"Fuck, bro. I'm so fucking sorry." Conner wipes his face, rubbing so hard that his skin starts to look a little raw. The ends of his fingers are black, claws that just won't retract all the way. He's lost so much weight. He looks gaunt, hollowed out, and empty. "I don't even really remember how I got home last night. Fuck." He looks at me, his eyes haunted and wary.

I swallow everything down. My pride, my hurt, my confusion. Georgina cheated on me. She sucked Conner's dick last night after we dropped him off at home. He was wasted. He's been wasted every day after that cunt rejected him. Last night he was really done in, though. His birthday, but what does he have to celebrate? At least, that's what he said.

"It's not your fault," I choke out. I want to offer him a slap on the back, even a hug, but I can't bring myself to touch him. It's not his fault. I know this male wouldn't betray me like this if he had his shit together. Georgina... she knew what she was doing.

Everything in our group of friends was perfect just two-and-a-half months ago. Georgina and I were together, fucking finally. Conner was the strongest alphason in the region. Sarj, Conner, and I were shaping up to be a powerhouse. ClearHowl was skyrocketing to the top.

The only black spot was Braxton and his dead mate, but Braxton hardly ever hung with us anymore. He prefers his own company. It was easy to forget about him.

Now, everything has gone to shit. The entire world is ass-backward and I don't know how to even begin to fix it.

A fog descends over my eyes. Georgina's face swims through my vision. Her red-painted lips match the dress she's wearing perfectly. Long blonde hair that I love to wrap around my fist while we fuck are matched by the long legs that wrap around my waist. She's the perfect female. Gorgeous, smart, loyal.

My wolf whines a fearful pitch. I frown. He's never acted this way before. Georgina's bright blue eyes fill with tears as she clings to us while my wolf howls and scratches. "He's the future alpha, Sean," she explains. "I can't resist his pull."

It's all bullshit. She's unmated, not MateLess. She can resist. She resisted for years until she knew that he was rejected by his truemate. As soon as a higher rank became available she wasted no time in throwing herself at him.

I shudder, my heart twisting as I shed her touch. What will I do now?

All of the air is punched from my chest. Grey eyes stare at me in absolute scorn from the silvery, subtle beauty of a she-wolf. I'm mesmerized. Her shimmering grey fur matches those eyes. They glare at me hatefully before the female turns and saunters off, giving me her back, her tail held high in a clear insult.

My wolf goes berserk. I snarl and lung, tackling the female to the dirt and cutting off her cry of surprise with my fangs in her soft jugular. Blood wells and gushes over my teeth, coating my tongue. The warm liquid of the female's life gushes into my mouth and flows down my throat. It's the sweetest nectar. My wolf howls happily at the taste of ambrosia.

The she-wolf goes limp under our teeth.

I pull away, horror-struck, as those grey eyes glaze over. It is a scene of soul-crushing horror. Her throat is ripped open to her spine. I am covered in her blood. It soaks my naked skin, coats my hands, my face, my hair. I hold her body tight to me as she shifts from paws to feet. She is nude, thin and pale, and even more exquisitely ethereal in this form.

The earth below us drinks up her blood greedily. I hold her as tightly as I can, but nothing stops her body as it shrivels up in my arms.

I try to say her name, but nothing comes out. I can't say her name. The female in my arms doesn't respond to my silent cries of help. My wolf is screaming in anguish, but I can't make a sound. Laughter echoes in my ears, a female's harsh amusement as my world dies in my arms.

Suddenly, I'm the one on the ground dying, nothing but a dried-out husk. The female stands, inhumanely graceful, like a ballet dancer, and walks away, her eyes unseeing me, not looking back once as I die alone in the dirt.

---

I blink dirt from my eyes. My body shivers, one long, teeth-jarring motion that sends pangs of hurt through my skull. With a shaking hand, I rub my face, knocking off ice-cold leaves. It's almost summer. Why the hell am I so fucking cold?

I push myself to my hands and knees, head bowed. Exhaustion pulls at me and my stomach churns threateningly. It's minutes before I find the strength to stand up, my body sore as if I ran a few hundred miles last night. I have to lock my knees to keep from crashing back down. Blinking, I stare at my bare feet, caked in mud and leaves. I'm nude, with bloody scratches and bruising all over my exposed skin.

Looking around, I inhale. Unfamiliar forest strikes my nose. Shit. Maybe I did run a hundred miles. I take a step and almost go down. Another step is more steady, until I'm finally able to walk, even if I'm unsteady as a newborn colt. My feet hurt already, the cold skin stinging, but I concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other anyway.

