He Chased Me to Spite His Enemy. So I Left Him at the Altar Chapter 02

He Chased Me to Spite His Enemy. So I Left Him at the Altar Chapter 02

Dorian didn’t dodge.

He even tilted his head slightly, like he was going along with it.

My nails dug into my palms.

It wasn’t pain. It was numbness. Like someone had dumped ice water over my head and all the feeling had drained out of my body. I opened my mouth to call his name, but my throat seized up and no sound came out.

The woman left. Dorian turned and went back inside the cabin, the door closing behind him.

Only then did I realize I hadn’t breathed at all. My lungs were burning. I doubled over, put my hands on my knees, and gasped for air.

This wasn’t right.

Dorian Thorne wouldn’t do something like this.

He put his jacket on me when I was twelve. At fifteen, he secretly swapped out the disgusting herbal drink they made us have at the full moon party for hot chocolate. At eighteen, when I was chasing Cassian Greymoor so publicly that everyone knew about it, he stood at the back of the crowd and watched my back. At twenty, when I got wasted after a breakup, he carried me home from a bar—watched me puke all over him, just sighed, tucked my hair behind my ear, and said, “Next time you want to drink, call me. I’ll keep you company.” At twenty-four, when I finally said “okay,” he was so happy he dropped his phone on the floor. He picked it up, saw the cracked screen, and just laughed and said, “Worth it.”

This man. I’d tried so hard to trust him. I made damn sure my feelings were real—not just gratitude—before I said yes. I cleaned out every corner of my heart before I made room for him.

If he betrayed me, then what in this world was real?

I took a deep breath and straightened up.

I didn’t come here to stand on a dock in the wind. I came here to find my fiancé.

I walked up the gangplank. My footsteps rang out on the metal. Music and voices drifted from inside the yacht. I recognized a few of them—Shadowpine wolves, Dorian Thorne’s boys, the ones he’d grown up with, the ones he drank with until dawn every year at the territory’s hunting festival.

The wooden door was half open. Just as I was about to push it open, I heard a sneer from inside.

Dorian Thorne’s voice.

“I only chased Evelyn Blackwood to piss off Cassian Greymoor.”

I froze.

The voice wasn’t loud. But it hit my chest like a silver bullet. Not because of the words themselves—but because of the way he said them.

Light. Dismissive. Almost amused.

Like he was talking about something that had nothing to do with him.

“Once I actually got her, it stopped being interesting.”

Laughter rippled around him. Not shocked laughter, not sarcastic laughter—the kind of laughter that said *yeah, we already knew. We all knew. Everyone knew but her.*

I stood outside the door. Motionless.

The water beneath the gangplank slapped against the hull in a steady rhythm. The LA night wind blew in from the harbor, salty and tinged with the smell of rotting seaweed. I was wearing a thin dress—Dorian’s favorite color, the pale silver of moon-grass, he said it suited me—and it was plastered against my body, the cold seeping into my bones.

Inside, I heard the sound of more drinks being poured. Dorian Thorne kept talking: “And honestly, after I tasted her, it was pretty boring.”

Someone whistled.

“Gotta hand it to you, Thorne. You actually bagged the untouchable girl.”

Dorian Thorne seemed to enjoy the praise. His voice was lazy, like a wolf who’d been in the sun too long—no, a *werewolf*, that’s what he was. “Don’t let her fool you. She went after Cassian Greymoor like her life depended on it, but she’s naive as hell. Too bad.”

“Too bad what?”

“Too bad that even though I was her first, I wasn’t her first love.”

He paused, probably blowing a smoke ring. I could picture the motion—slow inhale, slow exhale through parted lips, eyes half-lidded as he watched the smoke twist in the air. He made that same face in bed sometimes, telling me my collarbones in the dim light looked like moonlit snow on mountains.

“She spent ten years chasing Cassian Greymoor—who knows if she ever really cleared him out of her heart?”

Every word was like a razor blade dragged across my throat.

I opened my mouth. A metallic taste flooded the back of my throat.

“If it weren’t for the fact that I hate Cassian Greymoor’s guts, and I thought going after Evelyn Blackwood would get under his skin, I never would’ve put on that whole ‘quietly devoted nice guy’ act.”

Act.

Quietly devoted.

Nice guy act.

Each word hit me like a silver bullet. A werewolf’s body reacts to silver—skin burns, blood boils, bones feel like they’re being ripped apart from the inside. I never knew that words could do the same thing.

Someone joked: “You’ve had her for three years now, Thorne. Why start complaining now?”

Dorian Thorne’s voice dropped, like he’d suddenly stopped smiling. “That’s exactly why I feel cheated—because I chased her for so long.”

Cheated.

Not love. Cheated.

I closed my eyes.

In the darkness, I saw all those years. The rainy day when he held an umbrella over me, tilting the whole thing over my head, not even noticing that his own shoulder was soaked. The night we went stargazing on the mountaintop, the wind howling, him taking off his jacket and wrapping it around me, saying, “I’m not cold. Werewolves run hot, you know that.”

The way he got down on one knee in the moonlight.

His eyes full of stars, full of moonlight, full of the reflection of that lake island he’d named after me.

He said, “Evelyn Blackwood, marry me.”

Was all of that an act?

If it was, he was the best actor I’d ever seen.

If it wasn’t, then who was the man inside that cabin, sneering at me?

Someone in the group chimed in: “I heard she’s been looking for you like crazy, going out of her mind. You’ve been gone all this time—you sure that’s okay?”

Dorian Thorne took a drag of his cigarette, let out a cloud of smoke, and laughed. “Ditch her at the altar and embarrass her—isn’t that fun?”