His Cursed Mate

Chapter One

Present Day - Three Years Later

I stood there, staring at my disagreeable reflection in the broken mirror of the gas station bathroom.

Damn, I look rough.

My once-beautiful features had twisted to reveal something dark, something deadly. My dirty blonde hair was in a state of disarray. In the time that had passed since that fateful day, it had grown well past the top of my shoulders, tumbling down in messy waves and sweeping to a mess of split ends below by shoulder blades.

I let my eyes travel to my arms, taking note of how washed out my skin had become - I guess that was just a natural side effect of moving to Oregon, the state of minimal sunshine and an excess of cloudiness and rain. I stared at my left shoulder in the mirror. The ink of my family's clan tattoo was barely visible beneath the extensive scars that marked my upper arm from when he lacerated my flesh with his claws.

I lifted my shirt up and gazed further at my reflection in the mirror. Deep gashes were present along my abdomen, indicative of something inconceivable. I turned to the side, catching a glimpse of the matching gashes on my back. None of the scars he left had healed properly - not after I lost Jules. All of them were varying shades of rose to pink, but some of them had finally begun to turn more white in color, matching my skin tone.

I pulled my hands away from my shirt, letting it fall down to hug my waist. I allowed my gaze to wander up in the mirror, finally landing on my face.

A sharp inhale shortly followed suit, as I was met with the appearance of my face. My eyes - at one point, they glistened an alluring shade of deep blue; but now, they appeared dull and grey with dark circles rimming underneath them.

I faltered for a moment, not wanting to look any further. Slowly, my eyes traveled to my right eyebrow. There, sat a constant reminder of that day, written plain as day on my face - an ugly scar extended from around an inch above my eyebrow to half an inch below, on my eyelid. I turned my gaze to my nose. At one point in time, I would have considered my nose to be cute; it was short and came to a small rounding at the nostrils. My mother used to always refer to it as a "button nose". Now, there was yet another scar that laid across the bridge of my nose. I ran my fingers along each of the scars, grimacing at the feeling.

Over the past three years, I had made my own modifications to my body as well. I now had quite the collection of piercings on my ears - one industrial piercing and a conch on my left ear, and a rook piercing and triple cartilage on my right ear. There was an additional piercing on my nose as well; a simple hoop on the right side. If Silas was still here, I knew he would love them.

While I was staring at my disheveled appearance in the mirror, my stomach elicited a groan of protest to the lack of food I had eaten the past few days.

I guess I am pretty hungry...

The curves I once had had diminished over the years - they were still there, just not nearly as prominent as they had been before. Silas used to always tease me about how I was the envy of all the other she-wolves in the colony with my looks and curvier physique. I was by no means on the thin end of the scale at the time, but I'd definitely grown to be underweight.

I turned away from the mirror, beginning to pace back and forth in the cramped bathroom. I hadn't eaten for two... three days now. I wasn't able to find a steady job looking the way I do, and I made an effort to avoid as many other colonies as I could, fearing that they would view me as a Rogue and treat me as a threat. I mean, they wouldn't really be wrong. Technically, I would probably pose more of a threat than even a Rogue would, with the cursed bloodline and whatnot.