Pursuing My Rejected Luna by Cara Anderson novel Chapter 248

Ch. 20

Noah

I let Cassandra stew for an hour before I finally allow myself to even think about talking to her. I’m still not even sure what possessed me to agree to see her when the gate guard called about her arrival. I’m chalking it up to temporary insanity.

I’ve used every minute of that hour to prepare myself for the last thing I ever thought I’d find myself faced with, today or any day. Facing my rejected mate again.

The bond started doing something the moment the gate guard said her name. A tug behind my navel I haven’t felt in six months–the one I’ve spent every day since our bond snapped trying to forget. I need to be in control of what she sees when I walk through that door. I need my face to be something I’ve chosen rather than something the bond wants.

With every step closer to her I remind myself what she is. The woman who decided to deny our bond, to look past me completely. Not a stranger making a frightened choice-she knew me. Had known me for years through Jaxon and Skye and the overlapping geography of our lives. She saw me, felt the bond, and calculated. Decided I wasn’t the option she wanted.

The woman who brought an innocent child into a pack and used him as a prop. The woman who looked at Jaxon the way a woman looks at something she’s decided to have even though her own sister got hurt in the process.

I know exactly what she is and what she did and why the rejection was right and necessary and I would make it again. I will never forget it either.

The bond doesn’t care about any of this.

It doesn’t care about right or necessary or the cold clarity of a formal rejection delivered in a hallway. It cares that she is in this building, ninety feet away, and it has been pointing at her since her name came through the radio like a compass that has finally found something to point at after months of spinning.

I hate this but I manage it.

Cassandra is standing when I enter the room. Her chin is jutted out and her back is straight, like she’s braced for impact. And believe me, I want to rail at her. But that might send the message I care enough to be angry and I refuse to let her see that.

“Fucking hell!” The words slip out involuntarily when I finally allow myself to take her all in.

The cut on her face is deep, the left cheekbone swollen and puffy like a water balloon. It’s easy to see it was caused by someone’s fist rather than a fall. The way she’s holding herself means her ribs are injured too, probably broken. Fury burns in my veins with each new wound I log.

“Who the fuck touched my mate?” I barely suppress a growl as the unwanted thought takes me by surprise.

I force myself to look away before I lose the battle my instincts are waging right now. Instead, I find myself assessing Liam. He’s in the chair beside her, barely awake, but looking at me with the timid expression of a small person in an unfamiliar place.

The bond surges anew as I register his fear. Was he there when his mother was attacked? Did he see what happened to her? What kind of monster would do that to a woman, let alone in front of her child?

“Close the distance, put your hands on what’s wrong, be useful.” My wolf urges. The need is immediate and physical and I hate it the same way I hate the warmth and the pull I still feel. But I manage this too, forcing my

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face into a neutral expression.

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When I look back at Cassandra, she’s looking at me. I watch her eyes move over me before she can stop them, a woman registering that the man across from her is someone she finds attractive. I don’t think she even realizes she’s doing it but I’m sure as hell gonna make sure she knows I noticed.

I let a half-smile reach my face-just a hint of a smirk. Just enough that she knows I saw it. Communicating, without words, what I want her to understand: this is what it feels like. Wanting something you can’t have. Now you know.

I’m not proud of this. But I don’t suppress it.

“Why don’t you tell me why you’re here,” I say, “so we can both get back to our lives.”

I watch her face more than I listen for her words. If I’ve learned anything about Cassandra Winters, it’s that she’s very good at saying the right things to gain your sympathy. But it’s her face that gives her true motives away to anyone who bothers to look.

I bothered. I know what it looks like, the micro-expressions of someone working an angle. The slight shift of the eyes that means information is being organized. The fractional pause before a response that means the response is being selected.

I don’t see any of it. What I see instead is something I didn’t prepare for. Defeat.

The real thing. The real, exhausted defeat of a person who has run out of options and knows it and has stopped pretending otherwise. And I’m angry all over again when I feel a twinge of sympathy for her.

She’s about to speak. She opens her mouth and draws a breath. “I-,” is all she gets out.

Then her face changes and what I see there, I hate even worse. It’s agony, sheer and raw and brutalizing her body.

And then she’s going down.

Cara Anderson Author

Thank you for reading!

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