Ezra’s P.O.V
I left the house in a hurried daze. After my sudden realization about… her, that woman I had never seen before, I did not want to stay anywhere near that place for longer than I was supposed to.
It made me sick to my stomach to think that… I shuddered. I did not want to dwell on that thought.
I did not feel well after that encounter, so I decided to head back to the station and take the rest of the day off. I had no doubt that my beta and Lieutenant would understand; he knew full well the ordeal that I had just gone through. He would not think that I was slacking off from work even though I would not explain the reason for my sudden day off.
As soon as I pushed open the door, everyone at the station turned their heads to watch me enter and make my way into my office, where my Lieutenant was temporarily manning my seat in my stead. Even though I was walking with my head down and my eyes glued to the floor and my feet, I could feel their stares burning holes in the back of my head.
Upon reaching my office, I knocked twice before entering, and closed the door behind me because I did not want people to hear me utter my next words in fear that I would sound too much like the pain of my loss was crippling me from functionality.
“Think you can keep that up for the rest of the day?” I asked Gustav, and at the sound of my voice, he looked up at me expectantly, waiting for orders. “I need to head home and clear my head for a bit.”
“Oh, of course, that's not a problem for me,” he said with a supportive smile that was only short of being overly sympathetic. One of the advantages of having been promoted Alpha was that everyone respected my need for personal space without diminishing my strength and high tolerance for pain. But as my beta, he clearly knew me too well, because his worries were justified — I was on the verge of a mental breakdown.
I headed out of the station as quickly as I could without arousing suspicion. I had managed to compose myself enough that I could afford to raise my head as I walked back out and give an occasional smile and wave or two of each to whoever's eyes I would meet on my way out. If I looked like I was on the verge of tears, there was no doubt that they would talk about me when I was gone, as if I were a toddler who burst into tears after accidentally scraping a knee. I could afford to be vulnerable with my beta, but I must never let the rest of my pack know when I am in pain. After all, if their Alpha was falling apart at the seams, what would that make the pack?
Even though I was dying on the inside, howling at the moon in my mind, in hopes of at least being able to ease some of my pain, some of my suffering, I still wanted, needed, to put on a brave face for the people that believed in me. I owed them that much after they all accepted me back into their midst.
I drove straight to my house, my knees almost giving up under my weight. My fingers trembled as I tried and failed to insert my key to unlock the door a couple of times, until I was finally able to open it and push myself inside.
I could hardly register my surroundings as I stumbled through the door, and I was already, admittedly, seeing nothing but a blurry haze. My mind was racing, my heart pounding. I could not believe just how cruel the Moon Goddess was to me, how awful a joke she was playing on me. I had just lost Lily, my mate, only the day before and now, I had found my second-chance mate. And to make matters far, far worse that second-chance mate was human.
The average wolf usually had two mates in a lifetime, and should they lose their first, they only had one other chance of mating again, which was why it was common sense not to want to reject one's last opportunity of bonding with a partner… unless that potential mate was a human. The only consolation was that having a human mate only happened in one in a million chances — you'd have to be severely unlucky in order to have such a thing happen to you.
And it looked like I myself was severely unlucky. To think that the Moon Goddess enjoyed toying with me, so much so that she ensured that I would find that one-in-a-million-chances, human mate, right after my previous, beloved mate had died!
My body and mind yearned for the embrace of my bed, so my feet carried me toward it, that familiar, welcoming thing, the one constant in my life that never let me down. I used to share this bed with Lily, and it has been my companion through the many ups and downs of my life since I set foot on this pack.
I let myself fall on the mattress, the foam bending and flattening under me. I imagined that the softness of this bed was the same softness I felt whenever Lily wrapped her arms around me. I imagined her gentle caress and the fresh scent of her shampoo.
And I yearned for her, unfathomably, even more. I pressed my face into my pillow until I could no longer bear the lack of oxygen, and that was when I turned my head to the side, my eyes landing on my bedside table.
There, atop the nightstand, was a framed picture of Lily, relaxed and grinning like she's got all the time in the world. That picture had been taken only last week, when we went on our date out of town, the one that I had no idea would be our final date. I had insisted on getting this one printed out; I thought that this was the best photo to encapsulate the entirety of her, charming without needing words and impossibly beautiful.
I reached for the picture and cradled it in my hands as if I was actually holding her, instead of just an inanimate reflection of who she used to be. I traced her features with my hand, my heart wrenching tightly with each passing second. It was like being trapped in a room that was shrinking with every breath I took, claustrophobic, and each intake of air became my downfall.
The Moon Goddess must be having the time of her long, long life watching me in distress, seeing me have the desperate need to lock myself in my home, curl up in a ball, and assess my current predicament with Lily’s most recent photo in my hands.
Lily had died just the night before, after Silas killed her for reasons I could not, or did not, want to name. My beloved mate had died, just like that, and thanks to the Moon Goddess’s twisted sense of humor, I found my second-chance mate by pure luck immediately after losing the first, only to find out that she was human, a one-in-a-million rarity.
I thought about how I was exiled from the pack some few years ago because I was an illegitimate child of my father. I had not been accepted, then, it hurt, and I thought my life was over when that happened, until Silas extended a helping hand once he became Alpha, and gone was my punishment of exile for something that was not my fault. I thought that was a good omen, a sign that things were going to turn upward instead of only going downhill following my banishment.
Now I see that it was all just one long con to keep me in misery. I was given a sample taste of what it felt like to have a family, only to have that same family be ripped to shreds in front of my eyes.
Fate…was cruel indeed.
And I had no other choice but to keep on living with it.