“You might also tell your mate what you told me.”
His mate wasn’t here to tell. The thought returned as he got his feet under him, and he fell back into the chair. His pulse began to speed up. Why couldn’t he stand?
Malachi gripped his shoulder. “Are you more injured than we thought?”
“No, I’m fine, I just…”
As he shut his eyes, tried to muster energy, Kelsey’s face flashed before him. Betrayal, glossy eyes, and the last thing she’d said to him.“This isn’t trust. And I can’t.”
It was happening again. She was leaving again, and Trevor was the reason. Again.
With everything he knew this time, everything he had admitted to Arlo, to Ezra, to Malachi, Trevor’s defenses were nothing but rubble. He could not absorb a second loss of his mate. He doubled over.
“Trevor,” Malachi said.
Trevor reached up and grasped Malachi’s hand. He needed the anchor. No, he needed Kelsey, and she was gone. He groaned, long and loud. His mate was gone.
She drove home with dry eyes. Aaron and Ember had encouraged her to stick around and talk to Trevor, but nothing would be more pointless. Whatever he told her, she couldn’t trust he’d told her everything. Maybe she could never trust such a thing, not with him.
She hated leaving him with a cracked rib, huddling on a chair in Rhett’s kitchen, his distress obvious. But she could do nothing else. It was that or burst into sobs at an unknown wolf’s house in front of the entire pack. No, thanks. She was tougher than that. She’d had to be, and she was. His pack would take care of him.
His pack. That was who they would be now, in her mind. Just as they had been for the last nine years. Her sense of belonging was something she had to put away.
By the time she parked in front of Maggie’s house, the tears had pushed their way from her chest into her throat. In the steps to the front door, they rose up to mist her eyes, and she had to paw through her purse for her house key and missed the lock three times before she got the door open.
“You’re back early,” Maggie called.
“Trevor,” Kelsey said, and then the tears were falling.
The cane tapped its way to her, and an arm enfolded her shoulders. “Oh, honey, what happened?”
“You shouldn’t be getting up for no reason.”
“There is clearly an urgent reason. Come and sit.”
Maggie shepherded her to the couch and nudged her down to the cushion. Resistance of any kind had melted from her, and she sat, head down, trying not to sob so loudly. She never should have given him this chance. She never should have fallen in love with him. She should have asked some other kid to share his toys.
“If he’s hurt you, Kels, I’ll flay his hide.”
“He didn’t tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“He said he wanted honesty too. The story about Uncle Alan and the full moon, and why he thought he had to break up with me, and everything else he told me but not this one thing, this most important thing.”
A slow soothing hand rubbed a circle on her back. Kelsey tried to stop the flood. He didn’t deserve it. Not after telling her he was okay despite failing wolf gifts that couldn’t keep him from being bowled over, couldn’t protect his ribs from a stupid freaking kettlebell.
“What most important thing?”
This was going to take a while. “Well, first of all…do you know about wolves and life mates?”
“I’ve heard of the concept. Wait…”
“Yeah.”
For the next hour, Kelsey poured out the story, everything that had happened between her and Trevor over the last ten days, everything she had wanted to talk through but kept to herself while Maggie dealt with pain and stiffness, walked with a cane, counted down hours till the next medication. By the time she’d finished, her tears had dried, and some steadiness had returned to her voice.
Then they walked five laps around the house, and halfway through Maggie said, “You asked him if he’d been affected by your breakup, in the wolf-without-his-mate sense, and he said no?”
