Mated in the Shadow of My Sister novel Chapter 40

Chapter 0040

(James POV)

It has now been a month since Lily and I rejected each other.

I am currently standing outside my father’s office, prepared to make a new series of demands on him. I

have not been to this office since the meeting that we had before Stephanie’s memorial. Being here

brings back a lot of memories that I would rather forget, and many that I am still trying to understand. tla I had woken up in a hospital bed roughly four days after the rejection.

Just before I woke up, there had been a fuzzy period of time in which my brain was starting to adjust to consciousness again. During that period, a part of me fought with my body about whether I should wake up at all. It was not that I wanted to die. It was that I was scared. Of what, I was not certain… but I knew that once I woke up, I was going to be forced to face a reality that I was not sure that I wanted to be a

part of.

During the period of fuzziness, various memories flashed through my head. Although they were choppy,

they were enough to remind me that I had made a real mess of things. In an effort to humiliate and

intimidate my second chance mate, I had publicly bragged about getting bl ow jo bs and sexual favors

from other she-wolves, apparently forgetting that we were at a memorial service for my first mate.

amy

orders away in my me ntal folder of grievances against my parents. I figured that Luke would help me find

ways to work around the orders anyway.

The problem n was that I then discovered that Luke was not there. Or, rather, that he was there… but that

he was completely closed off and unreachable to me. I should have anticipated that Luke would retreat for a while they give us all sorts of warnings about the impact of rejections in school- but I found

myself caught completely off-guard.

Everything in me shifted when I realized that Luke was gone. His absence set me up on a roller coaster of emotions that I was not prepared to handle.