Rejected Mate and Following Fate novel Chapter 43

"Meaning?" I turn to him fully and lock onto him, seeing him swallow hard, and his mistrust of my current behavior is written all over him. In this moment he's afraid of me and he's nervously spewing words to try and diffuse it, or to keep me focused on anything other than turning on him. I can smell the terror coming in waves from him, even without my wolf sense. It's not intentional, but these feeling are bigger than me, and I have no will to reel them in right now. Fractured and seeping, and I don't know how to stop it pouring out and pooling around me like a dense smog.

"She got to you before Juan did. Ran and left the pack on their return to your lands. She bound her blood to you, so you became linked to her, and completely protected from being slain too, thus meaning he could never kill you. And if he tried to isolate and imprison you, then his pack would have asked why… what did a child do? All these years, this story haunted me as nothing more than the imagining of a fractured mind, torn by horror and atrocity she witnessed, and yet here you stand… the child of Marina. Just like she said you would. Alora…. I am so sorry, please…. you must understand, that had I known it was truth, I would never ...." His real honest despair comes through in torn rawness, but it's not my concern right now. I can't feel anything for his sorrow or his heartache, while there's only chaos and a need to avenge them all.

"Why can't I remember that? If she bound to me then why don't I see her in my memory?" I snap, interrupting his apologies, too caught up in my own pain and misery and needing to hurt something, to care about him and his regrets. It doesn't change the now or how I got here.

"She bound your memory, your gifts, and that of her son, to protect you all, for she feared Juan would see even challenge to his position in his own child, should he have inherited her gifts too. Like I said, she has certain abilities. She said the time would come when she would give back to you that which she took…. I assume she means those. Not just yours, but Colton's too." He falters, his voice trembling, wringing his hands in nervousness, and I jump up and stalk pas, him to push my hands against the glass. My head torn with the addition of even more to this story.

Colton has other gifts too. Bound? And me…. is she the reason I can't seem to grasp my own gifts and gain any control, because I'm always fighting some kind of spell that keeps them dormant? How is that helpful? Especially now, when she's like a corpse, sleeping through the years and can't do anything to physically help.

My body is aching to turn and trying to revert to wolf, but this damn building is strong and keeping it in check, no matter how hard it wails and howls within me. I bang the glass, the torture of it getting too much, and watch the shudder travelling from my palm and spreading out the full expanse of the invisible wall. It does nothing to ease the inner war.

"Bound my gifts? My memories? How could she… that's impossible. I have gifts, I'm learning but they're there, not tied down completely. Colton… he has his gifts too and he's more than capable of using them. His alpha strength, and speed, his dominance. He can command with a tone. It can't be true… no one has ever documented a witch binding a wolf's natural gifts." It's a rebuff of what he's saying as I mentally try and dismiss them as lies, focused fully on her and willing her to get up and tell me this herself. Lying there like a weak powerless fool who let her mate destroy everything in our lives.

Get up Sierra…. Get the fuck up!! You owe me this truth yourself, from your own mouth!

It's anger at her, but it's born of fear, churning up to douse the inferno of molten rage. That all of this is too much and bigger than me. I don't want this burden of weight or this story to be mine. I want to go back to the mountain, to the home, to disappear back into the shadows and be a girl that no one noticed again. I was safe and ignorant, and it didn't hurt like this. It wasn't some precipice of danger and had me teetering on the edge and looking down into the abyss, knowing I'm never going to be safe or okay ever again. It's all too much and I'm only a child. Eighteen, barely grown. I don't want this!!

"No, my dear… Colton will carry the gifts of his mother too, our research has proven time and again that hybrids have a mixture, every time… just like you. His non wolf side is in there but bound up tight. And you, you are not capable of harnessing your full potential if she has bound you. The gifts are maybe strong enough to peek at times, but she was a capable witch. I don't doubt her spells serve the purpose she intended. Her spells brought her a child when her body kept failing to carry Juan's seed. If she can overcome that… then she can bind a child in protection until she's ready to release you." He almost whispers it, such is his fear of me, of being heard telling me, of these people, of Juan, and I glance his way to find him almost pressed into the corner and watching me in wide eyed apprehension. He too knows that there is no coming back from this now that he's opened Pandora's box.

"Then how do I get her to do that if she's over there sleeping her life away?" I fix him with a stare, sniffing back watery tears I hadn't noticed were pouring down my cheeks, my heart numbing out and my mind moving into a state of shock once more. Calming me but making that sense of hopelessness grow.

"I don't know. This facility has a guard count of nineteen, and even though none of you can use your gifts within, I'm sure you will be no match to nineteen strong men…. Armed ones, even if you are somewhat terrifying when mad." It's a half nervous laugh, as he tries to lighten the tension, that dies on his lips as I continue to stare at him and lower my hands from the glass as I try to pull my breathing to something less erratic and self soothe, wiping my face with the back of my hands to pull myself together.

"You need to let me out…. I need to go find that son of a bitch and show him what my mother failed to… You don't mess with my family!! I can't stay here. I can't be here when he comes now." I snarl again, a spike of returning anger, knowing my emotions are clouding my judgement, and all over the place, but I don't care. I was just told that everything I was led to believe, my entire childhood, was a lie and that my bloodline was never diluted and weak… my mother was a prophesized warrior destined to lead her people. And Juan murdered her.

He killed all of them. Every single person I loved, cared for, and knew as my pack. A clan of Whyte wolves. To silence us.

That sniveling slimy power mad freak slayed them all, and he's going to rue the day he chose to leave me alive. Now it all makes sense though… why I was thrown with the other orphans and shunned as a whole. That was our punishment for him being unable to get at me in the way he wanted. That was how he figured he could keep me down and separate from the people, so I would never have any chance of rising and leading them against him. And if I did, he could put it down to my being hateful, and holding a grudge for ten years as an outcast, and nothing more than an impures taste for revenge at her own failings. So clever.