One thing was certain, though, even if he hadn’t cheated on me…
We were done.
Soul-bond or not. Mate bond. Fucking mate ceremony. None of it mattered now. I didn’t care if the wolves didn’t do divorce, or that I was the queen as far as every werewolf on the East Coast was concerned. I’d never be able to look at Lucas Rain the same way.
I’d never trust him again, and without trust a relationship wasn’t worth shit.
I’d been still so long a thin film of moisture coated my skin the same way it had the grass.
And long enough to hear rustling and a muffled female curse one wall away.
I moved as quickly and silently as I could, praying the next turn wouldn’t lead me farther from her, not when I’d come so close to finding her. And then I rounded the bend and came face to startled face with the woman I’d been hunting.
For a second we just stood still, staring stupidly at each other. I was dumbfounded by my luck, and she was cursing her lack of it.
The moment vanished and she turned to run, but not before I grabbed a fistful of her glossy black hair and shoved her forward, using the momentum of her run to drive her into the ground face first. It wasn’t as satisfying as it might have been on concrete, and the grass buffered the worst of her fall, but I heard her nose break.
It was a start.
I pulled her up and flipped her onto her back, kicking the gun from her hand and lowering myself down so I was straddling her, with her arms pinned by her sides. I held the blade of my sword flush to her neck. Her nose was bloody and already swollen, but instead of fear her eyes showed nothing but resignation.
“Make it quick,” she whispered, then looked away from me.
“You don’t deserve it to be quick.”
“No.”
“Why did you do it?” I lightened up on the blade so she could speak without me slitting her throat in the process.
“You had too much. You had Lucas, you had Desmond. The whole fucking pack adored you because you were the protector. You’d killed Marcus, and they loved you for it.” Her lashes were damp with tears. “Before you came along, Lucas paid attention to me. We joked that if his mate never showed up, he’d need a strong girl to stand with him. He was mine.”
This was something I’d never considered. I’d been so quick to think Lucas had trusted her because of sex, it never occurred to me the sex might have happened before he’d ever met me.
“But he was never meant to be yours.”
“No?” Her tears flowed freely now. “Do you know how rare it is for someone to meet their soul-bonded mate? If you’d never showed up, today might have been my wedding. It might have been my pack.”
I withdrew my sword. The blind homicidal urges I’d felt moments before had faded. I got to my feet and picked her gun off the ground. My carefully safetied SIG was wedged between my corset-bound breasts, so I had a free hand for her thirty-eight. Girl meant business. I checked the chamber and found she’d taken time to reload since leaving the hotel, because she wasn’t missing any bullets and she’d fired at least one at Columbia.
“Get up.”
Morgan froze, maybe waiting to be tricked or for me to change my mind. “I don’t…”
“Just get up.”
She clambered to her feet and cast a sideways glance down the dark corridor.
“No. No wise ideas. You make a run for it and I blow your head off, simple as that.”
In spite of my warning she still seemed to be considering her chances. “What are you going to do to me?”
“Nothing, if you don’t run.”
&
nbsp; “But…I tried to kill you.”
Like I needed reminding. “You sure did.”