Wild Girl: A Rejected Mate Romance

by C. R. Jane

  It was my mother.

  Dark hair bounced across her shoulders, panic twisting her expression.

  My mouth might have fallen open at that moment as she was the last person I expected to see. After I'd been rejected by my fated mate, my mother had left, too disappointed in me, never wanting anything to do with me. Or so I’d been told.

  So, what did she want? To help Alistair trample me for good?

  "W-what do you want?" I asked, my voice bitter. The thing about mothers was that a real parent was someone who put their children ahead of themselves. Except my mother had given me to the devil, then turned her back on me. How could I ever forgive her for that?

  Her pale eyes glinted like she'd been crying, which I struggled to believe were anything but crocodile tears.

  "We don't have much time," she told me, and only then did I notice she was carrying a navy colored coat— or was it a dress?—over her arm. She rushed to my back and tugged at the ropes around my wrists.

  "What's going on? Why are you helping me? What do you want?" My pulse thundered through my veins. If there was one thing I learned long ago was that trusting anyone from my past came with the danger of me ending up in worse shit than I’d started from.

  "Oh, Rune," she sobbed, and for a moment I almost believed her cries were real. "I don't have time to explain everything, but I was wrong to leave you with that monster. And now is the time you need to trust me, my sweet girl."

  My head hurt trying to make sense of what she was saying. Memories hovered at the edge of my mind of growing up with this woman who made me believe her, told me she loved me, read me bedtime stories, but in truth, I’d grown up in a house of lies.

  "How can I ever trust you again when all I have from our past is evidence of why I shouldn't?"

  "I don't blame you, and that's why I'm back." The ropes from my wrists fell away, and I got to my feet, rubbing at the rawness of my skin.

  My mother stepped in front of me and handed me what turned out to be a loose fitting dress, a lopsided grin on her face. "Put it on, we need to leave now. I caused a small distraction but it won't last long before they work out the fire was set on purpose."

  I blinked at her then quickly dragged the dress over my head and let it fall down over my body, reaching my knees. It hung loosely around me, but I didn't care. "Why are you risking everything to help me?"

  She'd taken my hand into hers and forced me to hurry toward the garage roller door. "Because I made so many mistakes. I let myself be swayed by the expectations of pack rules, I told myself it was fine as it was your destiny. That I couldn't do anything as your fated mate owned you. But no matter what I told myself, I couldn't sleep and the guilt was starting to destroy me. So, I'm here to do whatever I can to try and clean up my mistakes."

  I wasn't sure how to respond at first, too scared to let myself believe her even as she tried to show me she’d changed. Yet even her actions I wouldn't permit myself to accept as truth. Not after she abandoned me to a monster. The pain and torture I'd been through should have made me go crazy by now, but I guess I was more of a fighter than I ever realized.

  My voice remained quiet as my mind roared for the truth. I was trying to stay strong, but I couldn’t prevent my heart from weeping silently at the words I'd waited so long to hear from my mother.

  I winced at her touch on my bruised wrist, but I never stopped moving and we soon reached the side of the roller doors.

  She clasped the sides of my face, forcing me to face her, and I sensed the quiver in her hands. "I have a car and driver waiting for you outside. You will leave, but I have to go back before I raise suspicion.”

  She punched a pin code into the panel on the wall, and only then did I notice the blood on her knuckles, evidence of what she must have done to get that pin.

  The rollers lifted up, opening, and bright sunlight filtered into the garage, chasing away all the shadows.

  She spun toward me, fear etched across her expression, her eyes filled with tears. "This is your chance. Let me have this to make up for everything I should have done before."

  "Hey, stop!" A gravelly male's voice boomed from the other end of the room.

  We both spun around abruptly to one of Alistair's enforcers charging in toward us.

  Cold seeped into the pits of my soul, and I grabbed my mother's arm and tugged her with me to escape.

  But she pushed against me. "Go, I'll delay him," she said.

  It felt like I was being torn in two, an ache burrowing so deep under my breastbone, I was convinced my heart might stop beating.

  I refused to let go of her hand and dragged her past the rollers doors for our escape.

  But she ripped her hand from mine and nudged me. "Go. I may not have been your real mother, but that didn't mean I shouldn’t have protected you with everything I had."

  My heart might have paused at that moment. "What do you mean?" Did I hear wrong?

  She shoved me backward again, and I stumbled outside into the driveaway and out of the garage. The sun beating against me was like a hand on my shoulder, pulling me away from this vile place.

  "I found you on my front doorstep, abandoned by someone when you were a baby, so I took you in as my own. I always loved you as a daughter."

  A shadow fell behind her, and she swung around, drawing a knife from her belt that she drove into the man's gut.

  She wasn't my real mother?

  "Go," she bellowed.

  My legs were moving before I could make any more sense of her admission. I darted along the long driveway, as far from the huge mansion as possible. He had homes dotted across the land, but I'd never been permitted to visit many of them. I’d been to this one though. A heavy stench of ash wafted in the air, and I saw a black plume of smoke curling up from the back of the house. My mouth curled up in a grin as I watched his beloved mansion burn.

