Never His Mate: a Rejected Mates Shifter Romance (Claws and Fangs Book 1)

As I book it away from Audrey’s cabin, heading toward the woods again, I regret letting her convince me to walk back to her place. My Jeep is on the other side of the mountain and while I could shift and get back to it sooner, that still leaves me with the whole “driving while naked” problem.

Now, if only that was the sole problem I have to deal with…

I thought something was wrong before. Know what? I was totally right. I never should’ve doubted my gut. Something tells me now that the night of the full moon is far from over, and I believe it.

I pour on the speed.

Halfway back toward where I left my Jeep, I notice that my nose… my nose has stopped working, like I’ve developed a sudden cold or something. I can’t scent a single thing—not the woods, or the earth, or anything else—and hell if I know why it’s failing me for the first time ever. At least my eyes and my ears are working because, without them, I wouldn’t have realized I was being tracked until it was too late.

And, honestly, it just might be.

I’m an alpha, but I’m not invincible. As I stop short, I count three different hooded figures surrounding my front half. Whirling around, I find another four waiting at my back. Picking up on the echoes and the shadows in the distance, I’m sure even more are lurking in the woods. Audrey must’ve sent a call out to the pack when she caught me outside of Ryker’s cabin, because this seems… planned, almost.

And it’s not just the way they form a circle around me that has me on my guard. It’s the hoods. I see the black hoods hiding their faces, like they don’t want me to figure out who they are—with my sense of smell out, I can’t—and I know that I’m not just in trouble.

I’m in deep, deep shit.

“Remember what happened at the council meeting,” rumbles one of the faceless shadows. A big guy, and I’m suddenly thrown back to the night I left Accalia when one of Ryker’s larger enforcers tried to stop me from going. “She’s more dangerous than she looks.”

“A female alpha,” whispers another. “Can it really be true?”

“Doesn’t matter.” I know that voice. That’s Jace. “Ryker will only accept her as his mate. This is for our Alpha.”

“For Ryker,” echo the others.

Hang on⁠—

They can’t honestly think they can force me into mating Ryker, right? I mean, sure, it’s the full moon, and it wouldn’t take much to perform the Luna Ceremony that ties us together forever, but he promised that he’d get me to change my mind. That he was up for the challenge.

That he’d never use his alpha status to make the choice for me.

Only Ryker isn’t. It’s the rest of the Mountainside Pack that’s turned on me.

That’s my cue. I don’t care what they’re doing, or why, and maybe I’ll eventually ask Ryker about it one day, but right now? I’m out of here.

There’s no time to return to my Jeep. If I have any hope of escaping whatever Ryker’s pack has in mind for me, I’ll have to rely on my wolf outrunning them.

One problem: it’s not just my nose that’s broken. I… I can’t shift.

Panic flares up inside of me. It’s an unfamiliar feeling, and one I really, really don’t like; it’s right there with being afraid. Ever since I started shifting as a young pup, there’s never been a moment when I gave my body the command and it just didn’t work… until now.

It’s supposed to be instantaneous. When a few terrifying seconds tick by and I’m still stuck in my skin, I back up, looking for a different escape, but I can’t find one. The circle is closing in on me, my wolf anxious and scared, and I don’t know what the hell is wrong with me.

I don’t even have my claws. I’m more defenseless than I’ve ever been in my entire life and I hate it.

So when Grant suddenly appears behind the circle, I want to go after him again. He’s someone to fixate on, someone to blame, but as much as it sucks, I have to accept that I’m no match for him in my current state.

Audrey’s mate isn’t wearing one of the hooded cloaks like the others, but he’s obviously on their side. I get a perverse jolt of pleasure to see that he’s rubbing the heel of his hand against his sternum, wincing as he joins the circle. He moves carefully, like he’s still recovering from my attack. Considering how hard I hit him, there’s a good chance I cracked a couple of his bones, maybe even a rib or two.

Good. He fucking deserved it.

Once I can tap into my wolf again, he’ll also deserve what happens next. They all will.

