Chapter 5

• I could not make someone who didn’t love me happy. Everything I did, to him, would be nothing more than a nuisance. It was a harsh realization that came to me late. Elijah would never love me or appreciate me.
• I was twelve when I fell in love with Elijah after one unforgettable night. At that time, he was fourteen and the cold and anti-social Alpha’s son. No one dared talk to him so we all admired him from afar. All the girls squealed when he walked past but he never spared anyone a glance. He had no friends and didn’t shy away from a fight.
• As far as I knew, he was ten years old when the Alpha’s mate died and the Alpha, having no heir with his now deceased mate, started to track down the woman who claimed to be pregnant for him in the past.
• The woman had safely put to bed in another pack and wanted nothing to do with the man who denied her ten years prior. Notwithstanding, the Alpha wanted his child and heir. The adults said a long custody battle ensued as to who would get Elijah. It was on the way to court one day that the woman got into an accident which left her in a vegetative state for four years.
• Naturally, the Alpha, being the only other parent of the child, got custody of Elijah while his mother was in the hospital. On the day she passed away, the Alpha threw a party.
• “Is he any different from his father?” I stared at my reflection in the mirror as I thought back to Elijah’s past. “As cold and unfeeling as his father. Truly, the apple never falls far from the tree.” I sneered.
• My earliest memory is of being left out to freeze to death in the cold. It happened when I was about seven. Reese and Rosie lured me out on a cold winter night to play and then they abandoned me to die. I was a child with no wolf yet and I would have died if I hadn’t found a shed far from the house with raggedy clothes and things I could use to start a fire. It was a dirty shed that no one had visited in many years and it was on a forgotten, abandoned part of the hundreds of acres of land that belonged to my father as the beta.
• Since that day, every time I was overwhelmed with sadness or when my adoptive mother chased me out of the house, which happened every time my father wasn’t home, I’d go back to that shed which overlooked the edge of a cliff.
• That night, I was going to my comfort place when I saw someone trying to jump off the cliff. The fear that gripped me that night was palpable.
• ‘Hey, what are you doing!’ I screamed, shocked out of my grief by the boy standing so close to the edge of the cliff that he could be pushed off by even the slightest breeze.
• ‘Who are you?’ He retorted.
• ‘Me? R – Rosie.” I stopped before I could say my name, fearing getting into even more trouble if anyone knew I came here, and often at that. ‘Never mind that! Get away from there. You’re going to fall off and you could – you could die!’
• I was only a child. Being beaten, starved, cursed at and ostracized were things I had grown accustomed to so I could tolerate them but one thing I was scared of was death. I feared death but there was a boy dangerously courting death in front of me. My heart was loud in my ears as I crept towards him.
• ‘I’m going to die.’ The boy turned to me with eyes that were colder than glaciers, making me shiver. Only then did I realize his identity. ‘This is the only way I can hurt him. He wants an heir, doesn’t he? I’ll make sure he never gets what he wants.’ He laughed so hard his entire frame shook and I feared he’d really fall off the cliff.
• ‘He – he – then what of you?’ I didn’t have the words to stop a suicide.
• ‘Death is freedom and I’d rather be free than continue to live like a sinner.’
• ‘Hey, as long as you’re not a sinner then why should you die?’ I too was treated like a sinner.
• Whether my father found me on the street or whether I was really a child born from an extramarital affair, none of it was my fault but everyone mistreated me because of my birth and origin.
• ‘Does it matter? It’s so suffocating living like this. There’s nothing I can do. This is the only way I can be free and hurt him at the same time.’
• ‘Then what happens to those that make you – that make you feel this way? Won’t they laugh at you?’ I asked. ‘If you die like this, aren’t you making things too easy for him? Aren’t you a little bit vengeful? You should – you should kill the sinners rather than jump off a cliff like this.’
• I was twelve years old and at the time, I had no idea what I was saying. All that I knew was that I had to stop this boy from jumping off a cliff. I had to save this tormented soul.
• ‘Vengeful.’ He mulled over the word. ‘I’m just a kid.’ His shoulders hunched and he got even closer to the edge.
• ‘Ah – ah - that’s why you have to grow up first! If you die now then you can never grow up and take revenge. You’d be a – a fool to give up like this. Do your best to grow up well and get your revenge.’
• ‘Can I – can I do that?’
• ‘Yes, of course! An adult – an adult can crush anyone as long as they have – um – willpower and um a gun. Think – your mother would want you to grow up well and not to give up like this. Fight for her!’
• Only then did I manage to get through to him and he got off the edge of a cliff. I said a lot of nonsensical things but in the end, he was fine and by my side.
• I felt a bit of satisfaction. I had saved a human life so maybe I wasn’t as useless as my family said. The day was dark and we were young, our wolves senses not good enough. That night, I held Elijah as he cried. All along, I had seen him from afar and he was always the cool son of the Alpha. He never laughed nor smiled, never responded to the provocation of others but that night, he cried.
• ‘I’m going to kill him. He took my mum from me and he - I’m going to kill him. How can he call himself my father when he abandoned me for many years? Everyday - the house is silent. I can’t stand it. He won’t even let me play mum’s favorite songs. It’s silent and cold. I hate it. I hate it here! I want to go – my mum.’
• He cried for a long time, talking about his mother and how she had passed on, how his father was never home. How cold the house was, how much he hated the silence and how much he wanted to see his mother.
• In turn, I told him about my family. I told him how much I hated my family, I told him of my sister who who bullied me in private but acted normal in public. I told him how pretentious people could be and he promised to be my friend.
• He must have forgotten.
• That night, I got a glimpse of who I thought was the real Elijah. A boy who hated the silence and missed his mother. A boy so vulnerable he thought of taking his life. The same boy that moved as if he was the coolest person on earth, too good for the rest of the pack, the boy that made all the girls in pack giggle like fools when he walked past was actually hurting so badly.
• His father got into a ghastly accident the night he turned eighteen. He was comatose for a month before he died. That night, Elijah threw a party. It was our own little secret but I knew he killed his father.
• A while later, he befriended Reese and started to visit our home often. The more I saw him, the more enamored with him I became and then I realized I was in love. I thought I knew him better than anyone else but I was wrong. I didn’t know him at all. The boy I met on the cliff that night was not the same person I mated with. That boy was no more. I loved him because in my head, we were alike with fathers who were best friends, fathers who had put both of us in miserable positions and continued to live their lives without care as we suffered. To me, Elijah was one side of a coin that fit with me but that night, as my family laughed while I locked myself up in my room, as I heard him talk softly to Rosie, as I listened to Rosie call his name flirtatiously, I decided to give up. I could no longer continue to pour water into a basket and expect it to one day be full.
• This man not only did not care for me, he did not respect me. No one in this pack respected me. I would always be the unwanted daughter of the former Beta who his mate was forced to adopt, a stain on the Sinclair family name. A woman not good enough for Elijah no matter how much she tried.
• This mating would never work. It was a bond not meant to be. I hoped for his sake that Rosie could fill up the silence in his home. It was the last consideration I had for the boy whose life I once saved.