  My smiled dropped when I saw my mother fighting someone else in the garage. She vanished out of sight. I paused, everything in me screaming for me to go back and help her.

  Her earlier words sang in my mind and they called me back to her side. To help her, to make sure both of us escaped because Alistair would not take her betrayal well.

  A hand touched my shoulder, and I whipped around with a scream in my throat. A man stood behind me in front of a yellow cab. "We need to go now! You’re to leave immediately even if I have to put you in the trunk. I promised your mother."

  He grabbed my arm and rushed me toward the cab, practically throwing me into the back seat.

  The door slammed shut behind me, and he was in the driver's seat in seconds. My face was glued to the window, the whole world spinning from everything happening too fast. From discovering secrets that never should have been kept from me.

  I couldn't stop the tears.

  As we started to pull away from the curb, the last thing I saw was my mother thrown out into the driveway, a huge blade sticking out of her chest.

  Even from here I could see her eyes staring lifelessly up at the sky.

  She was dead.

  Alistair stepped out after her, examining her still body, a blank look on his face.

  I screamed and frantically pulled at the door handle, but it wouldn't open. "Let me out, let me out," I yelled, yanking on the door latch while desperately banging along the door for the lock in case I activated it.

  "Sit back. We've got a long drive."

  "Let me the fuck out now!" I screamed, pounding my fists into the window.

  He didn’t listen though. We sped up and raced down the road far from my past, and with it I left behind yet another part of my soul.

  I curled in on myself and cried heavily for losing my wolf, for losing the only woman I knew as a mother, and for being born in a world where everything tried to destroy me.

  Soon after, I blinked open my sore and most likely puffy eyes, and then glanced out the window to the forest we were passing. I kept thinking about the times my mother used to read stories to me at night, how much she
'd enjoyed explaining the magic in Harry Potter to me, how back then I believed I was as special as she had made me feel.

  Now, I didn't know what to think or feel, aside from feeling like my insides had been smashed like shards of glass over and over, and the guilt coursing through me that she’d died saving me.

  So much was starting to make sense now though, like why I wasn't pure blood enough for Alistair, and why she’d turned her back on me. She was too scared to admit the truth to Alistair that she'd given him a dud mate.

  I let my mind wander and I closed my eyes, wanting to escape reality. I must have fallen asleep because when the cab came to an abrupt stop and awakened me, it was night time outside.

  "Where are we?" I asked the driver, staring out at a parking area that led to a huge bar situated on the side of the road.

  "Your mother said to take you as far south as I would go, and this is it."

  I swallowed hard and glanced up at the Midnight Rambler bar. "Do you have a phone I could use to call someone?"

  "Sorry, look, my shift is over and I have a long trip back home." He paused. “Unless you have some money?”

  What an asshole. “No, I don’t have anything.”

  I pushed the door open and climbed out. The cab driver took off instantly, leaving me all alone in the middle of who knows where. There weren't many stores or homes around here, and not many cars driving past for that matter.

  Where the hell was I?

  4

  Rune

  The inside of the Midnight Rambler smelled of perspiration, beer, and oddly enough...socks.

  It had an old sailor feel as if I’d just walked on board a ship and all the men were drinking away their sorrows, slumped over the bar or tables, grasping onto their beers like a lifeline. A few were chatting here and there, while overhead the speakers were pumping out Everybody Hurts by R.E.M.

  Everything in here was depressing, including the music and dark brown walls covered in all sorts of sailing memorabilia. From plastic fish to fishing nets, and even a couple of life preservers. I started to worry that I’d walked in on someone’s wake. But when no one paid me attention as I entered, I realized this might be a regular night for this place.

  With my head low, I hurried across the sticky floorboards, to the women's bathroom at the other end of the room. I doubted they were used often enough to be as filthy looking as the rest of the bar.

  I paused in front of the sink and looked up at my reflection in the cracked mirror. At my harrowed looking eyes, my puffy eyelids, and how red rimmed my irises appeared. I had bruising around my throat from Alistair's fingers. Blood streaked the side of my cheek from where he'd hit me and split open my lip. I belonged on a poster advocating against domestic violence, and there was no hiding how badly I looked.

  All I had on me was this dress.

  No money, phone, or ID.

  I hoped Alistair's whole damn mansion burned to the ground with him in it. If I thought I hated him before, this was a very different level of hate, one where I seethed on the inside at the thought of him. If I got the chance, I would drive a blade right into his dead heart, and now I wished I had done that the first time around.

  But all I could think about now was my mother...who really wasn't my birth-mom, so not only was I rejected by my fated mate but by my real parents too.

  Her last words filled my head, and in seconds I was back in the garage with her, staring at the heartfelt pain in her eyes. I wished I would have said more to her, told her I had forgiven her... I wasn't sure if I had, but if I had known she would die, I would have given her that closure.

  Darkness gathered in my thoughts. They were destructive things, reminding me of all the events I'd done wrong, all the things I'd lost, all the chaos in my life.

  My fingers gripped the sink until my knuckles turned white. I couldn't get Mom's death out of my mind. The image played on a loop and my heart raced.

  Mom used to always say that fate had a twisted sense of humor, and she couldn't be more right.