“What are we waiting for?” He gestures at me with his chin. “Audrey put a few drops of quicksilver in her drink so even if she doesn’t go down, we’ll still be able to handle her. But it won’t last long. Let’s do this.”

My jaw drops.

You’ve got to be kidding me.

Quicksilver?

Mercury.

Luna damn it!

Mercury’s not as fatal to shifters as pure silver, but it has a profound effect on our kind. Ingest some of the stuff and it can act as a sedative, and maybe the single sip I took isn’t enough to knock me out, but how much do you want to bet it’s the reason I can’t shift?

“Ready on three,” says Grant. “One.”

“Two…”

“Three!”

That’s the last thing I hear before my former packmates surround me. In a last ditch effort to escape, I use my blunt human teeth and my short nails against them, but Grant was right.

With the mercury poisoning me, I might not go down, but they overpower me pretty easily.

Bastards.

I don’t fight them. Mainly because I know it’s pointless, but also because they made it even harder on me. As if the mercury wasn’t enough, they weren’t taking any chances. They yanked a dark hood over my head that leaves me blind, and I’m slung over one of the bigger shifters’ shoulders like I’m a sack of potatoes.

The meaty shoulder digs into my gut with every step, bouncing me as he carries me through the woods. It doesn’t take long for the nausea to kick in and I have to clamp my jaw together to keep from hurling. It would serve him right if I puked down his back, but with the hood over my head, I’d probably choke on it.

So, gritting my teeth, I ride it out, waiting for the moment I can retaliate. I keep hoping my claws will shoot out. I might not be able to shift to wolf with the mercury working its way through me, but I can do a lot of damage with my claws.

Too bad it never happens.

It’s not just my nose that goes. All of my senses are dulled, like the hood over my head has wrapped around all of me, cutting me off from the rest of the world—except for that Luna damned shoulder digging into my gut. Everything is muffled, too. Either the shifters are being quiet or my ears are reacting as if they’ve been plugged up with cotton because I can’t hear shit, either.

It’s so frustrating. I kick my foot at one point, but when a massive paw with a grip made of iron grabs my calf, holding me tight, even that outlet is taken from me.

When the whisper of the night’s wind dies down, and the air seems to shift, going still, warming up, I realize that they’ve brought me inside. Inside where? No clue. We haven’t been walking long enough to be out of pack territory, so that’s a plus, but being moved to a second location?

Yeah. Not ideal.

The big guy carrying me has been lugging me around like I’m a package and not a person this whole time. I’ll give him some credit, though. When he shifts me in his arm before setting me on my feet, he does so gently, easing me until I’m standing, holding tightly to my arm so that I don’t drop from being disoriented.

His voice is a deep rumble. “You good?”

At least I hear that.

I nod.

“She’s good, fellas.”

“Open the door,” orders Grant. “Be careful. We don’t want to piss off the Alpha.”

Piss off the Alpha? What about me?

I hear something. It kind of creaks, and I’m betting that’s the door they mentioned. Someone hooks their hands under my pits, lifting me up so unexpectedly that I can’t swallow my soft cry of surprise before they move me forward, then plop me down again.

A door slams behind me.

I rip the hood off of my head.

It takes a second for my eyes to adjust, but even quicker for my ears to pick up on the sound of grunts coming from below me.

It’s dark. I’m standing on a top stair, a closed door at my back. Though I know damn well it’s going to be locked, I give it a jangle anyway. A quick jerk reveals that it’s shifter-proof. Even if I was at full strength, I’d never be able to snap it.

Great. Fucking great.

So my choices are stay on the stairs until someone is stupid enough to let me out, or go downstairs and see who is making that awful noise.

Morbid curiosity wins out.

“Hello?” My heart is pounding so loudly, I hear it echo against my eardrums. “Is someone here?”

The grunting stops, but it’s followed by a harsh panting sound. Human. The grunts were canine, but the pants belong to a man. So a shifter. Even if his scent didn’t hit me the second I inched down the first few stairs—still so recognizable despite my busted sniffer—it doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together and figure out who’s locked in this cellar room with me.

