Rabid (Kingdom of Wolves #6) - Ivy Asher Page 0,78

going to just go out and be a lone shifter in some piece of shit town, with your wolf half-rabid and you without any kin or resources? You’d have gone crazy within a year trying to pass as human, and probably killed some innocent in the process. All because you’d rather run away than face things and be something better than this moping, spoiled little shit you’re acting like.”

My entire body bristles. “I’m not accepting this claim. I hate you.” The venom spat from my mouth doesn’t even make him flinch. Instead, my own stomach writhes, because he’s right.

He’s fucking right.

“No, you don’t. Who you really hate is yourself, and yeah, your old pack wronged you, but look around. You ever consider that this pack might be exactly what you need? All of this could anchor you. My claim could anchor you, if you’d just let it.”

All I can do is gape at him because...no. I didn’t consider that.

Is he right?

Tyran shakes his head, like he can’t contain his disappointment for my own shortcomings.

“You have so much right at your fingertips if you’d just take it. You don’t know how to get revenge? You just got fucking claimed by the most ruthless alpha on this continent. Do you think that was by chance? My wolf hasn’t ever wanted to claim a female. No one was savage enough for him, until you.” His eyes bore into me. “Use it.”

My breath catches as he suddenly digs his fingers into the bite in my shoulder, pressing right over the punctures. Pain and pleasure shoot down from the marks, and like a dam breaking, my eyes well up with the tears I’ve been suppressing for far too long.

I can’t breathe, can’t move as he grounds me in his dominant presence. “My wolf and I saw something in your spirits last night. But we don’t want this,” he says, his arms gesturing to the cliff’s edge we’re both standing on. “We don’t want the shame and the doubt. We don’t want your insecure, pitying weakness.” The growl in his voice grows rougher with each acidic word. “We like your rabid. We need it. I want all of what you are and could be if you’d just embrace the broken parts of you and use them to cut down everything that stands in your way. But if you can’t do that, if you can’t be that, then you’re right, you’re not claimed...because you’re not the wolf I thought you were.”

Twin streams of anguish fall from the lower lashes of my eyes, but Tyran doesn’t soften, doesn’t relent. His words storm at me, all vicious lightning and deafening thunder, too potent and powerful to ever be denied.

His hands drop, leaving my claiming marks pulsing with the echoes of loss. “Decide what the fuck you want and who you want to be, and then come find me...or go run away with that tail tucked between your legs. I won’t stop you.”

He turns and walks away, morphing back into his wolf and taking off down the mountain, leaving me behind in a trail of verbal devastation and heavy truths.

No softness, no sympathy, just face your shit and earn your place here...or leave.

That line drawn in the sand, everything he said, it all bursts from the pent-up emotions I’ve bottled. Like I’ve lit the end and thrown a Molotov cocktail, it explodes in a roar of anger from my mouth that echoes from the mountains and then floods from the tears finally broken free as I cry.

And cry.

And cry.

It’s not a quiet cry. These tears aren’t soft and slow. This is a rending of my soul to expel all the shit I’ve been harboring. I scream at the mountains, the sky, the rocks, my jagged edges, until my voice is lost and my throat is raw. I gnash and yank and pull as I purge myself of the wrongs, the taint, the loss. I spill my soul on the side of the mountain, desperately needing to get this all out so I can breathe again, so I can rise up and be able to look myself in the eye and be the wolf and the woman I can be.

My wolf howls alongside me as we rip our foundation of agony apart. The wind steals my cries, and slowly the tears ebb, the salty tracks of pain drying on my cheeks. Pebbles dig into my knees from where I’m kneeling at the edge of the bluff, but I don’t feel the