Olive the Other Werewolves

Chapter Twenty Five

there is mature content in this chapter...so read only if you can handle that sort of dealio and if you are a cool cat ;]

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Before me, Matteo had another mate.

It was a concept that I was struggling to get my reeling head around but Matteo had been right, this line of questioning had led to me getting upset.

And what was even more irritating than my initial hurt upon hearing this new information was that I knew exactly what this pain implied. It meant that I had feelings for Matteo.

"You didn't kill her, right?" I blurted out, immediately slapping a hand over my mouth.

Matteo surprisingly wasn't upset, or visibly at least. He almost seemed caught off guard that, that was the particular question I settled upon. "I did not." He affirmed with a cautious nod of his head, apparently satisfied with my lack of outburst.

He rubbed the back of his neck uncomfortably, "Mal actually rejected me."

My eyes widened as the pieces started to all started to come together.

"Shortly after Isabel turned me, I joined into Ardor as one of their own. It was there where I met Mal and discovered that she was my mate." His jaw tightened ever so slightly but I noticed it. "Everything was as ideal as any normal wolf could hope for, until Mal got it into her head that there were people coming after her. She began to obsess over her this outlandish idea that someone was hunting her down and wouldn't stop until she was dead, Mal drove herself into insanity. Then one night she was tearing me out of bed and rejecting me supposedly for my own safety."

I leaned forward ever so slightly, listening a little too intently to Matteo's explanation than I was entirely comfortable with. I straightened immediately. "Well was someone really after her?"

He snorted and looked over at me as if I was as crazy as Mal, "Obviously not." Matteo sighed and dropped his hand from the back of his neck, "She was troubled and I was unable to see that earlier because I was blinded by the bond."

"Being rejected by Mal was the greatest pain I'd ever experienced, the very act of breathing alone became a chore." Matteo absentmindedly picked at the bark of a tree beside us before beginning to walk again, forcing me to follow after him if I wanted to hear the rest of what he had to say.

Needless to say, I walked.

"I had to get out of Ardor, it was too painful for me there so I left." He explained, "I scrounged around on my own for a while as a pseudo-rogue until I stumbled upon Malice Pack but that is besides the fact."

Matteo looked over at me as we walked, "When I found you, imagine my surprise..." He shook his head, not particularly liking the way he started, "All of these feelings and emotions I'd kept pent up inside of me as a result of Mal's rejection projected themselves onto you. Yet still, I couldn't bring myself to inflict that same kind of pain onto anyone else." He cracked the smallest of smiles, "The Dark Alpha of Malice, afraid of hurting someone's feelings, a first for everything I suppose."

I was slightly ashamed by my first assumption that Matteo had been the one to harm his mate, when in reality it was quite reversed.

I looked down at his hands and noticed they were clenched tightly, I boldly reached over and took his hand in mine surprising the both of us. "I'm glad you didn't reject me."

His eyes widened slightly and it sent me anxiously scrambling to recover from that embarrassing omission, "For our wolves' sake, of course." I coughed nervously, trying and failing to maintain an air of casualty.