Chapter 7 CHAPTER SEVEN | I'VE FINALLY FOUND HER
Alaia POV
I don't know how long I lay on the floor.
Long enough for the music from the party to filter up through the floorboards and change songs four or five times. Long enough for the light under my door to shift from gold to blue. Long enough for Amethyst to stop howling and just go quiet — and somehow that was worse. The silence where she used to be felt like a missing tooth my tongue kept finding.
I'd been rejected.
I turned the words over in my mind the way you press on a bruise, needing to confirm it still hurts. I never wanted a mate. You know how I am; I can't be tied down to one girl.
He'd looked at me — me, his mate, the person the Moon Goddess herself had decided he belonged to — and chosen to throw that away. Chosen his reputation, his track record, his revolving door of girls who meant nothing. Chosen all of that over me, before he'd even given me a single chance.
No woman is going to change that.
I pressed my cheek harder into the floor and let out a breath that shook the whole way out.
The worst part — the part that made me feel small and stupid and furious at myself — was the half-second before I accepted. That terrible, traitorous flicker where I'd wanted to take it back. Where I'd looked at the pain on his face as he said the words, seen that flicker of something he was trying to swallow, and thought: “he doesn't mean it. He doesn't mean it. Take it back, take it back—"
I hadn't.
I'd stood up straight and said the words that sealed it, and I'd walked out of his room with my head high, and I hadn't cried until the door was locked behind me and I was already sliding to the floor.
That was who I was. I could hold myself together long enough to fall apart privately.
My mom would call that strength. Right now, it just felt like stubbornness.
Aaron found me eventually. Of course he did — we were twins, and I had never once been able to hide from him.
I heard him knock, heard him say my name, and I wanted to answer. I just couldn't make my body cooperate. He used the emergency key. The door pressed against me, and I let him push me across the floor like I weighed nothing, because I couldn't find the energy to move.
When his face came around the door, and he saw me, I watched something break in his expression.
He asked what happened. I told him, barely above a whisper, and felt his whole body go rigid against the words — felt the moment Aaron ended and Ajax, his wolf, took over, eyes going black and dangerous.
“Who rejected you?”
I couldn't say the name. It sat in my throat like broken glass. I shook my head, and Aaron — my brother, my best friend, sixteen whole minutes older than me and furious on my behalf — didn't push. He just lifted me into my bed, pulled the covers up, and climbed in behind me.
He held me while I cried myself empty.
I didn't even feel myself fall asleep.
When I woke, it was dark.
Not the dark of evening — the deep, dense dark of the small hours, the party long over, the packhouse quiet. Aaron was gone. At some point, he must have slipped out, and I'd slept through it, which told me exactly how wrecked I'd been.
My dress was still on. My hair was ruined. My face felt tight from dried tears, and behind my eyes sat a headache that throbbed every time I blinked.
I lay still and took inventory of the damage.
The mate bond was gone. Where it had sparked to life — that warm, electric recognition when Alexi and I had locked eyes, barely hours ago — there was now just a raw, hollow ache, like a wound that hadn't decided yet whether it would scar or fester. Amethyst was still quiet, curled in on herself somewhere deep. I could feel her grief like a second skin. We were wearing the same pain.
I'm sorry, I thought at her again, as softly as I could make it. I'm so sorry, girl.
She stirred. Just a little. Just enough to let me know she heard me.
I closed my eyes and tried to breathe through it.
That was when I smelled it.
It came through the gap under my door — faint, like something carried on the wrong wind, like if you walked past a bakery in winter and caught it just for a second before the cold swallowed it again. Warm. Yeasty. Fresh bread.
I went still.
“That's not Alexi.”
Alexi smelled like sandalwood and fresh-cut grass. I'd memorized it in the thirty seconds before he ripped my world apart, and this was nothing like that. This was something else entirely. Something that made my lungs want to slow down and take a longer pull, that made Amethyst lift her head for the first time in hours.
“What is that?”
She didn't answer. But she was on her feet now, ears forward, every ounce of her attention pointed at the door.
Amethyst. I pushed myself upright against my pillow, heart starting to tick faster. What is that smell?
In my mind, I saw her turn her head and focus on me, and what I saw in her eyes — after all that grief, all that howling silence — was something I hadn't expected.
Hope.
A knock on my door.
Soft. Almost hesitant. Not Aaron's knock — Aaron knocked like he was already sure he was coming in regardless. This was careful. Like whoever was on the other side wasn't entirely sure they had the right.
I didn't answer. I couldn't speak. I just sat there in the dark with my ruined dress and my tear-stiff face and my heart hammering against my ribs, and I watched the door handle turn.
The door swung open slowly.
And the scent rolled in like a wave — warm bread, warm skin, warm everything — and Amethyst surged forward in my chest so hard I had to press a hand to my sternum to hold myself together.
Mate, she breathed, reverent and certain, like a prayer she'd been saving.
I stared at the figure in the doorway, still half in shadow, and all I could think was that I had seen eyes like that before.
In a dream.