For the Alpha…

“Ryker?” He still doesn’t answer me, and maybe if I had my claws I could try to dig my way through the thick door and maybe escape, but I can’t. Since that’s out, they had to know I would go down the stairs if they left me trapped in a room with him. “Are you down there?”

I hear a snarl, followed by a raspy voice that I know all too well.

“Gemma, no! Stay away!”

Oh, Ryker. You can’t honestly believe that an order like that would work on me without the power of your wolf’s stare behind it?

I ease down the stairs, just in case. My instincts tell me that I have nothing to worry about—in fact, they’re screaming mate, it’s your mate at me—but I’ve been poisoned and wolf-napped so far tonight. Sue me for being a little cautious.

“Ryker?”

A muffled curse, then a sigh. “Luna damn it. You never fucking listen to me.”

Nope. I don’t.

Not about to start now, either.

I keep going, freezing when I reach the last step.

“Holy. Shit.”

Not surprisingly, the first thing I see is that Ryker is just about naked. He’s not wearing any shoes or a shirt, and the hems of his loose pants are shredded. A sign of a partial shift, where the wolf pushes against the human form without fully shifting to fur.

He’s not standing, either. He’s slumped on the ground, looking at a point just past me as if he can’t bring himself to witness the horror on my face as he demands in a voice too weak to be his, “What are you doing here?”

Honestly, I have no fucking idea other than that the packmates who tossed me in here seemed to think they were doing this for their Alpha.

The very same Alpha who is chained to the wall behind him.

I fly toward him.

“What am I doing here? What are you doing here? Who did this to you?” I grab the length of chain he’s trying to hide from me. Right. As if I don’t see two sets bolted to the cinderblock wall. The chains aren’t silver, but that only means that they’re not burning Ryker. Oh no, the chains are just keeping him trapped down here. “What the fuck? Why are you chained up?”

“Who did this to me? I did. I had no other choice.”

Is he kidding? “No choice but be chained to a wall like an animal? What’s going on?”

“Like an animal? Oh, sweetheart. I’m full feral right now.” His laugh is hollow. “It’s my fault for being such an arrogant prick. I dared the Luna, and she’s making me fucking pay for it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m a wolf. I worship her, and I’m a slave to her phases just like we all are, even if I thought I could pretend I wasn’t.”

In a way, I know exactly what he means. When I look at Ryker… the moon picked the perfect mate for me. I’m just the one who let my instincts get in the way. Plus his initial rejection, and how he all but tried to make my choice for me when he finally found me in Muncie again.

And now, almost a year and a half after she whispered that we were supposed to be together during Ryker’s Alpha Ceremony, we’re not—not really—and he’s clearly suffering because of it.

Feral.

Chains.

Weak.

And I thought I felt queasy before.

“Your turn. What are you doing here?” Ryker says, turning the question back on me. “You’re supposed to be in Muncie. You’re supposed to be safe.”

If he was vulnerable enough to open up to me, the least I can do is return the favor. “I came looking for you. I… I thought we could talk.”

“I think we talked enough. If you want, we can talk more after the full moon. Now, though? You have to go.”

“I can’t.”

“You can, Gemma⁠—”

He doesn’t understand. “No. Really. I can’t.”

As quickly as possible, I tell Ryker all about what’s happened to me since I arrived in Accalia, starting with running into Audrey. From her sweet nature to the doctored Coke all way to members of his inner circle bringing me⁠—

I pause. “Where are we?”

“My basement,” Ryker tells me. They’re the first words he’s said since I started talking aside from his growled, “I’ll kill them. I’ll kill them all. They shouldn’t have done that to you.”

He’s not wrong, but I think killing them is a little drastic. Now that I’ve seen what the full moon does to Ryker, I can’t blame them for hoping I’d help him out somehow. Even if they did trap me in his⁠—

Hang on.

“Your basement,” I repeat. “In… in the Alpha cabin?”

