Chapter 9 CHAPTER 9
Rafael’s POV
I stared at her, trying to keep my voice steady. “Please.”
Her head snapped up, eyes going wide with shock.
Yeah. I got it.
I’d been a complete asshole to her. That night at the hockey rink after practice, when she came to pick up Emma and lingered by the boards watching—I’d skated past and told her to stop staring. Told her I wasn’t some zoo animal for her to gawk at.
Emma had been pissed at me for weeks after that.
But I hadn’t cared. Vivienne was Emma’s nerdy friend—the quiet girl who always had her nose in a book, who dressed like she was trying to disappear, who barely spoke above a whisper. I was the captain of the hockey team, had scouts from Division One schools watching my every game, had girls way out of her league throwing themselves at me. And besides, I was the son of the Alpha King in the werewolf realm.
I couldn’t see myself with someone like her. Didn’t want to.
So I’d made sure she knew it. Ignored her at school. Looked right through her in the hallways. Made it crystal clear she wasn’t even on my radar.
Then the championship game happened.
We’d won. I’d scored the winning goal in overtime, felt the rush of victory, heard my name chanted from the stands. I was walking off the ice when the world suddenly tilted.
The curse hit me harder than it ever had.
My legs buckled. I went down hard in the tunnel, and then I was choking, blood pouring from my mouth onto the concrete. Everything hurt—my bones, my muscles—like something was trying to claw its way out of me from the inside.
I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think past the pain.
Then her face appeared above me.
Vivienne. Somehow she’d gotten past the security guys and was on her knees beside me with terrified eyes, her hands shaking as she turned me onto my side so I wouldn’t choke on my own blood.
“Stay with me,” she kept saying, her voice cracking. “Rafael, please stay with me. Help’s coming. Just hold on.”
The second her skin touched mine, my wolf—dormant for months, barely alive under the curse’s weight—roared back to life.
The force of it nearly made me black out again. He surged up like he’d been hit with electricity, and suddenly I felt it in every nerve, every cell.
Mate.
The bond slammed into place so violently my chest felt like it was cracking open. I could feel her—actually feel her—like a golden thread connecting us, pulling tight.
And I’d wanted to scream so bad.
Because she was human. Completely, totally human. I’d checked her records after I’d recovered, dug into her family history—not a single wolf in her bloodline going back generations.
Humans couldn’t complete mate bonds. It was impossible. The mating ritual required both people to shift and to mark each other with fangs that would kill her fragile human body. She couldn’t shift at all.
The Priestess had said that my mate would be the one to break my curse—a curse that she still hadn’t been able to track who was responsible for—but regardless, she stated that only my mate could free me from the poison slowly killing my wolf.
But how? How the hell was she supposed to break a curse when she was a human and we couldn’t even bond properly?
The question had been eating at me.
Every time I saw her, my wolf went crazy, pushing at my control, demanding I go to her. And every time, I had to force him back down because I didn’t have answers. Didn’t know what to do.
I still didn’t have answers.
But sitting here now, looking at the fading marks on her face, the way she was trembling and small and broken—none of that other stuff mattered.
Right now, I only cared about one thing.
Finding whoever did this and making them pay.
I took a slow breath and kept my voice soft. “Vivienne, I need to know who did this to you.”
She pulled the hoodie sleeves down over her hands, curling in tighter. Her eyes stayed fixed on her lap.
“I…” Her voice was barely there. “I can’t.”
“Why not?” I kept my tone gentle, but inside I was barely holding it together.
“Because—” She stopped, her hands twisting in the hoodie sleeves. “Because it doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.”
“Why?” Her voice cracked. “Why do you even care, Rafael? You’ve made it pretty clear for months that I’m nobody to you.”
That hit like a knife between the ribs, but I couldn’t argue. She was right.
“I care now,” I said quietly. “And I need you to tell me.”
“So what?” She finally looked up, and there was something new in her eyes—anger cutting through the fear. “So you can do what exactly? Nothing’s going to happen. Nothing ever happens to people like—”
“Vivienne.” I leaned forward slightly. “Tell me who did this. I promise you, I will handle it.”
“You won’t.” Her voice was getting louder, sharper. “You can’t. Because it’s—”
She stopped, biting her lip hard enough to turn it white.
“Because it’s who?” I pressed.
“It doesn’t matter!”
“It does. Tell me.”
“Why? So you can pretend you’ll do something and then do nothing? So you can make me say it out loud and relive it for no reason?”
My jaw clenched. “I’m not going to do nothing.”
“Really?” She let out a bitter laugh that didn’t sound like her at all. “You’re really going to do something? You promise?”
“Yes.”
“Fine!” The word burst out of her, loud and sharp. “It was Jessica. Your girlfriend. Happy now?”
Everything stopped.
Jessica.
My girlfriend.
“What did she do?” My voice came out too quiet. Too calm. The kind of calm that came right before something snapped.
“What do you think she did?” Vivienne’s eyes were blazing now, tears streaming down her face but she didn’t seem to notice. “She and her friends cornered me in that classroom.”
Her voice broke.
I waited, every muscle in my body coiled tight.
“She slapped me. Over and over. Called me a pathetic little slut who needed to learn her place.” Vivienne’s hands were shaking so badly now the whole bed was moving. “Then they tore my uniform. Ripped it right off me while I was screaming for them to stop. And Jessica—she pulled out her phone and—”
She couldn’t finish. Just pressed her hands over her face.
Ice flooded my veins. “She recorded you.”
Vivienne nodded, shoulders shaking with sobs.
“She said—” Vivienne’s voice was muffled behind her hands. “She said if I didn’t stay away from you, she’d send it to everyone. Post it everywhere. Make sure the whole school saw me naked and crying like the worthless nobody I am.”
My wolf was howling. Actually howling inside my head, demanding I shift right now, find Jessica, and—
“So tell me, Rafael.” Vivienne dropped her hands and looked at me with red, swollen eyes. “What the fuck are you going to do about it? It’s your girlfriend. Your precious Jessica who everyone loves. Captain of the cheer squad. Richest girl in school. Daughter of the biggest donor to this school.”
She was right. Jessica’s dad basically funded half the school’s programs. The principal kissed her ass. Teachers looked the other way when she pulled stuff.
But none of that mattered. Not with her.
I didn’t give a damn who Jessica was or what our relationship had been.
She was going to pay.