No Return Ticket for Our Lost Love Chapter 06

No Return Ticket for Our Lost Love Chapter 06

A sudden, violent wind swept through Southerland.

I walked straight to the taxi line, Matthew following close behind my heels. He usually despised cabs—complaining they were filthy, and that the chaotic mess of human scents messed with his inner wolf.

But today, the moment I pulled open the door of a battered sedan, he squeezed into the back seat right beside me, pressing himself against my side.

I glanced at the car keys gripped tightly in his hand. “You drove here.”

He didn’t say a word.

I didn’t care to argue. I gave the driver my campus address and leaned back.

The interior of the cab reeked of cheap tobacco.

Matthew’s brow knit tight, but for once, he didn’t voice his usual complaints. Instead, he turned his head to look at me, a rare, burning anxiety flashing in his eyes.

“Hannah, the publishing job—we can still talk about this.”

“The benefits at Eastgrove can’t compete with what you’d get in Southerland. If you stay, I can ask my faculty advisor to pull some strings and get you internal recommendations at a few core literary journals.”

“Besides, the second I inherit the Nightveil Pack, we’ll hold our Mate Ceremony. You’ll be the Luna. You won’t even have to work—”

“Matthew,” I interrupted, shifting my gaze to lock onto his. “I’ve already signed the contract.”

The words cut him off entirely.

“The breach of contract fee is only costs a grand,” I stated flatly. “But I have no intention of paying it. Because this is the path I chose for myself.”

Outside the window, the amber glow of the streetlights swept across his face in a rhythmic blur of light and shadow.

“Why?” His voice dropped lower, carrying a faint, barely perceptible note of pleading. “Why couldn’t you at least talk to me first? Do we really have to do things this way?”

I didn’t look at him. My eyes remained fixed on the road ahead, my voice an unreadable, flat line.

“Because you never included me in your future.”

“Every decision you’ve ever made—even deciding just now that I should be your Luna, that I shouldn’t have a job or a career—did you ever once stop to ask my opinion?”

“No. So you don’t need to trouble yourself with my future, either.”

The cab fell into a suffocating silence.

For the entire hour-long drive, he didn’t speak another word. He just stared blankly at the back of the driver’s seat, his fingers curling and uncurling unconsciously against his knees.

Through the fading embers of our fated bond, I could feel his inner wolf clawing frantically at his chest, on the verge of slipping completely out of control. But he had no way to soothe the beast anymore.

The car finally pulled up to the university’s south gate. I paid the driver and pushed the door open.

Matthew scrambled out right after me, reaching for the trunk to grab my luggage. But I beat him to it, lifting the suitcase out myself.

“Hannah.” He stood in the biting wind of the campus entrance, calling my name with complete helplessness.

I stopped.

He took a sharp breath, looking as though he were forcing himself to make the ultimate sacrifice.

“If this is about Rebecca… I promise, from now on, I won’t see her privately outside of academic work.”

“And my lectures—the front-row seat will always be yours. Will that fix this?”

I turned around to look at the sheer panic written across his face, and found myself wanting to laugh.

“Matthew, do you genuinely think my leaving Southerland is just a temper tantrum? That I’m doing this to force you to compromise?”

He froze, his expression giving away that I had hit the mark exactly.

I looked at him, my gaze clear and deliberate. “I don’t need a seat in your front row anymore. I don’t care how close you and Rebecca get, and I don’t give a damn whether you two want to kiss or sleep together.”

“I simply, completely, do not want you anymore.”

“Matthew Davis. I, Hannah Evans, officially reject you as my fated mate. From this moment on, we are nothing to each other.”

The moment the words left my lips, I turned, scanned my student ID, and walked through the security turntile.

Behind me, Matthew clutched his chest, his entire body buckling as if he were being violently ripped in two.

Within his psyche, his inner wolf grabbed at the snapping silver thread of our bond, howling in agonizing, soul-crushing torment.

A massive wave of energy was forcibly dragged from his body, feeling exactly like a rib being torn raw from his chest.

Matthew stumbled forward a desperate step, but his chest slammed hard against the locked barrier of the turntile.

Refusing to accept it, he began to throw his weight against the gate like a madman, his pupils sharpening into slit-like wolf eyes as his features shifted toward a partial, unstable transformation.

The campus alarm blared into the night, and armed wolf guards began sprinting toward the gate from every direction.

But my mind remained as still as dust. I kept walking, never looking back.