Seth

My wolf clawed at me, driven into a frenzy by the pain in my mate’s voice. He wanted to hunt down Jane’s alpha and rip him to pieces for tossing her out of her pack when she needed their protection and comfort the most. “What happened?” I growled, the words barely understandable with how animalistic I sounded.

“The shock from the murder-suicide, with three dead, rippled through the pack. Everyone was grieving—” She paused, as though unsure what to say next.

“Nobody more so than you.” I helped her up to a sitting position and settled her more firmly on my lap. I needed her closer so I could offer solace. The comfort my body could offer was the only thing I could give her in the moment.

“And John’s father. I’d lost my parents, and he’d lost a son. I couldn’t blame him for his sadness. Or his anger.”

I didn’t like how her voice quivered at the end, and I had a sneaking suspicion where his anger was directed. If I was right, my wolf needed to add another target to his list. “You were the only completely innocent party in the whole mess.”

“He resented the fact that I was alive when his son was dead.” She shrugged helplessly. “He couldn’t admit to himself that John was at fault. That he was the one who’d made the decision to kill my parents and himself. That my only crime had been one that no shifter should be judged for—refusing to settle for anything less than their fated mate.”

“Waiting for me wasn’t a crime. It was a virtue.” I squeezed her tight against my body, chilled to the bone by the thought of what might have happened to her if she hadn’t held firm. If she’d mated herself to a crazy man. “And a damn blessing for me.”

She offered me a shaky smile. “That’s what I thought, too. I was only doing what my parents had taught me. How could that be wrong? But then the whispers started, fueled by John’s father’s grief over the loss of his son. He needed to blame someone, and I was an easy target. I was young, grieving for my parents, and didn’t have any other family. Nobody to protect me from him.”

“You should have had at least one person—your alpha. It was his job to look after you. To offer you his support and keep you safe.”

She continued as though she hadn’t heard me. “John’s father was clever about it. Quietly suggesting that I’d had problems with my parents. It wasn’t as if I could deny it, right? What young girl doesn’t get into arguments with her parents? It wasn’t ever anything serious. We always made up afterwards.”

“Of course you did,” I murmured soothingly. “They loved you.”

“They really did, and I loved them right back. I swear to you, I did.”

The way she looked up at me, as though she expected me not to believe her, broke my heart. “I know you loved them, baby. I can see it in your eyes. Hear it in your voice. It’s obvious to me.”

More tears spilled down her cheeks as she sagged against me. I swiped them away with my thumbs, but they fell faster than I could keep up. “You’ve got to stop crying, baby. It’s killing me.”

“Sorry,” she hiccupped. “I can’t seem to help it. They’re tears of relief more than anything else at this point. I was so damn scared that you wouldn’t understand. That you wouldn’t be able to see it from my perspective and would take his side instead.”

“I’m your mate, Jane,” I reminded her. “There is no you versus them anymore. It’s our side. It’s us against the world.”

“It is us together now.” She sat up straighter, and the tears finally stopped as she took a deep breath. “That’s how I know I made the right decision back then, even with everything that happened. With all that I lost. Because it led me to you—the man fate intended me to be with. My parents wanted this for me. They would have loved me finding you, loved me being with my fated mate.”

“I’m sure they would.”

“But John’s father would have hated it. Will hate it, if word ever filters back to my old pack. He made that more than clear back then. That I didn’t deserve to find my fated mate. Hell, by the time I left, it was obvious that he didn’t even want me to live.”

“He took it that far?” I growled.

“The whispers weren’t enough for him, I guess,” she admitted softly, those pretty green eyes filled with sadness. “It was the day of their funerals, all three of them, when he confronted me. I’d just watched as my parents were put into the ground, and I was devastated. Looking back now, I think that’s what set him off—the same desolation that I felt because he’d buried his son that day, too.”

“That’s no excuse for going after a young girl who’d lost everything in her world through no fault of her own.”

“If only I’d had you around back then,” she sighed. “Because it was too hard to remember that I wasn’t the guilty one. He did too good of a job projecting it on me. By the time he was done verbally lashing out at me, he’d convinced me that the rest of the pack blamed me, too. That they wanted me gone, but they hadn’t confronted me yet out of respect for my parents.”

“So you left?”

She nodded. “I packed up what I could fit into my dad’s car and drove off in the middle of the night. At my parents’ funeral, our alpha had asked me to come to his house in the morning. I couldn’t face him, knowing that he was going to exile me. Or even worse—shun me. If I left before talking with him, then he didn’t have the chance to do it.”

I couldn’t bring myself to tell her there was a flaw in her logic. Her alpha could have announced her exile or shunning without her being there. If what John’s father had told her was true—I had a hard time believing any alpha worthy of the position would have done such a thing, but as the head of the shifter council I’d faced plenty of so-called alphas who didn’t deserve the title—then he might have gone through with it after she left. And if he’d gone as far as to shun her, it would be virtually impossible to find out exactly what happened back then.

Shunnings were a rare thing in wolf packs because of the severity of the punishment, and the ultimate outcome—wolves weren’t meant to live alone. If you were shunned, all memory of you was wiped away, as though you had never existed for any of the people who had once been your family and friends. It also meant that your odds of being accepted into another pack were slim to none because it was beyond difficult to battle the black mark on your honor when there wasn’t anybody to defend yourself against, since there wasn’t a single person willing to speak to you or about you. Luckily for Jane, even if her alpha had shunned her, there was no need for her to prove herself to her new pack. She was my mate, and that’s all my pack would need to know to accept her with open arms.

“You were a vulnerable young girl, and he made sure you were forced out into the world alone in your grief.”

“He did.”

She’d left one vital piece of information out of her story. “Who is he? Who is John’s father?”

“The pack beta and enforcer.”

“Fuck,” I bit out. No wonder she’d run. She had no reason to doubt his word, considering the position of power he was in. Authority he’d abused to punish a young girl. My mate. It wouldn’t stand. I refused to allow him to get away with what he’d done to Jane.