  A tear gathered at the corner of my eye before falling, followed by another and another, until I felt like I was nothing but pain. There was no room for any other emotion to exist.

  I stumbled backward, my back hitting the tiled wall, and I sunk to my ass, my legs folding underneath me. I dropped my face into my hands and cried hard, my entire body shaking.

  For the loss of the woman I knew as my mother.

  For my suppressed wolf.

  For the fear crowded in my chest, taking me to the point where I might pass out. My breaths drowned in cries, and I hugged my middle, eventually quieting down, knowing that I'd have to find a way to contact Daxon or Wilder. I didn't care which, but I didn’t want to be alone for another minute.

  A sudden blur brushed past me, and I expected someone to have entered the bathroom. I lifted my head and wiped my eyes with the pads of my fingertips.

  A young girl, maybe in her mid teens, hovered in front of me. I say hovered because she was levitating off the floor. She wore a tattered dress, torn at the hem that fell to her knees in rough edges, and stained across her chest with something dark, like maybe blood. She had bare feet, dirty like she'd been running in mud.

  I stilled, my pulse hammering through my veins, and my breaths raced as I stared at a ghost in front of me. What else could it be?

  She glanced down at me and folded her arms across her chest. "Sometimes good things will fall apart so that better things can fall back together."

  I blinked at her a couple of times, my mouth parted from the shock of seeing a spirit. This was a first for me.

  "Are you talking to me?" I managed to find a response, which wasn't exactly enlightening after she just offered me insightful advice, albeit advice that I was pretty sure I’d heard on the Hallmark channel.

  She threw her arms into the air. "Who else would I be talking to? The toilet? Do you know how long it's been since someone could see me? But it seems you're just as broken as me so that’s no fun."

  Her belly bowed as she leaned in closer to me, saying, "Not many ladies come to this establishment. Why are you crying in the dirty bathroom, wolf girl?"

  My hands trembled as I pushed myself up to my feet, figuring as a ghost she must be a little all knowing and able to easily tell I’m a wolf shifter. "Are you haunting this bar?"

  She laughed. "I've been here long before this was a bar. This was once a doctor's office to one of the most evil surgeons the land has ever seen." She peeled back the fabric of her dress over her shoulder and down to reveal half her breast. A vicious cut ran the length of her chest sideways and through her breast. It still looked open, the blood black, although obviously it no longer bled.

  I continued to gape at her in astonishment, unable to do much else.

  She shrugged and covered herself back up. "The scariest creatures on our planet are men. So if you're crying over a lover, forget him as he’ll only destroy you. You should be planning your revenge for whoever hurt you, not crying."

  She spun in the air, then paused in front of the mirror as if glancing at herself, except she had no reflection.

  "What's your name?" I asked.

  "Lillian Baker, but my friends used to call me Lil."

  "Why can I see you?" I asked, well aware that if I'd been able to see ghosts before, I would have remembered.

  She whipped around, and I reared back into the wall again from how fast she came at me. "Only you know the answer to that question, princess." And just like that, she disappeared into thin air before my eyes.

  I stood there for a few moments, half expecting her to pop back into existence in front of me, but she never came. The idea that I hallucinated the whole thing played on my mind, but then so did her earlier words.

  What if everything that happened to me did so for a greater purpose? For me to be put together as someone stronger, braver, better?

  Wouldn’t that be nice.

  My teeth began to chatter like I was freezing to death, and my head hur
t a little too much to make sense of ghost logic or whether I was really imagining things now.

  I hurried to the toilet, then washed all the blood from my face. Feeling partially normal, I patted down my hair and looked into the mirror at myself, appearing less scared than when I first walked into the bathroom.

  I squared my shoulders, knowing I couldn't hide in here forever. What I needed was to call my men to come get me.

  Back in the bar, nothing had changed from the somber ambience I’d witnessed earlier. I strode over to the bar where two men perched on stools, cradling their beer. I stepped up toward the empty corner of the bar, and I dragged myself onto a stool. I lifted my hand to try and get the attention of the bartender drawing a long beer for a customer. It took a minute, but he finally glanced my way.

  "What will you have, darling?" His voice was gravelly and carried a heavy energy about him like I should be wary. I guessed working in such a place did that to people.

  "Could I use your phone please?" I asked.

  "Can't hear you, give me a moment and I'll be right there," he answered loudly, yet not a single person looked my way. Are these people even awake?

  I spun my stool to take in the rest of the room when I spotted Lillian floating in the middle of a table, half her body sticking out from the table. She was tapping the three men around her on the head, singing a song I didn't recognize. It reminded me a lot of Ring Around the Rosie in the tune, but the words were different. How long has she been haunting this place? She must be bored to death. I smiled at my thought, seeing as she was already dead. I obviously had a lame sense of humor when I was traumatized.

  When I continued my scan of the room, I noticed two young kids in the far corner seeming to play a game of hopscotch. None of the other guests were paying them any attention. They were wearing dated clothing that looked to be from the 1800s or something. More ghosts. How many ghosts were here exactly, and why could I see them?

  "Now, what will you have, Miss?" The bartender's voice startled me, and I twisted around in my seat to face him.