipped his pants. He took his time with it. Then he looked at me the way you look at gum on your shoe, and he raised his voice so every person craning their neck could hear him clearly.

“As a matter of fact, I reject you, Hazel Reid.”

The bond snapped.

There is no soft way to say what that feels like. Something living was pulled out of my chest by the roots. Golden warmth turned to broken glass and dragged itself back out through every rib. I heard myself make a sound, low and animal, and I bent forward around the pain because my body thought I had been stabbed. In a way I had been.

“Fuck off,” Drake said over my gasping. “I pity the man who ends up with an animal like you.”

Laughter. Real laughter now, no one bothering to hide it. Pity and disgust on every face, and the phones kept recording, and I understood that this moment would exist forever. Tomorrow it would be everywhere. Strangers would watch me break on a loop.

My mother’s voice rose out of some dark drawer in my memory, calm and certain, the way she said it when I was nine and had ruined something again. *You’re useless, Hazel. God gave me a useless girl.*

“She was right,” I heard myself whisper. “She was right about me.”

A sob tore loose and then another, and then I was choking on them, gasping, shaking so hard my heels scraped the floor. I couldn’t get air. The room was too bright and too loud and full of eyes, and the hole in my chest where the bond used to live was screaming, and I could not get air.

Then strong arms wrapped around me from behind.

Warm. Solid. They lifted me clean off the ground like I weighed nothing at all, and some last shred of pride told me to fight, and the rest of me simply gave up. I let a stranger carry me through the crowd. I buried my face against a leather jacket that smelled like motor oil and gasoline and something darker underneath, something like smoke, and the rumble of laughter and voices faded behind us until it was gone.

The night air hit my wet face like a slap. Cold. Clean.

He set me down in the parking lot, near a row of bikes and jeeps, and the second my feet touched the ground my stomach rolled hard and I dropped to my knees on the gravel. Everything came up. The fancy wine I had sipped to look sophisticated. The two bites of food I had managed because I’d been too excited to eat. All of it, until I was heaving up nothing, my throat raw, my eyes streaming.

Through all of it, one big hand gathered my hair back from my face and held it there. Gentle. Firm. Like it was nothing. Like I was worth the trouble.

That small kindness almost broke me worse than the cruelty had. I didn’t understand why.

“Let me get you some water.” His voice came low and rough above me. Familiar in a way I couldn’t place, like a song I had heard once through a wall.

I stayed on all fours in the gravel, trembling under the full moon that was supposed to bless mated pairs tonight. Somewhere inside that hall, Drake was probably straightening his shirt. Lucas was probably still staring at the floor. And I was out here on my hands and knees with vomit in my throat and a dead bond in my chest and my mother’s voice on repeat.

Empty. Worthless. Used up before I had even begun.

I didn’t want water. I wanted to stop feeling like this, and I only knew one way to burn a feeling out.

“You can take me to bed,” I whispered, hoarse and shaking. “I need this feeling to go away. I’m useless after all.”