Page 10 of Her Reborn Mate

“In that case,” I said, taking a deep breath. “I will take my leave. I hope that one day you’ll understand that I was not lying. And when that day comes, I hope that you’ll find your way back to me.”

Alexis scoffed and turned her back to me.

Defense mechanisms came in various shapes and forms. Some lizards spouted an acidic bloodlike liquid from their eyes at their predators in self-defense. Rodents posed dead when an attacker was nearby. A snake would hiss and secrete venom when faced with danger. Wolves became aggressive. I could not blame her for behaving this way. Had I been through a similar situation, I would have done the same. She was hurt. Her brain was not able to compute the events that had happened. I had made the fatal flaw of uttering Ariana’s name. I was to blame for that.

Mostly, I was just glad to see that she was alive and not too physically wounded. She had found a new life less than a day after I had presumably died. A new job, a new place to live, a new person to spend time with. That last made my heart singe with jealousy, but it was not something on the forefront of my mind.

I was the alpha, and it did not suit my stature to grovel and plead.

“Goodbye, Alexis,” I said.

When she did not respond, I took it as my signal to leave. I exited from the window, but before taking one last look at her, thinking that I’d do anything to get her back, to make her see things from my perspective.

Anything.

***

Where was I supposed to go now that I had been rejected by my mate? Which hearth could I call home in this strange new town where I knew nobody and had no penny to my name?

It wasn’t that I was hungry and tired. It was that I was heartbroken, and my current emotional state made it impossible for me to think clearly or to chart a course of action. The woman I needed had told me to leave. And for good reason. For once, I was not going to aggressively defend my stance and lash out in response. I should not have said Ariana’s name.

Though, something stung me deep in my heart as I recalled that Alexis had barely shown any happiness or relief upon seeing me alive and hardly asked any questions as to how I might have been alive.

She had mentioned vampires. Something about dragging them to Bangor with her. If she was in danger, it was my responsibility to make sure that she was well out of danger. At least for now, Maurice was serving as a shoddy Alpha to the pack. As much as this made my blood boil, there was this bittersweet relief in knowing that, as the Alpha, he wouldn’t at least do something outright terrible to the pack members.

Alexis was my only concern for now—her safety and somehow making sure she’d see things from my perspective.

“I thought I heard yelling coming from upstairs,” some woman said, coming up behind me. “Are you the asshole who is responsible for the injuries on that poor girl? If so, I have half a mind to beat the crap out of you.”

“I never hurt a hair on her body,” I said, turning around to see who dared to speak to me this way. It was a woman, heavily tattooed, holding a shotgun in her hands, smoking a cigarette.

“Good. Then you can at least tell me what hell she went through and if she’s the real deal or not. I never saw such a tortured soul in my life. Couldn’t help but offer her a place to live and a job.”

“Then you are a much kinder soul than I ever was,” I said, feeling remorseful for all the times I had been bad to Alexis. I missed her, even though she was just inches away. There was nothing I could say right now that would change her mind about me. Such a combination of words did not exist in the infinite permutations of language. At least not for now. Later, maybe she would understand, and maybe she would soften, but nothing was going to happen right now.

“Who are you, and what business do you have with that girl?” she asked.

“I could ask the same of you,” I replied sternly.

“They call me Izzie. This is my bar. And if you wanna stand here without getting shot, you better explain who you are,” she said, trying to scare me by putting her finger on the trigger. “She already had a hell of a scare from a meth head today.”

“I’m Will. I was…engaged to her before my accident. And what meth head?” I knew even before she said anything else that it wasn’t a meth head she was talking about.

“Some guy who grabbed her throat. I hit him with a crowbar. He was screaming when he ran. His skin was all torn up,” she said.

“Thank you for protecting her,” I said.

“We women look after our own, especially after folk have been bad to ‘em,” Izzie said. “And from the way I see it, she doesn’t want you here. So next time you come here, remember, I have a shotgun, and I love using it.”

I was not concerned with her anymore. As far as I was concerned, she was taking care of Alexis, and I trusted her to continue doing it. She seemed like a responsible woman. What worried me was the vampires. I needed to scout this area and make sure that there were no lurkers here.

“I’m not going to bother you again,” I said. “You take care now.”

“Mmhmm,” Izzie said, still holding her shotgun.

When I was well out of sight of the bar, I turned into an alley, climbed atop a building using the fire exit, and began looking around the immediate vicinity to see if there were any signs of vampires. Or any hostile being, for that matter.

The fact remained that Ralph, Blair, and Maurice knew that Alexis was alive, and they would do anything in their power to kill her to silence her. What they did not know was that she wasn’t entirely defenseless and that I was still alive.