Chapter 37
AMAIA
Because a werewolf mate did that a lot. It was just in their nature.
“Listen, hon, do you think your parents would want to see you like this? Over a man?” Tiziano dabbed my forehead with a chamomile-infused napkin, pushing back tear-soaked locks from my pale face. “And one from Dark Diamond, nonetheless!”
What my parents would or would not have wished for me would never be known. They were gone. A bunch of bones in dusty clothes. That was the answer I would have given Tiziano, had I been able to speak.
“He’s right! Either you reject this Callum boy, or you accept the mate bond.
” Makena paced back and forth across the bedroom.
After some research, they had discovered that my mate was none other than one half of the notorious Dark Diamond’s Gamma twins.
Definitely a player on the field. Outside the field? He probably was as well.
Dark Diamonds were all like that.
Callum Ashburn.
That name sounded perfect on my lips.
Amaia Nguyen Ashburn.
“Sleep with a few guys before rejecting him, so at least the douche won’t play well in the next game—”
Makena smacked his head. “Tiziano!”
“What?” he snapped. “I’m not happy with the choices the Moon Goddess has made for my best friends. Not one, but two Dark Diamonds for mates? I’m considering becoming a pagan and rejecting the goddess altogether.”
I sobbed into my pillow, the case all soaked with snot and tears.
The last time I’d cried was during the funeral of my hero, my dad, as I’d squeezed Lachlan’s hand and watched the brown coffin descend into that dark hole dug into the unforgiving ground. Since then, zero tears had been shed.
Until today.
I had sworn it. Dedicated my life to medicine and research. No other teenagers deserved to grow up without their parents.
Graduating two years early from high school, earlier than even Yvaine and Tiziano, I’d worked part-time at the brain cancer research center, publishing several manuscripts under my name in the academic world.
In the middle of all that, the idea of a mate had never crossed my busy mind. The fantasy with Lachlan? Exactly what it was called. A fantasy.
Somehow, I’d always believed that I would marry Lachlan someday, my childhood sweetheart, but only when I felt satisfied with my work.
Only when I felt I deserved it, as na?ve as that may have sounded, since we weren’t true mates.
But I’d always liked rationality and making choices on my own.
The mating concept was the opposite. Mates always complicate things—see Makena and Gaius.
Or even Yvaine! Now she’d been forced to skip classes and take a break from heartbreak, fleeing to Scotland.
Four days into the rejection, I officially crawled out from under the covers and took a shower. I stared at my feet all the way to the bathroom, too tired to even lift my head, before positioning my shaking body in front of the mirror.
My reflection was no surprise. Swollen eyes and dark circles. I traced the incavated lines. Had my cheeks lost flesh?
Chemo. My face reminded me of a chemo face.
It felt like someone had ripped the cold heart out of my chest and kicked it into outer space. There, floating and lonely, it had imploded on itself.
Since the rejection hadn’t been fully completed—I hadn’t known his full name then, and wolves had to pronounce the full name to truly break the bond—since I was halfway through it, I was lost in a limbo between rejection and not.
He hadn’t said my name, either.
I knew I had to choose, and fast. But deep down, I also knew I had no say in it. Because as much as I needed to focus on my life mission, on my medical research, and on my studies, I would never be able to function without a heart.
There it was.
One day later, I was before the luxurious Dark Diamond campus.
The obnoxious onyx diamonds over the front gates connected to make a heart shape, a diagonal claw mark slashing through the symbol like a meteorite that had crash-landed from planet Lascivious.
The trees beyond—elongated, dark—seemed handpicked to match the vibe bordering the pack we were about to visit.
Enemy territory. For most of my pack members, at least; I’d never minded them. All werewolves, just like us. All affected by entropy and decay, just like us.
As we approached, Tiziano’s lecture didn’t pause, not even for a breath. He claimed that there was no better proof of love than him setting foot in the devil’s lair. Which, true—the chief of the Comets’ Ultras was risking his life here.
At least his ramblings managed to distract me, even make me smile a little. Of course, my stomach was eating itself, and adrenaline commanded my blood, generating furious pulses through my veins.
“Hey, you!” Makena, who had also joined our trip scouting DD, shouted to a girl passing by, hopefully a student. “Do you know where we can find Callum Ashburn’s apartment?”
At the name, my wolf whined.
