Page 34 of Bad Girl
His eyes widened. He closed his mouth.
“That’s a first,” he murmured.
Yeah. No kidding.
“I wanted to kill her on the spot, but we were in the boardroom. A human was with us.”
“Her?” My dad stopped pacing.
Something moved behind his eyes that I didn’t have a name for.
I nodded.
“What did she smell like?” He raised the phone closer, watching me so carefully I could see the pores on his skin.
“Just wrong, Dad.” Agitation crept in because I couldn’t think of what her scent had actually been like. Couldn’t pin it.“Maybe a hybrid.”
“Hm.” He sat down.“Do you remember your grandfather’s younger brother?”
“The recluse?”
Dad nodded.
“He left the pack to live in a remote cabin in Scotland. The truth is, son—his wolf was broken.”
“What? How can that even happen?”
“We aren’t in control of who our mate will be. His fated mate not only rejected him, but attacked him.”
My stomach turned.
Kael went very still inside me.
“No,” I whispered.
I shook my head.
“No, Dad. But—” I paused, trying to fit it against what I had just experienced.“It was nothing like what you and Mum described.”
He said nothing. His brow stayed furrowed.
“What happened to his mate?”
“She never joined the pack and the pack never would have accepted her,” he said with a shrug.
I reached for my desk for support and sank into my chair.
“I’ve waited years,” I whispered, closing my eyes as sorrow emanated from Kael. Heavy. Bone-deep. The kind of grief that came from something that had been holding hope for decades and was now being asked to put it down.“A lifetime—for her.”
“Tadhg made his mistakes too, son. From what my Da told me, they were locked between wanting to kill one another and mate.”
Kael didn’t like that.
I rubbed my chest.
“It was a broken bond. Unnatural to the pack, therefore rejected. But times were different then. There were more of us.”
I swiped my hand down my face.
