Chapter 19 Another Man’s Mark
Everett POV
The bolt slipped from my fingers and rang off the frozen ground.
I’d heard him. Every word, clear as if Shane Tolliver had been standing beside me instead of across the yard. I want you, Liza. A declaration he’d waited for and earned, while I stood holding a socket wrench and a fresh bolt I’d been fitting into a hinge I had no business repairing.
Then they went upstairs, and I felt it.
Liza’s desire came through the open bond and bent me over the gate rail. Her hunger, fierce and joyful and aimed at someone who deserved it, poured into me with the same merciless clarity it always did. I braced one hand against the gatepost and breathed through my teeth.
I could have walked away. Gone inside, shut the bunkroom door, pressed my face into the thin pillow and waited for it to pass. I’d done it before.
I didn’t walk away.
I knew Liza’s pleasure now, better than I’d ever wanted to. I knew the difference between the deep, deliberate intensity she gave Dominic and this reckless, laughing want for Shane.
My knees hit the packed snow. I caught myself on both hands and stayed there, head down, while cold seeped through my flannel. The bond brought me every touch another man laid on the woman who should have been mine.
Then the bite came.
I felt the exact moment Shane’s teeth broke her skin. The pain was sharp and foreign, a white-hot line across the right side of her neck. Beneath it, Shane’s bond settled into place, permanent, chosen, and freely given by a woman who would never give me the same.
My wolf tore up from the bottom of my chest and I roared.
The sound ripped out of me, loud enough to scatter the crows from the lodge roof. It echoed off the timber walls. Every West wolf within earshot would have heard it. Every one of them would know what it meant.
The Alpha who rejected his mate, on his knees in another Alpha’s yard, howling.
I got to my feet. My hands were shaking so badly that I couldn’t make myself reach for the bolt I’d dropped. The bond carried Liza’s afterglow and her satisfaction. The permanence of his mark burned at the edge of everything she felt.
I made it to the side of the lodge and leaned against the log wall while the sky tilted.
I held still until the worst of the nausea passed, then pushed off and walked back toward the yard.
Dusk had settled over the snow, and the temperature was falling fast. The gate hung straight, one fresh bolt seated in the upper bracket and the socket wrench on the rail where I’d left it.
I picked up the wrench and the bolt I’d dropped and put them in my pocket because I didn’t know what else to do with my hands.
The garage apartment sat above the bay doors. I could hear nothing from it. But the bond told me enough. Liza was content. Liza was laughing. Liza was wrapped around a man who’d earned her with patience instead of ceremony.
I sat on the cold bench near the gate and waited.
I couldn’t have said how long it took. The light left the sky in stages, from blue to gray to the deep purple that came before full dark in the mountains.
West wolves moved through the yard on their way to the lodge, and a few of them glanced at me but none spoke.
I was the sick East Alpha on the bench. I was the man they’d heard roar.
The apartment door opened.
Shane came down the exterior stairs with his jacket unzipped and his hair damp. He moved loose and unhurried, plainly pleased with himself. His boots hit the frozen gravel at the bottom of the steps, and the wind carried his scent to me, and my wolf lunged.
Sex. Liza’s skin. And blood. Liza’s blood, faint but unmistakable, the metallic scent of an open wound on the woman the Goddess had chosen for me.
I was off the bench and across the yard before I knew I’d moved.
Shane saw me coming and his green eyes went flat, but I was faster than he expected from a man who could barely keep down water.
I caught two fistfuls of his jacket and drove him backward into the garage wall hard enough to rattle the bay door in its track.
“You son of a bitch,” I said, my voice raw. “You bit her.”
Shane didn’t flinch. He grabbed my wrists and shoved, and the strength behind it reminded me that he was a Beta in fighting shape who spent his days hauling equipment up mountainsides, not a sick man running on fumes.
“Get your hands off me, Pryce.”
I didn’t let go. “I can smell her blood on your mouth.”
“Yeah. You can.” Shane stopped trying to break my grip and looked me dead in the face. His expression held no guilt, no apology, and no fear. “She asked me to. She bared her throat and told me to take it. You want to know what she said? She said, I chose you. Those were her words. Not mine.”
I tightened my grip on his jacket. My arms trembled from sickness or fury, maybe both.
“She’s still bonded to me,” I said.
