Chapter 17 #2
I completely froze. Full system crash. My nervous system went offline, and my heart rate flatlined.
All I could do was stare. People milled around me, unaware of my short-circuiting body.
He had his back to me. Even from here, it wasn’t hard to notice how tall he was. Ridiculously tall. Similar to my father, who was basically a dinosaur.
Spellbound, I watched how he paused, how he tipped his head and lifted his nose up in the air. How he sniffed…something.
Me.
His spine straightened before he slowly turned around.
Our eyes clashed.
It was like every firework, Christmas light, and streetlamp blew all at once.
If I’d been comatose before, now I was sprinting into a heart attack. My pulse raced; my palms grew clammy.
And then they came. Sparks. Literal electric flutters. All around me, like invisible fireflies.
He was undoubtedly and objectively the most beautiful man anyone could ever think of. So much so my eyes stung.
He was the pure definition of masculinity.
Oh, Stephen!
It was like the guy had escaped from a magazine, and no one had had the good sense to send him back in.
His ash-blond hair was cut short at the sides and fell longer, messier on top. It was the kind of hair you had to run your fingers through—maybe for scientific reasons.
Sculpted jaw, cheekbones carved by divine intervention, and lips full and soft, the bottom one thicker, inviting longer attention. His nose was straight, unbothered.
I wasn’t short, but I probably only reached his shoulder. The height difference felt perfect to me. I’d need to tilt my head back several degrees to look at him if he was standing right in front of me.
He wore a pale green tank that did little to hide all that bronze skin, and his arms were insanely muscular, probably bigger than my thighs.
He had biceps, triceps, all the possible ‘ceps.’ An immense dark-blue tattoo crawled from his shoulders down to his clenched fists—a tangle of fractures or lightning bolts, I couldn’t decide.
I only knew that they seemed to pulse with movement when he breathed.
He had been wearing a lazy grin before, but now, his expression was frozen in total shock. Steel-gray eyes zeroed in on me, the black almost swallowing all the silver as they dilated.
They roamed all over my face, and I pictured them carving my image inside his brain.
The air thickened between us, so much so I could almost distinguish the nitrogen and oxygen molecules. We both heard our wolves howling the word.
The one everyone waited for in dread.
The one that would change your existence forever.
Mate.
We looked at each other as if neither of us could believe what we were seeing.
Something deep inside me snapped. Rearranged. Everything seemed clearer as I gazed into that silver abyss.
Relief. Awe. Chaos.
And I knew it. Awareness and acceptance of what this meant—what he meant—zapped right through my chest.
We continued to stare at each other without daring to bat an eyelid, until his group of friends—mostly girls, a few guys—moved. It tore me out of the magical trance. I blinked, able to breathe again.
His gaze dropped to the lower part of my face, eyes darkening noticeably. Oh, no. Was there something in my mouth? Or worse, on my teeth?! I had guacamole just before coming… with parsley!
I was still biting my lower lip when one of the girls leaned in, telling him something I didn’t catch.
I recoiled as if the sight had slapped me, zeroing in on that hand, on the seahorse tattoo palming his forearm. I looked back up at him, then at the hand again. I’d never disliked seahorses as much as I did right then.
Still wide-eyed, he followed the direction of my gaze, only then noticing the hand there. He swatted it away without even looking at the girl, who staggered back. A determined look possessed his features.
And then he moved.
People flinched away, like gravity bent around him, and everyone else had to step back. His tremendous figure stalked forward, shoulders rolling, eyelids hooded. My cheeks burned, heart racing embarrassingly fast.
I placed a hand on my chest.
He saw—and a smile pulled at his lips. A small one.
But it wrecked me anyway.
Here he comes! Is he going to kiss me? Touch me? Ask my name? Which one do I want?
“All of them!” my wolf howled.
By now, the butterflies in my belly had gone to war.
My fated mate was just a few feet away, our atmospheres colliding, the people passing by completely unaware of our two newly discovered souls. Some glanced at me with curiosity, while others tried to talk to him. They were pointedly ignored.
Four more steps and—
“Yo, Thor, my man!” A boy with a shaved head and an octopus tattoo crawling down his forehead bear-hugged my mate around his waist, breaking the mate march. “What’s with the face, bro? Looks like you saw a ghost.”
A ghost, or a mate. They gave off similar feelings; both drove you crazy with fear and amazement.
Wait, Thor? Was that my mate’s name? It didn’t feel right.