Unfortunately, not even the pain can distract me from my thoughts. My wolf, exhausted, has fallen unconscious, his presence just a sleeping, wounded animal in the back of my head. I don't know where the fuck I am. I'm cold, filthy, and sore all over, but nothing can make my mind slow down.

Iliana.

She fucking hates me. I was so nervous last night, or was it two nights ago? I don't fucking know how long my wolf lost his mind, but does it matter? All I know is that we were prepared to have our mate, our Iliana. She wasn't exactly my dreamgirl, I barely know her despite being... friends... with her sister, but she was mine. As soon as I heard she had shifted I knew I would Claim her at the next Mating Ceremony. Then... fuck me, she rejected me, didn't she?

MateLess. She called herself MateLess. She declared it to Alpha Alexander in front of the entire pack and now I am like a lost fucking puppy.

What the hell was she thinking?! Declaring yourself MateLess when you aren't is illegal in every pack in the fucking hemisphere. She could be punished, exiled, thrown to the fucking wolves; pun unintended. It's not a simple white lie. It could ruin her. Destroy her life completely and utterly.

I fall to my knees, gagging as I vomit out whatever my near-empty stomach held. Bile follows, sickly green and yellow until my gut finally stops trying to turn inside out. Weak, I lay back down, facedown in the dirt. It's where I belong.

I hurt LiLi. Maliciously, willfully denied our Bond in my own head. I thought that Georgina was the better choice. I thought that up until Lydia rejected Conner and a couple of months later, at his twenty-third birthday party, Georgina gave him a lapdance and blew him. Yeah, some female. Such fucking loyalty.

I was so pissed when Conner told me about Georgina. Of course, he told me, and he did it the very next day. He's not a shady male, he was pissed drunk, and vulnerable because of his own mate issues. Georgina, she was drinking, too, but sober enough to perform for our alphason. Shit, that was August... when was that conversation that Leelee overheard between her sister and me? Fucking hell, at least a year earlier, maybe just a little more. So while I was feeling pissy and embarrassed that my chosen female was a slut, Iliana was suffering from my rejection for over a year.

I am a mate-bond abuser.

The scent of my vomit stings my nose. I roll over on my back away from my puke. I dated my own mate's sister and now I'm worried that her lie will hurt her? I hurt her. I can't even wrap my head around how badly I fucked up. Motherfucker, I did that to my own mate.

Wiping the tears away with my filthy hand only spreads more dirt. I'm disgusting in more ways than one. I laugh at my own pathetic life, the motion making my stomach seize. The noise that comes out of my mouth sounds so rough I wince. "Stupid, Sean. You're a fucking stupid asshole."

A bird takes flight from a nearby bush, insulted at my voice breaking their dawn song. With a groan, I push myself back up to my feet. Swaying, I turn in a circle. I can tell that I am high in the mountains, and unless I ran across the country two thousand miles, then I went west. I'm probably about sixty miles from home. OK, so if I ran at twenty miles an hour in a straight line, then it must have only been the one night that I was sprinting away from my life. From the decision that destroyed my mate bond and the best damn thing I could have ever had in my life.

The agony my muscles are in means I have a long walk ahead of me. Naked and shoeless, because I can't depend on my wolf to shift. It took me three, maybe four hours to run here. It's going to take all day to walk back.

I'll have a long time to think about the clusterfuck my life is the whole damn way.

---

I knock on the Thomas's door a little too hard. It swings open and I'm greeted by Gerald, our retired Gamma. He looks like shit warmed up to room temperature then thrown at a wall. Don't ask how I know what that looks like. I have a lot of younger siblings. Twins do weird shit.

"Where is she?" I rasp out, my voice is hoarse from holding back the shouts in the back of my throat. "I'm going to wring her neck." My wolf curls his lip up. He's always seen Ili as some sort of den-mate. Close enough to be family. But to me she's not family, she's more.

Gerald lets out a choked laugh that peters out to nothing quickly. "In her room," he steps back and lets me stalk by. He knows how I feel. He probably feels the same way. He's mentored me for the last couple of years so he and I tend to think alike.

"Ili," I growl as I push open her door. Of course, she's still awake. Judging by the dark circles under her eyes, she barely sleeps.

She doesn't bother to look up, just keeps tearing small stickers out of a magazine and pasting them in a large keepsake book. She looks bored and frustrated. She isn't a fan of crafting, but Cinda told me Ili promised to help her with her mating book, so here she is.

I walk to her side and snatch the book from her hands. Soulful grey eyes snap up to me. "Hey! Give me that stupid, idiotic thing back right now!"

