Filed to story: The Tyrant Alphas Rejected Mate
And that’s good. It’s so good.
Remember the thicket?
It was agony. I was torn and beaten and aching, and if I’d had the strength, I would have dragged myself on my belly to Killian’s door and begged him to mount me. I was alone and bleeding in a briar patch, and where was he?
He’s not my mate. He can touch whoever he wants. He can bend Haisley Byrne over up there on the dais, and I might puke, but I won’t care.
Not. My. Mate.
Kennedy taps my shoulder, and I nearly jump out of my skin. “Potato salad’s ready.”
“Shit. I need two pitchers of beer, too. I’ll get it.” I make for the keg, but Kennedy grabs my wrist to halt me.
“You just keep growling at those assholes. I’ll pour.”
“I’m growling?”
“Sure are.” She gives me a small sympathetic smile. “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”
I love Kennedy. Sometimes we hang out, late at night, out on the porch after Mari and Annie have gone to bed. We talk about life. Leaving. And why we stay.
Pack life is easy in a way. Rules, taboos, status, rank. It’s all laid out for you from the day you’re born. You know where you belong, minute to minute. You don’t have to make hard choices.
But what if your heat and your wolf never come?
What if you’re female but your wolf isn’t? What are you then? Are you pack? Are you only pack if you follow the rules? If you don’t draw attention to the part of you that doesn’t fit?
Or can everyone see that you don’t really belong, and it’s only a matter of time before exile? Wouldn’t it be smarter to get the hell out of town before that happens?
No one has been exiled since Killian’s father’s time, but that wasn’t so long ago.
And we need a pack. Pack isn’t just Cheryl and Killian and Haisley and the assholes at the A-roster table. It’s also Abertha and Mari and Annie and Old Noreen and Liam and Fallon. It’s the Malones and Butlers and Campbells. It’s the pups. It’s the elders who remember my Ma and Da and will tell me new stories about them I’ve never heard before, even now after they’ve been gone so long.
I rest my forehead on the cool door. It’s an equation Kennedy and I do over and over again. The packmates we love minus the packmates we hate. The rules that crush our spirits minus the fact that we belong even less in the human world, and their ways are even more intolerable.
“Here you go, fighter.” Kennedy prods me with a filled tray. “Go get ’em.”
I give her the finger before I take it from her.
Back in the dining rooms, packmates are howling and cheering. Conor has Gael on the ground. Killian’s riveted, oblivious to Haisley and me. She’s smiling, smug as hell, watching the fight with her arms over her head, draped around Killian’s neck.
My stomach sours. I hate this. I need to think about mushrooms, but I can’t. My wolf’s given up. She’s done with this bullshit. She’s huddled in a corner, back to the world. I want to join her.
I trudge toward the elder’s table. The leg, again, comes out of nowhere. This time, I can’t avoid it. I trip. The tray goes sailing through the air. I can’t help but put my full weight on my bad leg, and it gives in. I fall, my shoulder slamming into the floor.
“Watch that last step.” Lochlan Byrne smirks as he stares down at me. “It’s a doozy.”
I push up on my elbows. My tailbone aches. There’s beer down my dress. Potato salad on the floor. The bowl broke, and there are shards everywhere.
“Una, what on earth are you doing?” Cheryl peers down at me, hands on her hips.
My leg throbs. I wrenched it as I fell, and I landed on my bad side. I have to get up, but I can’t. I need a second. I’m in between B-roster and a pup table, but we’re close to the edge of the open floor. Everyone has a great view. There’s laughter. Murmured disapproval.
Lochlan Byrne’s lounging in his chair, smirking down at me. Finn slaps his back. I don’t look up at the dais. I don’t want to know.
I’m not even embarrassed or mad. I’ve switched to automatic pilot. I just want to get up off the floor.
I flick a chunk of potato off my calf and push up until I’m sitting upright. The aisle’s narrow, and the table top is too high to use for leverage. There’s not enough room to do my usual sitting to standing routine. It’s gonna be awkward as hell getting back on my feet. Good thing my feelings are switched to off.
I’ll feel the humiliation later.
Maybe I can grab a chair leg?
“Lochlan, what the fuck? She’s got a bad leg, asshole.” Gael abandons the fight and trots over. He elbows past a gawking Cheryl and bends over, grabbing me under the arms and hoisting me up with zero finesse.
For a second, I feel a flash of gratitude. And then Killian howls so loud that the plates rattle on the tables. He leaps from his chair, transforming into the wolf mid-air, and Haisley goes flying, landing on her butt a few feet away.
I don’t have time to do more than tense before Killian’s silver wolf bowls into Gael. Everyone scrambles for distance.
Gael flings me out of the way as Killian’s wolf smashes him into the B-roster table. Laminate cracks. People scream and scatter. Half of B-roster, including Conor, shifts. The other half freezes, cowers, and shows their necks.
The past and present collide. Snarls, cries, shouts, and blood. I freeze, too.
And then Ashlynn Kelly-who I hadn’t even noticed tonight-seizes my forearm and uses her whole weight to drag me across the floor, out of the way.
Gael somehow manages to shift. His wolf is big, but he’s nowhere near Killian’s weight class. Gael is so out-matched, he might as well be another species. A cat fighting a lion. Blood spurts, fur flies. Screams and howls fill the lodge.
“He’s gonna kill him,” Ashlynn pants.
We’re huddled behind an overturned table, stuck between a wall and the fight. Packmates in human form have clustered along the far wall. The lieutenants have all shifted. They’re circling, darting forward, trying to distract Killian’s wolf from Gael’s flagging body, but they’re uncertain, and the wolf pays them no mind.
Killian is mauling the smaller male. Gael’s wolf is limp, head bent to show his neck, his flanks rising and falling rapidly as blood pools around him. The fight was over before it began, but Killian’s wolf is unsatisfied. He growls ferociously, shaking the rafters, and then he paces, taking lazy swipes at Gael’s prone carcass.
“Do something,” Ashlynn hisses at me. Like what? Like a rodeo clown or those guys who distract the bull from a matador?
Killian’s wolf plants a paw on Gael’s bloody haunch and howls. It’s a warning. Everyone bends the neck.
He bares his fangs, and I can see clear as day what he’s going to do next. He’s going to rip out Gael’s throat.
Gael helped me.
Out. My wolf paws at her walls.
This is wrong. This is bad.
“I can’t watch.” Ashlynn buries her face in my shoulder.
Let me out.
I don’t know what else to do, so I let my wolf come, bracing myself. She’s so small. There’s nothing she can do against a giant.
My bones crack, my muscles tear, and there’s the strange pulsation as my heightened senses come online. The shift is over more quickly this time, and it hurts less.
At first, my wolf does nothing. She’s totally calm. She sniffs the air a few times, and then she trots out from behind the overturned table as if she doesn’t have a care in the world.
She’s trembling inside. We’re trembling. But she isn’t afraid. Not of him. She’s terrified of what he’ll do. She’s also kind of-irritated with him.
She stands at the edge of the open floor, careful not to get blood splatter on her paws. She’s panting. Despite it all, she’s happy to be out. She’s happy to see him.
Mate.

New Book: Veiled Desires of the Alpha King Novel
Dayson was the alpha of the largest pack in North America. Powerful figures from other packs sought to offer gorgeous girls as potential mates for Dayson. He steadfastly rejected these advances, he was not a pawn to be manipulated. But eventually there came a mysterious girl he could hardly say No. Who was she?