“Tank Man! Seen Thor?” Another brick house of a guy bounced over from the right. “Ah, here you are!” The new werewolf slapped my mate’s shoulder, sounding like he had just slapped the side of a horse. “Come on, man, you’ve got to sign shirts and tits. C and Kill have already disappeared.”
The other guy elbowed my mate with a loud snort. “I bet you’ll drag a few girls back to my apartment again, huh? Need to get some new earplugs, jeez!”
“That’s smart. I don’t want them to know where I live, either.”
“He’s had more girls in my living room than Zara on sale day.”
“Don’t know what that means, but I’m guessing it’s a lot.”
The two guys laughed.
I didn’t. My mate didn’t either.
Those words hurt so much that tears welled in my eyes.
My mate, who had only momentarily released me from his gaze to look at his friends with confusion, connected what they said and whipped his head back toward mine, worry and guilt wrestling in his eyes.
A bitter feeling flooded my heart, all the butterflies dropping dead. My gaze fell to my ergonomic white shoes, laces in double knots.
He shouldered his giant friends out of the way to reach me.
But fate wanted to play a dirty trick that day.
“Vy!” Lachlan sneaked up behind me, hands cupping my shoulders.
My mate snapped his head toward Lachlan with an indecipherable look, and I found myself acutely conscious of the fact that he didn’t seem bothered by the Highlander touching me.
“Please help! A pack of feral fans is chasing me. I swear, one of them has my name written on the gel of her nails,” he semi-whispered, checking over his shoulder.
Then he turned forward, and his entire expression turned lethal. His lips retracted, displaying his white canines.
“What the hell are you looking at, Terminator?”
I could faint.
Terminator…
My mate is the Terminator.
The one name on everyone’s lips. The most criticized, feared, and beloved werewolf in the entire wereball league.
I became painfully aware of the situation, and a silly, pitiful whimper slipped out of my lips.
His gaze swung then, right back to my eyes, so piercing it punched the breath out of my lungs.
His ramrod-straight posture and the steady, rapid way he drummed his fingers on his thigh gave away the fact that he expected me to say something. That thing.
Mates. We’re mates!
That was what I should have said.
Silver eyes clouded with disappointment when my lips remained shut.
To my defense, I was still in shock!
And he still hadn’t uttered a single word. He simply scowled with a clenched jaw, resentment curling around the edges of something much softer.
Then the cavalry arrived.
Lachlan’s pals flanked him, as if they’d smelled conflict and been drawn to it like hounds to wounded game. Hulks from Dark Diamond backed up my mate.
Arms crossed, his gaze bounced between me and my twin, and his eyes narrowed further, as if he were plotting something. Because that was what he did. The Terminator always plotted.
Before I could yell, “Mate!” and prevent everything, snarls and hisses flew from both sides.
Insults came next.
“Look at the were-scum.”
“More like were-larvae.”
“Remember when I kicked that soft ass of yours so hard, I gave you a second asshole?”
“I broke your nose so bad, your mom still files missing person reports.”
“I’ll bury your face in the turf till grass grows out your ears!”
“You limp-dicked fucker, come say that to my fangs!”
A crowd gathered. Everyone knew they couldn’t fight—that was only during the match, in the arena—but verbal conflict was just as entertaining.
Until one of them shouted random words at me.
I was shocked. But not because of the words.
They slipped over me, forgotten. The guy didn’t know anything about me, probably not even my name, and I knew he was lost in the heat of the moment.
My mate had other ideas.
His head snapped to the right and his canines lengthened before he emitted an incredibly malicious growl that ripped through the crowd, silencing the whole place.
A heartbeat later, he was in front of the pack member, a hand curling around his neck as he lifted the huge guy off the floor. With a single, powerful move, he punched him square in the face and knocked him out.
A dangerous amount of energy radiated from his shaking body.
My head was spinning, and I started feeling drowsy. The Dark Diamond members paled, and even my pack members startled at the inexplicable act. No one had given any weight to that insult aimed at me. Not even my brother, who had one arm around my waist.
My mate spun on his heels, his elbow pulled back. My blood ran hot as he flung forward an enormous fist with DOOM tattooed on the back of his fingers.
CRACK. A hole was left in the wall…and in my chest.
My knees wobbled with a longing ache as I watched my mate barrel away without sparing me another glance.
I couldn’t hear what Lachlan was telling me as he waved his hand in front of my face, lips moving.
My brain was repeating the same thing over and over again, like a broken record:
The Terminator is my mate.
The Terminator is my mate.
The Terminator is my mate.