"You didn't tell me," I say flatly. "Why? Doll, I would have helped you."

Her pretty, delicate face, gaunt over her cheekbones, tightens. Her eyes are darker than I remember. Goddess, how could I let her push me away so easily?

"I'm fine, actually, thanks Braxton," she replies with a hint of sarcasm.

I shake my head, dumbfounded at the cool disregard in her body language. She won't even look at me for more than a second. It drives me insane. It always has. Iliana was always too aloof, a star that no one could capture. My wolf would circle her, sniffing, wondering. She always scented of males from her skating, her training. Oh, it was innocent, but it didn't stop him from wanting those unknown human males' blood on his teeth.

I laugh sarcastically and without giving her a moment to think, I shove her on her back and sweep my body over hers. Nose-to-nose, I stare into her fathomless grey eyes. I love her eyes and I never bothered to tell her because she never bothered to tell me that she was MateLess. "When I left ClearHowl two years ago you wouldn't talk to me. I saw you, twice, that's it, since your last skating competition. Twice. That's it. I thought you were mad at me for something. Hell, I even thought you were a little embarrassed by your late shift. Every time I came home from college to visit you avoided me again."

"Stop it!" she gasps out, looking thoroughly shocked at being manhandled.

"No, Ili, no. You were my best friend. You were the one who held me when I lost Caroline. Shit, you still are my best friend. I have never replaced you." I growl in her face, snapping my canines threateningly when she starts to protest. "Tonight, I was so angry with you and then I saw you..." I take a deep breath, inhaling her slightly sour scent. She used to smell like daisies and apples. Fuck this shit.

"There were other things going on," she whispers. "Caroline died and I couldn't burden-"

I shudder and close my hand over her delicate throat. Grey eyes widen on me as I snarl close to her beautifully familiar face. "Even more reason for you to tell me you were suffering, Ili."

"Your brother-" She says softly, her throat flexing under my palm.

"Is a big boy, yeah? He can sort his own fucking shit, Ili. You..." I choke back my rage and tears, "you look like hell. When I saw you in that fucking line at the Solstice I couldn't fucking believe it. Damnit, how much weight have you lost?"

She shudders under me. "Please, stop, Brax."

I relent. I force myself to take my hand away from her delicate throat. My wolf salivates as her pale skin is revealed when I remove my hand. Her throat is right there, easy enough to Mark.

"It was bad, Brax, but I'm fine, now," she deflects. She always did that shit with me. She's a master of pulling every little secret out of you while simultaneously holding her own tight to her chest. I truly thought she was done with me. Maybe I thought everyone was done with me. I was the male who lost his mate, the one who was going to be Beta but turned into a MateLess fuck real fast. I ignored Iliana as much as she did me. The guilt that I feel now is chewing me up inside.

"Hell, no, you aren't. Look at you," I rest my forehead against hers and close my eyes. "You were always delicate, Doll, but this is insane."

"I'll be fine if you get off of me. I can't breathe with your fat ass squashing me," she mutters. It's another deflection, this one with humor, but it works. It always did.

I laugh and haul myself off of her. Keeping my arms locked tight around her waist, I make her roll with me so she's on top, our positions reversed. "I wish you had told me."

Grey eyes darken soulfully. "I just couldn't, Brax."

Fucking hell, how could the goddess not give this beautiful woman a mate? A thread of excitement winds through me. Maybe she's meant for me. I would give anything to have Caroline back... except Ili. I couldn't sacrifice her for my mate, and doesn't that just sum up everything?

"OK," I inhale slowly, rubbing her back until she settles against me. Her brittle frame melts over mine and I laugh internally as my half-chub digs into her belly. Even pissed off, it knows a good thing when he feels it. It's ironic. I can't get hard for any other female. Losing my mate resulted in a lost libido for a long time. Ili brought me back to life in more ways than one.

"Goddess, baby, you scared me so bad. I'm fucking sorry that I wasn't there for you," I tell her softly.

"I pushed you away," she says quietly. "I didn't want you to see me like that."

"Shit, Ili. You held me when I broke apart when my mate died. You think it doesn't kill me to think of you going through that alone?"

She shudders again and I tighten my hold on her. "Let it out, doll." She bursts into tears; big, ugly sobs that soak my shirt and break my heart. My erection withers to nothing. Her fists pound my shoulders and I wince. Not because she's hurting me, but because she isn't. I wasn't lying when I told her she terrified me. Her brittle thinness is scary as fuck.

"I've got you, babydoll," I croon to her until she falls asleep on my chest.