Out of Pain

MAX

She was nowhere to be found. I’d searched every place I could think of. If she wasn’t here, or in France, or even Greece, then where was she?

Maybe the people I asked had lied to me, but that seemed unlikely.

Especially her uncle, Julian, who I ran into as soon as I got back, feeling defeated and lost because I hadn’t found her.

He showed me the text she’d sent him. It was sent the same day as mine, just a few hours later.

“We thought we’d give her some time to cool off,” he said, clearly going against his instinct to dig deeper.

“We figured something must have happened between you two, and she was upset,” her aunt added, confirming my suspicion that she was the one who’d held Julian back.

“Nothing happened between us,” I said firmly. “Everything was great. We even made out on the way to the airport.”

“That’s more information than I needed.” Julian made a face.

“I wouldn’t have told you under normal circumstances,” I shot back. “We were talking just fine right before the attack.”

“She hasn’t reached out to you since that email she sent?”

“No. And before you ask, she’s not in Paris either. I just got back from there after talking to her friends.”

“Did you try her ex? Laurent?” Lydia asked. “We called our kids too, and they said they haven’t seen her in a long time.”

“Gaby talked to him. He was out of the country with his current girlfriend.”

“Maybe she’s changed her mind about your relationship,” Julian suggested, more gently than usual. “Maybe she’s not ready to settle down. She’s still very young.”

I showed him the email I’d received from her again, and he frowned but didn’t say anything.

“She rejected me,” I said, my voice rough. “That’s more serious than not wanting to settle down.”

“In that case, maybe you should let her be, Max.” Lydia gave me a sad smile.

“If she’s going to all this trouble to hide from you and everyone she knows you could ask about her, maybe it’s better if you stop. At least for a while.”

“We know you love her, but you two are just too different. You keep forgetting that you have a mate. A destined companion.”

“I do.” I nodded. “And that’s Estella.”

“Max…,” Julian started, but I cut him off.

“Before you say any of the usual crap people say when they don’t know the truth, your niece is my mate. There’s no one else for me.

“I didn’t choose Estella over my destined mate. She is my destined mate. She always has been. I’ve known that since the day I found her near your brother’s burned car.”

“But she is…,” Lydia started in shock, but I cut her off too.

“A human,” I said, laughing a little. “Yeah, I know. It’s rare, but it happens, and it happened to me.”

“I didn’t have a choice, thanks to the Goddess, but if you ask me, I wouldn’t want it any other way. I wouldn’t want anyone but her.”

“That’s why you always protected her,” Lydia said.

“It wasn’t just that, but yes, that was part of it.” I nodded.

“Did you tell her?” Julian asked.

“No, I hadn’t. I was planning to tell her when she got back from Paris. We were going to figure out what to do then.”

“If you’d told her before, it would explain why she ran,” he said, and I glared at him, even though I knew he might be right.

I noticed that despite their initial shock, they took the news pretty well, but I didn’t feel like asking them about it.

“Is there a chance someone else told her?” Lydia asked.

“I don’t know.” I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Everyone who knew was pressuring me to tell her myself.”

“Let’s wait a bit. She might come to her senses and come back to sort this out.”

“A week,” Julian said, his face serious. “That’s how long I’m willing to wait. Then I’m going to the police.”

I nodded in agreement and left. But their suggestion that Estella might have found out the truth from someone else stayed with me, gnawing at me from the inside.

Could that be why she left?

It would make sense if the message was different. The Estella I knew wouldn’t be scared to confront me and call me out on my crap.

She mentioned rejection, yes, but the rest of the text wasn’t what it should have been if she’d known about us.

If she knew, she would have let me know. She would have taken out her justified anger on me, and most importantly, she would know what her rejection meant to me.

ESTELLA

It’s a nice place.

The pack I was brought to when I fainted. Most of the members look at me with suspicion, but it doesn’t bother me.

I’m a human, after all, and I’m not exactly used to it, but I still remember my first years in a pack, and it was worse than this. But overall, they treat me well.

I have my own room, warm meals, and their luna is a good woman. She keeps me company sometimes when she’s done with her duties for the day.

I was planning to leave after a day or two, but most days I feel really weak. There’s a pain that spreads through my body, from limb to limb, and it lasts for hours.

