เรื่องสั้นแนว Inspirational Werewolf และนิยาย Mistress

On the day of the bridal shoot, Nathaniel White's childhood friend, Yvonne Woods, turned up out of nowhere with an armful of flowers and threw herself into his arms, laughing. The photographer couldn't look away and turned the camera toward them again. I stood off to the side in my wedding dress with no idea what to do. The shutter clicked 99 times. Not once was the camera pointed at me. Watching how comfortable they were with each other in front of the camera left a bitter ache in my chest. Nathaniel and Yvonne, the girl he'd grown up with, were both very good-looking. Whenever they stood side by side, every photographer aimed straight at them. The day he asked me out and I said yes, a friend offered to take our picture. Instead, she aimed the camera at him and Yvonne. She even said they looked perfect together. On a Valentine's Day date, every street photographer we passed offered to photograph the two of them for free and asked me to step aside so I wouldn't ruin the shot. I'd spent most of a year preparing for these bridal photos: losing weight, taking care of my skin, and choosing the perfect makeup look. None of it could compete with one sweet smile from Yvonne. "You, the wolf on the grass! Move! You're in the shot," the photographer shouted at me impatiently. I froze. Instinctively, I looked at Nathaniel, hoping he'd speak up for me. Instead, he looked away and reached over to pluck a fallen leaf from Yvonne's hair. His usually cold eyes were full of tenderness. Something went out of me. I walked off without a word. I was giving the whole frame back to them. And the rest of my life, too.

On our second anniversary, my boyfriend Blake messaged to say he had lost me to one of his friends in a racing game. Right after that, the video of me collapsing at last year's shifting trial went into his group chat. In it, I lay curled on the ground without so much as a strand of wolf fur appearing. The chat erupted. "That counts as a werewolf? She's a rabbit in a wolf skin." "Whoever won her is out of luck. Imagine having to mate with a broken wolf." Someone opened a book on it soon enough. The wager was how long it would take for me to be discarded. My boyfriend was the first to bet that I would be discarded within a month. "Eric values strength above everything. He has said that only a strong Gamma warrior deserves to be his mate. "Still, a bet is a bet. Eric can make it through one month until the forfeit is over." Serena, who had grown up alongside Blake, tagged me in the group and did not bother hiding the mockery. "Liora, you won't last a week before he's sick of you, will you?" Reading it, I smiled. Nobody knew that after that collapse, my wolf had begun to evolve. And nobody knew that a month ago my father, the Alpha, had issued a decree naming me the pack's next Alpha. I typed a message into the group. "Blake, count me in on this bet."

I saw a trending post on a werewolf forum: "How to get your mate to break the bond with you?" The poster said he was going to lie to his mate about going on a wilderness trial, but he was really planning to run off with his "true love." I silently scoffed. What a shameless scumbag. But the next day, my Alpha mate came home, smelling of another she-wolf. "For the future of our pack, I have to go on a lone wolf trial in the wilderness," he said. "We should temporarily break our mate bond." I looked at his phony face and nodded calmly. "Okay. Whatever you say. We'll break the bond tomorrow." Later, he took the family money and his lover and disappeared. But with his parents' support, I became an executive at the family company. He blew through all the money, ditched his lover, and came crawling back to the country, trying to win me over. But by then, I was already at my engagement party with another, far better Alpha. I said it from the beginning. He was the one who chose to abandon his family. Even if he wanted to come back, this place would be nothing but his personal hell.