C H A P T E R 1
Z O E Y
Sighing heavily, I run my hands over the top of my head, locking my fingers at the back of my neck and focusing on the ground at my feet. Today is one of those life changing days that I don’t really want to face. Today is the day, I’m leaving my lovely cabin and everything in it. I’m not selling it, but I will be coming back. The way I feel right now, well, I feel like I’m going to be fucked up forever. My eyes are heavy, my mind foggy and my body feels genuinely worn out despite not doing much. Last night was another sleepless night for me. One of many.
My tiger is a naturally solitary creature, I enjoy living in a small town. Maxton wasn’t like that anymore with weekends being so busy. And don’t get me started on winter when it was so crowded, I was on edge the entire time. Even the small free clinic on the other side of town was so busy it felt like I was working at a hospital in Chicago. It’s to be expected though, with so many alpha males living in one place. Nothing draws in horny women like blood, broken bones, and testosterone. I love my work at the clinic and don’t want to quit but I have to get out of Maxton for a little while. My tiger is becoming unmanageable, edgy, and always looking to bleed something. These days she seems to always be scratching at my skin, shredding me, trying to punish me. For what, I have no fucking idea.
A damp, earthy smell is heavy on the breeze, a sign that a rainstorm is on its way. My excellent hearing picks up the vibration of rumbling in the distance. A thunderstorm, even better. It will match the turmoil inside me a lot better than a simple pitter patter of raindrops. I love storms. Especially the sound of the rain as it crashes down onto the metal roof of my cabin. It’s a soothing lullaby that often lures me to sleep when my animal won’t settle, which is often lately. Damn, I love my cabin in the woods, quiet and secluded just on the edge of town. A delicate cool breeze blows, the metal and wooden wind chimes decorated with butterflies and flowers hang from my roof, clanking together to create a gentle, soothing rhythm. Red, orange, and yellow leaves fall gracefully from the arthritic branches of the trees surrounding me and towering far above the ground. Fall. It’s my favorite season. Usually, anyway.
Today though, I can’t raise any of my usual joy for the season. Of course, it’s hard to muster anything when there isn’t a spark of happiness or joy inside me. Most days all I feel is the aching pain in my heart, tightening my chest to the point that I’m certain I’ll quit breathing. I want to quit breathing. It hurts too much. Every breath a reminder. My nights and days are empty with only the constant pain and searing emptiness to keep me company. God, my heartbreak runs so deep, feeling like a river of acid burning through my veins, making every organ in my body ache, my heart clenching tightly with every beat.
Maxton used to be a smallish country town where hardly anything happened, but it had a homey warmth to it. It was a place where locals were like a Norman Rockwell painting, everyone knew everyone. Everything changed when the all-shifter logging crew moved into town to work at the lumber mill. The whole atmosphere of the town changed. There was always some brawl going down at the mill. Being a nurse, I got called often to patch someone up or snap a broken bone back into place. Shifters weren’t the only ones who worked at the mill, humans did too. Vampires, and even a couple of Fae. They were just the ones who shook everything up.
Now, the small town is crawling with shifter groupies, that’s what I call them. They’re women and men who come on vacation looking to bang some kind of supe, usually a shifter and for those looking for something with a little more edge, a little more danger, Vampires and Fae. Yeah, Fae are far from the tinker bell fairies humans imagine them as. You’d think that after being out in the open for so long people would stop having such a stereotypical view of Fae, but nope.
Pages are set up on Facebook and Instagram so women could brag about who they slept with and the exact size of their big dicks. Supes had great stamina, so naturally women have explosive orgasms that put every other sexual experience of theirs to shame. Some married women return regularly. Bachelorette groups became the norm any day of the week. I’ve gotten used to walking past groups of women stumbling down the street as they bar hopped looking for their last fling before their wedding.
Tears blur my vision and I press my eyes tightly closed to try and stop them, it’s in vain of course, but I still try. Melancholy slips over me and a hard-lump forms in my throat. I force myself to swallow it down because I refuse to have another crying fit. I’m done breaking down over the bastard. It’s all I’ve been doing for two months, sixty days, every day, all night, cry and cry until my eyes were swollen and my throat so sore from sobbing that I couldn’t swallow. One would think I didn’t have any tears left but apparently as long as there was pain, there were tears. God, I wish I felt nothing. Emptiness would be better than this constant, perpetual sadness that clings to me like a shadow. Always there, always waiting like a crocodile ready to strike and pull me under.
It was supposed to be the happiest day of my life, my mating celebration. Fuck, I still had the damn ceremony announcement up on my fridge. Today I really feel like I need a joint and a bottle of Jack. A mating ceremony is taking place today, just not mine.
Blowing a quick breath out between my pursed lips, I shake my head. I want to know how any of this is possible. Seriously, one night he went out to the bar with some friends and just didn’t come home. It wasn’t unusual for him to take off when his wolf got too hard to manage, but it was unusual for him not to tell me about it. I went to start looking for him or information about him, but I had to get gas, that incident changed everything. Waiting in that line was how I found out that my future mate was shacking up with some bimbo.
Homewrecking whore is more like it and my supposed best friend. A feminine, delicate model type with killer curves, long blond hair and lips so full they made men think of nothing else but being wrapped around their dick. At least that was the first thing Cody said when he met Sara. Guess I should’ve known then. What kind of man says that to his mate about another woman? The fact that he could even think it was a big red flag that I totally missed. As if all that weren’t bad enough, the bastard decided to mate with the cunt only a few days after giving me my claiming mark. Bastard. I still don’t understand how it happened. One minute we’re happy and in love, the next I’m crying into my wine in front of my fireplace.
In the beginning, I was so angry at Sara, blamed her for everything because I didn’t understand how someone who was supposed to be my friend could do that to me. After a while, I realized it the blame wasn’t all on her. Oh, plenty of it was, but really, she wasn’t the one who committed to me. Sara wasn’t the one who made promises and took the step to bind us together in the way of our people. She also wasn’t the fucker who just laid low because he was too much of a damn coward to tell me to my face what he did. Nope, that was all Cody.
There’s really nothing worse than being the last to know what everyone else already knew. God, I’m still not over the humiliation. Walking down the street, trying to ignore the looks, the whispers. Pity filled eyes as someone asked for the millionth time if I was doing okay. Yeah, it’s a good thing I’m leaving here because I swear to god, I’ll bite the next person who asked me that question with that look. These days this town is full of gossips and I knew most of them were walking around talking shit behind my back.