Pack Refuge (The Splintered Bond Book 2) by Merri Bright

Author:Merri Bright [Bright, Merri]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

19

Quiet Suspicion

FINNICK

Sleep eluded me. After the conversation with Glen, I hadn’t been able to concentrate on anything but Flor. Not that that was anything new. Even when I’d tried to avoid her, my mind had been fixed on her.

The part of my heart that had splintered when I rejected her back at Southern was still aching, like a blistered wound, seeping into my thoughts. My soul.

Even now. Even after she’d been claimed by Brand.

I’d spent weeks immersed in the Northern pack’s library, and I headed there again tonight, using my senses to find my way in the near-total darkness. With the exception of the sections covering true mates, mate bonds, and shifter fertility studies—Margarette’s obsession—the library here wasn’t as extensive as the Eastern collection, but the main texts dealing with Pack law and history were well represented.

Once inside the library, I flicked on a lamp and pulled a book from the shelf I’d located the day before. I flipped idly through the pages, on my own personal hunt, as usual. At first, I’d been seeking an answer to how one woman could be a true mate to more than one male. But for the past few days, I’d been obsessed with a new question. I had to find something about mate bonds to help me understand why I wasn’t free. Why I still longed for the small, boyish Flor, who was already claimed.

Not that she is boyish, I admitted to myself. When my wolf had heard her cries with Brand, when Glen and I had interrupted their mating, I’d seen her body.

She’d been naked after her first shift at Southern as well, but covered with blood. I hadn’t truly registered her shape, her slight curves, her rounded, tight breasts. The gentle slope of her neck, and the stubborn tilt of her chin. Most shifter women were long, lush. She was like a fairy, some sort of pixie-shifter blend. Magical.

But when Brand was moving inside her, when she was crying out... Hell, even just the memory of her tight, feminine body made me hard. She was more than magical. She was strong and fierce, angry and intelligent, generous and good, even after all she’d suffered. When she’d fallen apart in my brother’s arms, I’d seen why he’d fallen so hard for her so fast. Her soul had shone around them, transforming her, and him. She was miraculous, a goddess on earth.

I pulled out another text, appropriately titled The Magic of Mating, and began to read theories about how precisely the mating bond developed, and how it could be damaged. My mind kept returning to Flor, though.

Had the years of the Hunt done something to her? Suppressed the natural urge to bond emotionally and physically with one other soul? Perhaps the sheer number of males who’d preyed on her had damaged her psyche somehow.

Perhaps those males had given her that scar on her chest—the small, five-pointed, jagged star that began at her heart and ran up toward her collarbone and down to the bottom of her breast.

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