Filed To Story: Chasing the Rejected Luna's Heart (Clara & Liam) Book PDF Free
After digging through the cabinets, I found a few relatively clean washcloths the previous occupants had left behind and got acquainted with my gag reflex scrubbing the bathtub until I felt like I wasn’t going to catch something just from taking a shower.
Once I got out, I went over to see if my phone had finished charging where I had left it on the bed. I was disappointed but not surprised to see no one in my family, or Clara, had texted me. There were, however, three missed calls from Liam that I ignored completely.
Not a word from the others, which again was hardly a surprise.
I realized somewhere in the back of my mind, I had been hoping–even if it didn’t seem likely at all–Dad would announce he had changed his mind and that he was sending the driver back to collect me. Or maybe this was all some terrible mistake, and there would be some unexpected magical fix that would allow me to return to my old life a little less trusting but otherwise unscathed.
No dice.
Well, I couldn’t just sit around waiting for a fantasy that was never going to materialize the way my worst nightmares had.
Actually, scratch that. I never could’ve imagined any of this shit.
I decided I might as well go into the city and explore while it was daylight since I was pretty sure going outside after dark in this neighborhood was suicidal.
Outside on the streets, everything was a little less foreboding than it seemed in the eerie glow of twilight the night before. Maybe I had just come to terms with my fate already. Adaptability had never been something I had considered a trait of mine, but I’d never really been tested either. If nothing else, this was an opportunity to prove, even if it was only to myself, that I wasn’t the spoiled princess my cousins and packmates accused me of being, even if it was only in whispers behind my back.
I couldn’t imagine the rumors that were flying by now. Not that I was really that much a part of the daily pack life as it was, but surely my tutors would notice I was gone, and they would tell someone, and so on. I wondered what Dad was going to say. Was he going to admit the shameful secret that his mate had cheated on him with a human? I highly doubted that, but the thought was amusing in a vindictive kind of way.
I walked aimlessly for a while, not really sure what I was looking for. I knew I had to start over somehow, but I hadn’t even managed to come to terms with the fact that my old life was gone yet. What did shifters who weren’t affiliated with the pack do with themselves, anyway? How did they find a sense of purpose despite denying every inborn instinct and drive that pushed them to be part of something?
Then again, it was hard to imagine there were all that many she-wolves who found themselves in this position. I was sure it was different for guys. Hell, some of them probably felt like this was freedom.
It wasn’t long before I came to a market, so I decided I might as well go in and get some supplies to make my humble abode a little less…everything. It occurred to me I had never actually been shopping for this stuff. We’d always had servants who took care of the cleaning and cooking, and the idea of collecting the things that made it possible for me to do it all myself was so far beyond me, I might as well have been shopping for parts to make a space shuttle.
I opted for a few different kinds of cleaners, choosing the cheapest they had, and grabbed a few ready meals that could be cooked in a microwave. I had never even used one of the damn things, and given the general state of the apartment, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was a fire safety risk, but beggars can’t be choosers.
At the checkout, a couple of guys browsing the selection of lighters ogled me shamelessly. I had thought male shifters were lecherous, but human males took presumptuousness to a whole new level. An art form, really. I was about to give them a scathing critique when the next cash register opened up and I took my purchases over to the counter.
I glanced back over my shoulder once I was outside to make sure I hadn’t been followed before heading back to the apartment. It took a few hours and nearly all the cleaner I had purchased to get the place into a semi-decent state, but it wasn’t like I had anything better to do. I couldn’t help but imagine what Tyler would say if he saw me now, on my hands and knees scrubbing grime from the grout of the filthy squares that covered the floor now vaguely resembling a kitchen. Cinderella in reverse, I guess.
The physical labor was strangely relaxing in a mind-numbing way. It gave me a chance to zone out. To think about everything that had happened, and try to come up with some unifying theory that made sense and left some possibility for resolution.
Maybe the doctor had lied. As untenable as it seemed, it would’ve been a welcome possibility compared to the alternative, which was that my mother-the only person I had ever really and truly trusted-had been lying to me my entire life about something as huge as my existence. My identity.
No matter how I tried to reason it, though, it just didn’t make sense. Liam’s words had burrowed into my mind like a parasite, and once they were there, they just wouldn’t go away.
Was he right? Had Dad planned this from the beginning? Had he known I wasn’t his kid all along, or at least for longer than he had been pretending? If that was the case, it didn’t make sense why he would’ve kept it a secret for this long. Why spend all that time raising me, even if he hadn’t exactly been a hands-on father? Then there was the possibility that he had made it up altogether. But how would he benefit from pretending like I wasn’t his child if I was? I’d always harbored a suspicion that he blamed me for my mother’s imagined transgressions, and recent events had not done much to counter that assumption. Still, he was close to giving up the throne and I wasn’t going to be his problem anymore in a matter of a month anyway.
Unless Liam was right and that was the motivation in itself. It had been pack tradition for the last hundred years that the reigning alpha handed things over when his eldest child was either old enough to become alpha, or to be given to an alpha chosen as his successor. It was a compromise that allowed us to exist in relative peace and stability compared to the old days, when power had been won and lost through bloody, vicious battles that resulted in death more often than not.