“Why should I tell you?” the girl retorted with a neon glare, eyes reflecting the streetlight. Her gaze found me. “Wait, aren’t you the bitch that rejected C?”
And once again, proof that news traveled faster than progress.
“We’re here to make amends,” Makena said calmly, noticing a couple of Dark Diamond’s members closing in with stances that were anything but friendly.
Of course, Tiziano neither minded nor cared.
“Tell us where! You’ve already made us waste oxygen!” he snapped, eyes glowing in the night.
The heated discussion escalated, with me trying to suppress all the immediate symptoms of fainting, and with Makena failing to calm our violent friend.
This was a mistake. A big one.
KILLIAN
The greasy pizza, more cheese than crust, smelled better than fresh pork. I folded the full thing in half, bit into it, and moaned. Oh, yeah.
I was sitting on the nylon floor, legs sprawled out in a V, looking at my twin and my best friend.
In theory, these two idiots were training.
In reality, they were slaughtering themselves.
The pair had been at the gym for nearly four hours, sweating out all the water in their bodies, recharging with electrolytes, and then sweating it out all over again. And again. And again.
On one side was Logan, heaving the barbell. The veins in his hands and neck were so swollen, they looked like they could burst at any moment. A veil of sweat covered his golden skin, the necklace with the crescent moon pendant nestled between his bare pecs.
“Add another forty, Kill,” he hissed with teeth bared, his handsome face contorted.
I ate another bite, vacuuming the rest of the cheese into my mouth, and walked over.
“T, you got three hundred on there already!”
“I said, add fifty more!” the ass ordered, panting a little.
I sighed.
“Sure, T-man.” I cleaned my hands on my pants and began loading the barbell for Logan. “If you want to smash your muscles, that’s fine. But don’t talk to me like I’m your servant.”
“Sorry…” Logan muttered quietly. I patted his shoulder with a grin before adding an extra weight.
Then there was Callum. My rejected twin was doing push-ups with one hand, a block of fifty pounds on his back. I lost count when C got to two hundred in a row.
He was looking for the kind of physical exhaustion that crept into the bones and hopefully lasted at least a day before our supernatural healing intervened. I’d long given up trying to get them to take a break. Or shower.
“Thor, listen…” I scratched my neck. “Why don’t we call her again? Maybe now she’s in the mood.”
He had tried to stalk her on Instagram, but her profile was private.
Logan’s face tightened. I knew he was dying to hear her voice.
“No. Her damn phone’s still disconnected.”
Shoulders and biceps bulging further, big enough that they’d need their own zip codes, Logan pumped the extra weights up and down.
“Three Comet scum are here!” someone shouted over the DD mind-link.
T and C’s heads whipped to the right. A heartbeat later, the heavy weights smashed against the floor as the two dashed out.
“I’m sorry, baby, I’ll be back!” I called to my pizza, jogging after them.
The hope of seeing their females, protecting them from our pack members, won over any other feelings. Once at the spot, however, Logan let out a husky sound of displeasure.
Oh, got it. His mate wasn’t there.
But C froze, brows scrunching, mouth dropping.
I clearly heard Callum’s heart accelerate, then stop. For several dangerous seconds. It literally skipped three beats.
The mate bond was some serious shit.
And the petite female had a similar reaction, except where C paled, she blushed so had that her cheeks could’ve competed with the red of the tomato sauce on my pizza.
Ah. So this was the girl that was going to teach my virgin bro all about sex.
I briefly assessed my twin’s mate with curiosity and realized two things concurrently: one, C and his mate hadn’t stopped staring at each other during this sickly sweet scene; and two, the other female from Comet looked somewhat familiar. Had I slept with her?
Logan narrowed his eyes at the three Comets before he mind-linked the small DD gathering, telling them to piss off and find something else to do.
His attention stayed on them for exactly four extra seconds before he grunted and stalked away.
“Well, Terminator,” the Comet dude mocked. “You’re my best friend’s mate. I guess that’s payback from my past life. No, the past ten lives!”
Hearing that, Logan halted without glancing back, his back to them.
“Are you happy that, thanks to you, she’s been forced to skip her very important classes? Do you know how much damage this could do to her university career? How much she could fall behind? Huh? Do you? You don’t even read! Okay, maybe you have a manual on taxidermy.”
I’d have to check how to taxidermy him.
My T-man, as immune to insults as he had been to females since meeting his mate, wasn’t in the mood to waste his time on that Comet louse and began to leave again.