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

by Cate C. Wells

Fate has to be playing a joke. My aesthetic is delicate, sweet, romantic, cottagecore. His aesthetic is—the pants I wore all last week are fine. No shirt, no shoes, no problem. Haircuts are for the weak. I kill things with my bare hands in human form. I’ve been through hell and seen the other side.

Why do I care about being ladylike in Darragh Ryan’s murder shack? Patriarchy. It’s the only explanation.

Una saved me from my father eighteen years ago, and Kennedy saved me tonight by a hair’s breadth. You know, maybe Fate doesn’t have it out for me. Maybe she’s got my back, and the real enemies are the fucked-up males in this fucked-up pack.

Darragh Ryan is just a fact of my life. Like allergies. Or lactose intolerance. I’m going to live my life despite him.

“Because if this—” He stops, draws in a breath, and begins again. “If I don’t make it, I want you to know—” He coughs, and in a jagged, deep voice that scrapes softly across my skin, he says, “I want you to know that you are the most beautiful thing in the world, and even if I couldn’t have you, and even though I fucked it up, you were the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Is the bond so strong because of him? Because he’s been tending to it all along?

I force my brain to focus, searching out his eyes. They’re on me. On my face. And even if I don’t quite trust it, I see it—longing. Bitter, tender, hopeless longing. It stirs me, touches my raw and bruised heart.

“You want me,” I whisper. “Yes.” “A lot.” “Like air,” he says. My lips curve, sad and rueful and bittersweet. “Nobody wants air.” “They need it.” “You don’t need me.” He walked away. He stayed away. “Like air,” he says again with a note of finality.

He takes my face in his hands and kisses me. Like he’s starving. Like I’m everything. Like he’s wanted to do this his entire life, and he never thought he would, and reality has exploded into a technicolor dream, and I’m the center of it all. Like that.

We went through hell together, and it won’t change anything. Our mating was made impossible years before I was even born.

He couldn’t talk to me, and I couldn’t listen. A fated pair.