He slowly shakes his head. “No. Those idiots might think this is Alpha business, but it isn’t. It’s mine. This is my cabin. The one I had before I took over for my dad.”

Oh.

Welp.

Didn’t expect that.

Is it worse that I’m here? I wasn’t meant to enter the Alpha cabin until I became his bonded mate, but now I’m in his personal home and… I don’t know what to think about that.

Later, I tell myself. I’ll think about that later.

For now, all my worry is for Ryker.

He’s sweating. It drips down his face, plastering his dark hair to his forehead. That only means one thing and, Luna help me, I hope I’m wrong.

Even so, I can’t resist the urge. Dropping to my knees, I reach out to him, aiming to push one particular lock of hair out of his face.

His voice is hoarse as he warns, “You shouldn’t touch me.”

“You don’t want me to?”

“I do. Luna, I do. But it’s taking everything I have to restrain my wolf. These chains… they had to know that they weren’t strong enough to keep you from me. Especially with the fever…” His words trail off, but both of us know exactly what he was about to say. He shakes his head, and I have to admit that I was right. “Maybe if you’d stayed behind in Muncie, you might’ve been safe from me. But this close…” Ryker’s cheeks ripple, fighting the shift. “Just… just stay on the other side of the room, Gemma. Please.”

Holy hell. He’s begging.

Fisting my hand, I awkwardly scoot away from him. Once there are a few feet separating us, I climb up from my knees and shuffle as far away from him as I can get.

When there’s some space between us, Ryker calms just enough. He slumps against the corner again, head bowed into his chest. His panting goes from rough gasps to a gentle wheeze. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he’s passed out.

He hasn’t, but if that’s what he wants me to think, I’ll give him his moment. He didn’t ask for this. Obviously he didn’t want me down here with him. That was all his council’s brilliant idea.

Since I don’t want him to worry that I’m still staring at him, I look around the basement. It’s not overly large, maybe as big as the living room back at Aleks’s apartment. Apart from the chains screwed into the wall and its unfortunate guest, there’s nothing else down here. It’s obviously rarely used, and I can see why.

The walls are made of cinderblock, but there are deep gouges in each brick. Scratch marks, claw marks cover the place. I see smears of old blood, and though my senses aren’t what they’re supposed to be, I know it belongs to Ryker.

There are no other scents down here except for his.

I can’t help myself. I have to ask.

“Ryker?”

His head shoots up, proving that I was also right when I thought he was faking. He shifts as close to me as he can without tugging on his chains. “Mmm?”

“How long?”

He’s finding it hard to focus on me. Or maybe he’s trying hard to resist the urge to crawl over to me.

‘Cause, yeah. I’m having a hard time leaving him by himself on the other side of the basement.

“How long for what?”

“How many times have you been chained down here?”

Because I know for damn sure that it’s not the first time. If he’s blaming the moon… there’s been a lot of moons for Ryker.

“You want the truth?”

I don’t tell him that I’ll know regardless. “I always want the truth. I thought you figured that out by now.”

“Then this is my twelfth.”

I gulp. “That’s every full moon since I left.”

“I was a shifter without his mate. I didn’t know where you were. No one could find you. I was a danger to the pack… and to anyone who stood in my way to track you down. I could control my wolf every other phase of the moon. But when it’s full, this is the only option I have.”

I know why, too. Moon fever. When the Luna is at her strength, our wolves come to the forefront. Our animalistic instincts become almost undeniable. It’s why I always get lonely during the full moon, and why I run a few days leading up to it. You get itchy, too, and pretty fucking desperate to find someone to scratch that itch.

Mates rut. It gets easier after you’re in a committed, bonded mating, but two unattached shifters working their way through the mating dance can spend the entire full moon banging away.

Two alphas with a bond? No wonder he’s chained up. I’ve heard stories about shifters who fell prey to moon fever. They’ll chase their mate across miles so they can ease their lust.

And the pack council thought it was a good idea to throw me down here with their feverish Alpha.

Well, hell. We already had sex once before. If it’ll stop his suffering, I’ll take one for the team.

“It’s not the only option.”