All Chapters of The Broken Fate of a Fated Mate: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

*Vanessa*I don’t recognize the girl in the mirror.She has my dark hair, bound up in a bridal half-up, half-down style, accented by crystal pins. Her skin is flush with nervousness. But the biggest thing that makes her hard for me to recognize, is the look of pure excitement on her face.My face.It’s not an expression I wear very often.Around me, some of the female shifters who volunteered to help me get ready are talking amongst themselves about the coming mating ceremony. We’re not exactly friends but we are neighbors, and in this pack, that’s the closest any of us will get.I look over my reflection in the mirror. I wanted something simple, a dress that would be an accessory to the main thing: the pendant around my neck. My mating-token. Analogous to what humans would use as engagement rings, the pendant was Trent’s gift to me once we discovered we were fated mates – his promise to me that this day was going to come.“Almost time,” says K

*Shawn*“You know, one of the perks of being Alpha is that you can choose where and even if you still want to do patrol runs.” Aaron’s voice is slightly breathless, betraying just how seriously he’s been taking his training lately: as in, not at all. “Seriously, Shawn, if we’re going to be running around this stretch of the woods, can’t we just do it in our wolf forms instead?”I click my tongue. Of course, he’d suggest that. Our wolf forms have significantly more endurance than our human ones. But I needed this run. I needed to rediscover my limits and push myself past what I thought I could handle. The terrain running through this unclaimed area just outside of our pack territory provides just the sort of rocky ground, steep inclines, and lack of shelter from the sun overhead to do just that. I brought Aaron with me because I know that he’s been slacking and needs the challenge. And honestly, he’s one of the few people I like just a little bit more than my own solitud

*Vanessa*I tell myself that it must just be the excitement of the night’s celebration, and the foolish happiness I feel at having been invited to this dinner that has made me skittish and stupid. There must be a perfectly reasonable explanation as to why Elder Luka seemed to vanish without a trace. Never mind that the territory is small and that the square is even smaller. Never mind that it shouldn’t technically make sense for them to have disappeared the way they did. Yep, there must be a logical reason that my still-muddied brain just can’t quite comprehend yet. Regardless, their words play in my head over and over again until I have them memorized. 'The fated mate bond is not the be-all and end-all of your journey, Vanessa. You can still be happy. You deserve to be happy.'Those words challenge everything I thought I knew about fated mates and even the Goddess herself. I’d held onto the belief that finding a mate would mean finding a family for as long

*Shawn*Vanessa’s determination threw me for a loop. I’d put her on the spot, essentially demanding she either admit to being unable to complete the trial or to lie … but she did neither. Instead, she accepted it with a conviction I would never have expected from someone who was dragged into this compound half-dead a week ago. It wasn’t just that she agreed to do what would be an impossible task for most people. Even I am struggling to come up with a way to compensate for our lack of numbers in a way that can allow us to both hunt and protect the pack. I could tell that she doubted herself, for just a moment there. But it was the way she seemed to push through all of that and look me in the eye to tell me that she would do it. That was what shocked me.I wasn’t being dishonest when I said that I believed she could handle it. But still, seeing the change happen right in front of me where she just snapped into that focus, was unexpected. “Hello? Again? M

*Vanessa*The next day is set up similarly to the one before. A tour around the compound revisiting all the groups I did before, only this time I'm supposed to be joining in a meeting to discuss the solutions I’d come up with at each station. I worked well into the night, trying to streamline as much of their current systems as I could, but it was daunting. Not the challenge in coming up with solutions itself —I was finding that to be the easier bit. No, it was figuring out how I was going to aim for improvement without overstepping my boundaries or giving Ashborne any more reason to suspect me. If Shawn thought he wasn’t able to change things as he wanted without the pack misreading his intentions, I wasn’t sure where my confidence was supposed to come from. But this is the only choice I have. I have to make it work.Aaron meets me at the same spot we did yesterday morning, his face no happier to see me than it was then. But—and it’s a very cautious ‘but’—I