Sometimes, I have to force myself to get out of bed. To fight the pain and stand up to go to the bathroom or just to the window to look out at the forest.

When they asked for a name, I gave them my mother’s, and luckily, they didn’t question it.

I’m not sure how far this pack is from Patrick and Cal’s territory, but so far, no one has shown up looking for me.

Honestly, I doubt they even think I’m in the country. And if they do, they probably wouldn’t consider another pack, outside of the ones I’ve already visited, as a potential hiding spot.

I’ve considered reaching out to them many times, but I’m just not ready yet.

Plus, if I know my uncle, he’ll probably use some movie-style call-locating app to find me and drag me back home.

I don’t want to go back, but I don’t want to stay here either. I know I’ll have to start over at some point, but I’m not ready to do that just yet.

It’s not just that the idea of going out and falling in love is daunting. To this day, I can’t understand how Bonnie does it.

She throws her heart into every relationship, not caring how long it will last, even though I’ve never seen her stay with someone for more than two years.

In my opinion, it takes a special kind of stubbornness and courage to do that, to love different people like that. To invest in them.

I know it’s what most humans do, and I did it with Laurent, but in the end, I couldn’t follow through.

You see, I always knew it was Max for me. Or at least, that’s what I told myself.

It’s still true. I still love him. I still sleep in his old T-shirts. It’s both torturous and comforting to have something of his close to me. On me.

He’s probably forgotten about me by now. Or maybe I’m just a distant memory, now that he’s found his destined one.

The Max I thought I knew would tell me I’m talking nonsense. That mates don’t mean anything to him. But he’s proven himself a liar, hasn’t he?

I can’t really blame him, and there’s a small, selfless part of me that’s happy he gets to fulfill his kind’s destiny.

Delta is a beautiful woman. It’s hard not to feel self-conscious around her.

Eva is beautiful, in a mystical kind of way. Bonnie is undeniably gorgeous too, but she doesn’t seem to care.

Delta, though, it’s like she challenges you with her beauty. Even if she wasn’t Max’s destined mate, I fear she’d still win him over.

But what comfort can the knowledge that I was playing a losing game bring?

MAX

“You should stop drinking,” Delta said softly.

She had called me yesterday, and when I told her I was back, she insisted on seeing me immediately.

Honestly, I wasn’t really in the mood for company, but at least she spared me the pitying looks my people kept giving me, and she didn’t cry like Luz every time she saw me.

The kid still has nightmares, but from what I’ve been told, she’s calmer than before, though sadder too.

As much as I love the pup, it’s best for both of us if we don’t see each other for a while.

Delta was the one cynical person I didn’t mind having around, until she started lecturing me about my drinking.

“I don’t have to do anything,” I growled.

“I’m only saying it because it’s not good for you, Max.” She sighed, pouring herself a drink.

“And it’s good for you?” I snickered.

“I know how to moderate, but you’re pushing the limit for our kind.”

“So what? A drunk werewolf isn’t a good look?”

“Drinking won’t change what’s happened, Max, and I’m telling you this because it was the first thing I tried after what happened to me.”

“Well, I want to see for myself.” I shrugged and downed another.

There was a slight buzz in my head. I knew it wasn’t enough, but it had taken me several empty bottles to get there, so I intended to savor it. It might dull the constant ache of her absence.

Six months have already passed without any sign of her.

Julian filed a missing person’s report, and the search began.

Gabrielle’s story checked out. She had driven Estella to the airport, and there was a ticket under her name the day she sent me that email. She had come back. Here.

But no one had seen her. The first person I checked with was Delta. I asked her over and over again, but she denied seeing her.

When I suggested that Estella might have seen her anyway, she reasoned that the guestroom door was locked while she was staying there, and there was nothing of hers lying around the house.

Our patrollers hadn’t seen her entering or leaving the pack either. I thought it was strange, and it meant that either I was incredibly unlucky or she really hadn’t visited.

There was a chance no one was on patrol when she came because the attack had left us short-staffed, but there was no way for me to know.

The next logical option was Bonnie. I practically stormed into her bookstore and then her house, searching for Estella.

She was shocked but let me look around enough to understand that my girl wasn’t there. She hadn’t been to Bonnie’s since before she left for Paris.

