Claimed By My Cheating Mate’s Rival Alpha Chapter 02

Claimed By My Cheating Mate’s Rival Alpha Chapter 02

CASSIAN

My wolf had been howling out for her before I even saw her.

I took down my mask and watched as recognition crashed into her. Her amber eyes widened.

My breath hitched in my throat. She was more beautiful than the last time I’d been this close to her, which was six years ago at Wolflings Academy, when she’d looked at me like I was a disturbance she wished to remove from the face of the earth.

My wolf was in a frenzy beneath my skin. He’d recognized her the instant her scent hit the wind half a mile out.

Mate.

He’d been screaming it at me for the last ten minutes while I tore through those rogues. The adrenaline from the hunt was still electric in my veins, mixing dangerously with her proximity.

Mine! Take her and claim her, now!

I tried my best to ignore me.

Back at Wolflings Academy, I’d been the wolf with the bad reputation and the worse temper. She’d been the untouchable Blackwood heiress. She always hated my guts. Not sure what that was about.

She’d been Mason’s then. He wore her on his sleeve like an accessory. I always wanted her for myself, but I’d kept my distance because I was seventeen and pathetic enough to think wanting something that badly meant I didn’t deserve it.

I wasn’t seventeen anymore.

I pulled her to her feet. She swayed against me and I caught her, one hand at her waist, the other tilting her chin up.

“It’s you.” she bit out, her tone venomous. My wolf purred as something dark rushed through my chest.

“You don’t sound pleased to see me,” I murmured, running my thumb along the edge of her jaw. Her skin was impossibly soft, and warm. I could feel her pulse quickening underneath my fingertips. “Most people are grateful when someone saves their life.”

“Don’t touch me,” she hissed and wrenched her face out of my grip and stumbled backward, nearly falling. “I didn’t ask to be saved. I have to go back to Mason.”

Mason. The name triggered something dark and possessive inside me.

“Mason again,” I said, stepping closer, “Why wasn’t he here to save you?”

Her breath hitched. I closed the distance between us until I could feel the heat radiating off her skin, and could count the flecks of gold in her eyes.

I raised my hand and brought my fingers close to her mouth. I traced her lower lip, feeling the warmth of her breath on my skin.

“Mason can’t handle a woman like you.”

Her teeth suddenly sank into the pad of my thumb hard enough to draw blood, and she shoved away from me with more strength than someone full of wolfsbane should have had.

She stumbled backward, chest heaving, those golden eyes blazing with fury, then stumbled away.

She actually bit me.

My wolf erupted. Every instinct I had screamed at me to chase her, but I didn’t move.

I stood and watched Scarlett Blackwood disappear into the trees. She was stumbling from the wolfsbane, but she didn’t stop. Ecitement surged through me.

I raised my hand, pressed my bleeding finger to my lips, and tasted her fury. I licked it clean, savoring it.

She could run back to Mason name and hide behind his walls, while he made claims on a woman he didn’t deserve.

It wouldn’t matter because I’d already found my prey.

And I wasn’t going to let her go easily.

SCARLETT

The house was dark when I got home. Mason’s car wasn’t in the driveway.

Of course it wasn’t. My husband was somewhere while I was being dragged through the woods by rogues, and the only person who’d come for me was the last man I wanted it to be.

And all this happened on my birthday.

I walked into our bedroom, locked the door and peeled off my ruined dress. I headed into the bathroom and stood under water so hot it scalded my skin pink. Dirt and blood swirled down the drain. My knees were raw, my palms bruised, and the wolfsbane needle mark on my neck had turned a purple bruise.

I scrubbed every inch of myself, and tried to wash the night off my body. But the water couldn’t reach what was buried underneath.

Because underneath the rage, the betrayal, and the humiliation of begging Mason to save me and hearing him laugh, there was something else. Something I didn’t want to name.

And it had everything to do with Cassian.

I could still feel his thumb on my jaw, and the heat of his body radiating into mine when he’d stepped too close. I could still see the way those blue eyes looked at me like I was something he’d been starving for.

My body reacted to him in ways I didn’t want to give reason to.

My wolf had stirred stirred all the time he’d been close. The feeling was electric, and it hummed beneath my skin, and her voice had echoed through the walls of my mind, chanting the same word over and over again.

Mate.

I shook my head. No, it’s not possible.

I shut her down so hard my skull hurt. Cassian was not my mate. He couldn’t be. My wolf was confused from the effect of the wolfsbane.

That was all.

I wrapped myself in a towel, sat on the edge of our bed, and stared at Mason’s empty pillow.

The room was quiet. The kind of quiet that forces you to hear everything you’ve been drowning out.

His pillow still held the dent from his head. His robe hung on the back of the door. It was the one I’d bought him for our first Christmas as a mated pair because he’d mentioned once that he liked the feel of flannel.

I looked away from the robe. It hurt to see it there, hanging like a ghost of someone who used to live in this room.

Everywhere I looked, there were pieces of us, and it felt suffocating to be in the room.

The framed photo on the dresser was a photo we took when we went on a vacation last year. His arm was around my waist, my head thrown back as I laughed at something I couldn’t even remember now.

There was a scratch on the wall behind from the night he’d carried me after the mating ceremony, both of us drunk. He’d kicked the door open so hard the handle gouged the it. I’d laughed until my ribs ached, and he’d kissed every inch of my face and told me he was the luckiest wolf alive.

I pressed my hand flat against his side of the mattress.

When did it all stop?

I tried to pinpoint the moment when Mason stopped looking at me like I was the center of his world, but there wasn’t one moment. It happened slowly, and so gradually that by the time you notice, everything is already dead.

I remembered the proposal. How he’d taken me to the river where we used to play. I remembered the vows he’d whispered to me.

The tears came before I could stop them. I pressed my face into my pillow and sobbed until my lungs burned.

I wanted to hate him, but I couldn’t because I still remembered him as the boy I fell in love with when I was sixteen. I still remembered him as the boy who held me at my family’s funeral.

But I wasn’t sixteen anymore.

The sadness sat on my chest like a stone, but underneath the sadness, there was something else.

I lifted my head from his pillow and wiped my face with the back of my hand, because they were the last ones I intended to cry over Mason.

When I looked around the room again, I didn’t see memories. I saw evidence.

Evidence of everything I’d given, and sacrificed for Mason.

My fists clenched. The sadness didn’t disappear, but it turned into stronger.

I thought about my father, my brothers, and all they taught me. I was a Blackwood, and it was about time I started acting like one.

He didn’t come home that night.

I sat in the dark for hours, and listened to every car that passed. My phone laid on my bed, empty. There were no calls, or messages to check if I was even okay.

Something shifted inside me. For all the years I’d been with Mason, I was seeing him now through a clearer lens.

I picked up my phone and called my mom for the first time in a while.

She answered on the third ring, her voice foggy with sleep. “Scarlett? What’s wrong? It’s the middle of—”

“Mom.” My voice was steady, steadier than it had been all night. “I’m leaving Mason. I’m getting a divorce. And I’m taking back Dad’s company, and Blackwood territory.”