Bias Lovers Reunion Short Stories & Novels

As Gamma of the Creed Pack, I'd held the Northern Border alone for three full years. Every time I called in to ask when I could come home, my mate — the Alpha of Creed — picked up the phone himself. He told me the rogues weren't cleared. He told me the rival packs were still circling. He said, "Nora. One more year. Once we have completely eliminated all our enemies, I will hold the grandest mating ceremony for you. I swear it on the Moon." I believed him. When I dragged myself out of a pile of dead rogues with a silver arrowhead still lodged an inch from my heart, bleeding too fast for a medevac, my warriors had to shift and run me back in wolf form all the way to Creed territory. The moment we crossed the border, I saw fairy lights strung from every streetlamp along the road to the pack house. Pack wolves on the sidewalks were talking loud, smiling at each other. "The Alpha's Mating Ceremony is tonight. He's taking the Elder's daughter as Luna. Three years of peace on the border. It's a good time to be Creed." I coughed dark blood into the fur on the back of my warrior's neck and laughed, short and bitter. He hadn't needed me holding the border. He just hadn't wanted me home.

I used to be a top ballet dancer. The year I was diagnosed with a spinal hemangioma, my boyfriend Julian Blackwood said, "Wherever you go, I go." We'd been together three years. He walked beside me as I went, step by step, from the most luminous dancer on that stage to a woman in a wheelchair. Every time the nerve pain hit and I collapsed, he was the one who lifted me off the floor. Every round of electrostim and acupuncture, he sat in the corridor outside the therapy room and waited for me to come out. Before I got sick, he promised me—the night I finished my final performance of Swan Lake, we'd sign the marriage license. He'd bought tickets for that show three months in advance. I never stood on that stage again. And the marriage license never came up. Until the morning I noticed the collar of his white dress shirt carried a smudge of lipstick that wasn't mine. I heard him on the balcony. A woman's voice on the other end. "Mr. Blackwood, you left your jacket at the hotel last night. I'll bring it over." I stared at that smear of red, and something in me snapped. I laughed. "Send me to Westbrook. The locked-down rehab facility. I don't want to drag you down anymore." Something flickered in his eyes—a brief, animal panic. Then he nodded. He thought I meant rest. He didn't know I'd already signed the papers to donate my body to science. I was going there to die.

Seven years into our marriage, my husband Theo ordered me an Americano, the way he always did. Except I'd just told him, again, that caffeine made me sick. The moment I opened my mouth to say something, his phone rang. He stood up and walked out without a word of explanation. Half an hour later, Lydia posted to her socials. "Thanks to a certain someone for taking time out of his insane schedule to fix my plumbing. Also, the fresh hot cocoa was incredible." The comments filled up with people gushing over her. Steam curled off the mug in the photo. It made the drink in my hand feel even colder. Lydia and Theo had grown up together. Seven years ago, within months of each other, they'd both rushed into marriage. The difference was that Lydia had married a man who hit her. Night after night, Theo would peel himself away from me and run off to defend her. Sometimes he'd fought with her husband and end up at the police station. It happened more than once. I used to think it was just his sense of justice, so I always cleaned up after him and smoothed things over. Now I could see it for what it was. He'd given so much of his attention to someone else that all I got were the leftovers, neglect and a cold shoulder. Fine. This love had already gone cold. I didn't want it anymore.

When I'm dragged onto the auction stage, my ex-boyfriend, Clifford Mitchell, is sitting among the audience. He has his arm around Selene Graham, the woman who framed my father and sent him to prison back then. He leisurely raises his paddle. "A hundred million dollars. I want her to strip naked in public and play that video from back then." The compromising photos he coaxed me into taking when I was 18 instantly appear on the massive screen, and the whole venue bursts into laughter. I bite down hard on my lip and, with trembling hands, slowly undo my buttons to cover the cost of my son Brooke Sullivan's surgery tomorrow. Just then, Brooke bursts in. His head's covered in blood as he throws his arms around Clifford's leg. "You big bully! Don't hurt my mommy! You can have my kidney, so please save my mommy!" Staring at the face that is practically identical to his own, Clifford loses his composure for the very first time. "Kyra, this child—" I slap him hard across the face, a bitter smile on my lips. "Don't you think I'm filthy, Mr. Mitchell? He's just a bastard child. I wouldn't want to sully your precious eyes."