All nearby hotels were checked. Bus and train stations too. She had indeed paid cash for a train ticket to the farthest town, but when the cops went there, no one had seen her.

Her photo was everywhere, but it was like she had vanished off the face of the earth.

The police said that since there was no suspicion of foul play in her disappearance, they couldn’t investigate much further.

She was an adult and it seemed she had left of her own accord.

I guess she really didn’t want to be found.

So, here’s to that! Cheers.

Or it was until Delta decided to take matters into her own hands and took the bottle from me when I’d decided that just filling the glass was wasting my time.

“Enough,” she said sternly, sitting down next to me.

My wolf growled in my head, but I couldn’t deal with him anyway. Not since she left us.

“I’ll decide when it’s enough,” I snarled.

“You can’t handle this right now. Someone with a clearer head should take over.”

“Since when are you that person?”

“Since you’re more messed up than I’ve ever seen you,” she shot back.

“I just can’t wrap my head around why she’d do this.” I sighed, shutting my eyes. “It’s not like her.”

“Humans are unpredictable, Max.”

“You don’t know my Estella.”

“True, but she still left you. So, I’m going to give you the same advice you once gave me—”

“I’m not giving up,” I interrupted.

“What other choice do you have? Wait for her to find some nice human guy, sleep with him? Marry him? Have his kids? Do you want to feel that kind of pain?

“Because if you do, you’re no better than me.”

“Don’t compare your situation to mine.”

“Why not?” She shrugged. “We’ve both been left behind. Our mates rejected us. The circumstances were different, sure, but we’re in the same boat, Max.”

“No.” I shook my head. “Estella will come back.”

“It’s been six months, and she hasn’t. But I’m here.”

She placed her hand on mine, and I almost jerked away from the contact but didn’t.

“I can’t.”

“It’s hard at first,” she said gently. “I know. I’ve been there. It feels like ripping your own heart out, but sometimes that’s what you have to do to survive.”

“I can’t betray her like that, Delta.”

“She’s not like us, Max. She won’t feel a thing.”

“She will.” I chuckled. “Every time I slept with another woman before I was with her, her hair was turning gray.”

“That could be a coincidence, and besides, the more distance she puts between you, the less it will affect her. She’s not marked.

“You won’t be doing to her what I did to Eric. Or what he did to me. You won’t hurt her that way, Max.”

I shook my head again and again. No matter what she said, my mind, my heart, my wolf rejected the idea of being with anyone else.

But when she leaned in closer, I didn’t pull away. When she kissed me, I didn’t resist. I wanted to. I really did. But the alcohol was finally kicking in.

My anger was taking over. My pain was swallowing me whole.

It didn’t matter that kissing Delta tasted like ashes and made me want to throw up. I kept doing it, trying to revert to the person I was before Estella came into my life.

I kept touching her, undressing her…

But the moment I tried to enter her, the weight of my betrayal hit me.

And it wasn’t my wolf howling or the burning sensation in my chest, as if a fire had started inside me, that stopped me from going any further.

It was the fact that being with anyone else but Estella made me feel dirty. Incomplete.

So, I ran to the bathroom and started scrubbing myself clean, trying to erase any trace of what I was about to do.

I banged my head against the shower wall to punish myself for being so selfish.

Nothing fucking worked.

I still felt filthy.

I still felt like a traitor.

UNKNOWN

He had just stepped out of the bathroom, examining his scars in the mirror as if he didn’t already know how many of them marred his body, even with the fresh one he’d just added, when he heard a blood-curdling scream.

It made his skin crawl, and that was saying something because anyone who knew him knew that he wasn’t someone who easily felt things like fear or chills or… compassion.

He felt nothing except the occasional burns that left those marks on his skin. But even those were starting to fade.

His first thought was that they were under attack, but he dismissed it because he would have been the first to know through the mind-link if that were the case.

When he stepped out of his room, he found other pack members in the hallways, trying to figure out what was happening.

He was the first to pinpoint the source of the noise.

The first to burst into the human’s room.

The first to witness the scene.

The first to feel his blood turn to ice.

The only one who could understand this kind of pain.

The only one who began to comprehend what the human’s sickness meant.

Because he still remembered his first time.