Torn [1/3]
Author's Note: I am in no way affiliated with Wolf Lake or any of its Characters. Only the character of Calen Ryans is mine.
This is the sequel to Waiting. The prequel must be read for any of this to make sense.
Luke
He had been absent at the time of Sophia's change.
The transformation had taken place only minutes after their mating.
But he hadn't been there due to other duties.
He supposed he could blame Sophia for being so inherently private and failing to tell him of the significance of her color.
But he knew that the real blame rested on his own shoulders,
in his own inability to suppose that Sophia would be special.
That she was special.
He could have urged her to join him in a run,
to change into her wolven form in front of him.
But after he and the rest of the pack had sensed the scent of the change on her, no one had bothered because she couldn't be anything other than ordinary.
But she was.
Sophia
After the incident in the woods, she had avoided Luke.
Not because she was afraid of him, but because she was afraid of what she would do to him.
Coupled with the anger at his ruthless torture of Calen, was the pain, agony, and humiliation she still held inside of her at his utter rejection.
For the first few weeks, she had been successful.
Luke hadn't been any more eager for their second confrontation.
But then he was a predator.
And it was against his primal instincts to let his prey roam free for long.
Luke
Even as he realized that he loved Sophia, he couldn't overcome his pride to lay it all down on the line.
If human men had problems confessing to their feelings due to a hatred of vulnerability, it was even more so for him.
The man in him may have rebelled against vulnerability, but the wolf in him abhored it.
His refusal to become vulnerable in front of anyone, even Sophia-
That had been his second mistake.
He should have known that nothing but a complete confession would even begin to thaw Sophia's frozen heart.
But he hadn't known. And by the time he had, it was already too late.
Sophia
In those days and weeks, life had been a chaotic blur to her.
If it wasn't Luke demanding her to give him her time,
It was Calen, subtly demanding answers about Luke.
To Luke, she gave a cold shoulder, refusing to even acknowledge his existence-
much like he had her.
To Calen, she gave riddled answers, woven through with half lies and half truths. Because deny it as much as she would like, she was still a skin-walker. And her words determined whether her father and her people would remain safe.
Neither were satisfied.
It didn't matter though, because in the end, they were mere puppets.
Puppets that were being strung along to a prophecy that allowed some more control than others.
She was an other.
She had no way of knowing that she was slowly unwinding a prophecy.
A prophecy that stated only one would emerge the victor,
only one could emerge alive.
Luke
It had finally begun to sink into his thick skull.
Sophia wasn't coming back.
Even after she had coldly stated her lack of love for him, he had still believed with some pursuit on his part, she would eventually capitulate.
She didn't.
With her increasing joy with Calen, came his increasing frustration at being denied what he thought was rightfully his.
He had been so arrogant. He had been so truly blind.
He had thought that it was a mere contest of wills,
Man Vs. Wolf
A stage that Sophia would have to go through before finally realizing that she belonged with the superior of the two.
A recurrent thought that kept cycling in his subconscious was that if he hadn't known any better, he would have thought Calen was one of them.
There was something primitive, primal, something inherently different about him.
But if Ryans was a fellow skin-walker, he would have been able to smell it on him.
And he didn't.
Therefore he couldn't have been a skin-walker.
This logical assumption--
That was another mistake.
Any Reviews/Criticisms will be Appreciated