Red Claw

Prologue

It has been over fifteen years since that day.

The day my whole world shattered.

The day everything I thought I knew was reviled as a lie.

The day I found out I was pregnant and walked in on the love of my life with my so called best friend.

The day I found out that they had been sleeping with each other throughout the entirety of our relationship.

The cliché wasn't lost on me.

I mean didn't it almost always end up like this when your partner cheats? And when I thought about it, it was glaringly obvious what they were doing. Whenever I couldn't get a hold of one, the other was also unavailable.

I had thought that we were happy, and so in love it was almost sickening. And that my friend was close to him because she wanted to support me. Wanted to be a good friend to both of us. But it turned out she wanted to be a lot closer to him then I thought.

I knew his father didn't like me but his mother did, and often asked if I would like to go shopping or get my hair done or spend some girl time with each other. Having lost my own parents and being raised by my elderly grandparents, it was nice to finally have a mother figure that I could do those sort of things with. That was something that I had missed the most over the years, no longer feeling that I had a right to call her. To ask for advise. To cry on her shoulder when I was sad.

My only consolation on that fateful day was she was as outraged as I was, she had yelled and cried, pulled me into her arms and held me while my life imploded.

He had just sat there looking broken, not saying a word. No justification, no apology, no begging for me to understand or give him another chance. Nothing.

That was what hurt the most, that he didn't even care enough about me to say sorry.

My ex-best friend had cried and was a blubbering mess, trying and failing to talk, to explain. But nothing she had to say would ever change the facts.

That they had both betrayed me from the start.

And now here I was almost fifteen years later, returning to the place that had destroyed me. And all because my oldest son was showing some very extreme anger issues. He had always been a hot head but this was getting too much. I needed to ask a few questions, and unfortunately I could no longer hide the fact that I had hid his children from him.

So here we were, in my car heading towards Red Claw Falls, my home town.

Heading back towards him.

Its been fifteen long years since I last saw her.

She was my love, my life, my mate.

And I hurt her in the worst possible way.

The love of my life left without a trace when she found out I hadn't been faithful to her.

I didn't blame her for leaving, when she had caught us.

I couldn't say anything to her just sat there in misery.

Not that I didn't want to, but I couldn't.

My father, the Alpha at the time had put a gag order on me. Along with the order to get his Betas daughter pregnant. Neither of us wanted it but we couldn't fight it at the time. And so every month we had to spend a week having sex, and I had to force myself to see and feel my mate wrapped around me.

Even when I told him that I had found my mate he still refused to rescind the order. And when the Beta asked if his daughter could stop as well, when she found her mate, my father still refused. I remember having to stand there as we explained it all to the poor guy. He had been so happy when he found her, and we had to crush that happiness.

They were happy now, and we were still close, but I knew that he would never truly forgive us or my father.

It had been hell and was killing both of us.

When I had found out that she was gone I lost my shit.

I ripped my room apart, snarled at everyone. And refused to listen to my father again. I finally broke through his orders and after I told my mother what he had ordered us to do, she had rejected my father. She felt as if she had lost a daughter when she left, and in a way she had. They just didn't know it at the time. Well my father did but he was hell bent on getting a strong wolfen heir.

It almost broke him to lose her, but it had the benefit of showing him what he had been doing to me. What he had done to us all. What he had cost us and the pack. He eventually got her back, but it was never the same.

Especially after I challenged him, and won.

But that had all meant nothing to me.

I was Alpha now but she was still gone.

And it was still all my fault. If only I broke those orders sooner.

So now here I was, Alpha of the Red Claw Falls pack, without my mate. And refusing any woman who came my way.

If she ever came back to me, I would do everything within my power to ensure she truly came back to me. 

I just wish that she was the last woman I had been with and not her best friend.