“Because you won’t let go.” Shane’s voice dropped low. “That doesn’t make her yours. You freed her the night you rejected her. You picked your image over her. And now you’re pissed because somebody else saw what you were too goddamn vain to look at?”
I raised my right fist.
Shane didn’t move. He stood against the wall with my left hand still bunched in his jacket and watched my fist hang in the air between us, and his green eyes said go ahead. They said I’ll take the hit, and then I’ll put you on the ground, and she’ll still be mine in the morning.
“Everett.”
Liza’s voice came from above us. I looked up.
She stood at the top of the exterior stairs in Shane’s flannel shirt, the sleeves rolled past her wrists, her black hair loose around her shoulders.
The last purple light caught the left side of her face, and the scar ran its familiar path from below her eye to her throat.
On the right side, above the collar of the shirt, the mark was visible.
Fresh. Dark. Already closing the way wolf bites did, but still raw enough to see the shape of Shane’s teeth in her skin.
She looked down at me with my fist raised and Shane pinned against the wall. Her expression stopped me.
She was happy.
She was standing in the cold in another man’s shirt with another man’s bite on her neck, and she was happy in a way I had never made her.
In a way I had never tried to make her. The night of my ascension, when our hands touched and the bond flared white between us, I’d seen hope in her eyes and flinched from it.
I’d looked at the scar and calculated what it would cost me in every room I’d planned to walk into, and I’d decided the cost was too high.
Shane hadn’t calculated anything.
My fist came down.
I released Shane’s jacket and stepped back. My hands dropped to my sides. Shane straightened his collar and watched me without moving from the wall, his body still coiled in case I came at him again.
“I’m jealous,” I said. “I’m sick, and I want to take it out on you because you have what I threw away. But you didn’t steal anything.” I looked up at Liza, then back at Shane. “Nobody betrayed anyone. She chose you. I felt it.”
Shane studied me for a long moment. Whatever he saw didn’t soften him.
“Get out of my garage,” he said.
I nodded. I picked up the socket wrench that had fallen from my pocket during the shove and set it on the workbench inside the open bay door.
Then I turned and walked across the yard toward the lodge.
I didn’t look back at the stairs. I didn’t need to.
The bond told me Liza was watching, and I felt her calm attention behind me.
She didn’t call after me. She didn’t need to say anything. The mark on her neck made her choice clear.
? ? ?
The bunkroom door stood cracked, the way the guards always left it, and the draft from the corridor brought the smell of woodsmoke and someone’s coffee from the common room. I sat on the edge of the narrow cot and waited for the nausea to hit.
It came fast.
I barely made it to the basin in the corner before water and bitter bile came up in long, painful heaves that left me gripping the rim with both hands while the room swam.
The rejection sickness had been getting worse for weeks, but the new mark had made it vicious.
My body understood the permanence of what Liza had given Shane before my mind could bear it.
I rinsed my mouth with water from the pitcher. My hands were shaking so badly that I slopped half of it down the front of the flannel. I peeled the wet shirt off and sat on the cot in my undershirt, and the cold air raised goose bumps on my arms, and I couldn’t stop shaking.
In the mirror above the basin, a stranger looked back at me. The bones of my face stood out. I’d lost enough weight that my collarbones jutted above the undershirt’s neckline, and the muscle I’d maintained for years had begun to waste.
This was what rejection looked like.
I lay down on the cot and pulled the wool blanket to my chin and stared at the pine boards of the ceiling.
Through the open bond, Liza’s happiness went on without a break.
She was still upstairs with Shane. Still in his bed, his shirt, his life.
The chosen bond between them felt strong, fed by desire and proximity and the blood she’d freely given.
Mine remained open because I refused to accept what she’d said on the night I threw her away.
I, Liza Mallory, reject you, Everett Pryce, as my mate.
I could end it here, tonight, and the sickness would lift.
But I’d also lose the last thread connecting me to the only woman the Goddess had ever meant for me. Right then, sick and shaking in a borrowed bunkroom, that thread was the only thing telling me I’d once been worth something to someone.
I shut my eyes. The nausea came and went in slow, heavy waves. I felt Liza’s contentment at the edge of my awareness, fading as she slept, and even that small mercy was more than I deserved.
I stayed awake for a long time, listening to the lodge settle around me, and I did not say the words that would have set me free.