They let her be for exactly one month before Embry ruined it.

The rain came down harder after Harry's funeral. To everyone else, it looked like the same old Washington rain that always pelted the town, but Leah knew better. The skies were as thunderous as her heartache. It didn't stop, it didn't relent. It continued to pound, drowning every surface it could touch.

Leah really hated the rain.

And she really hated the smell of wet dog.

A few days after the funeral, Sam decided she'd had enough time by herself, and insisted she begin to join the pack, as a full member, patrolling the reservation. After their little… chat after the funeral, she did nothing to hold back the stinging glares she had for him. She was convinced guilt was the only thing that kept him from exacting his creepy Alpha power over her and outright commanding that she join them.

He was too pathetic for his own good.

She didn't think she would ever get used to it. Being forced out into the rain, stripping behind bushes, leaving her clothes in piles in the woods—those that she hadn't shredded, anyway—forced to spend her time with those who wouldn't—couldn't—understand.

And she'd had to give up college for this.

The days dragged and nothing helped. It didn't get better. Whatever anguish over Sam and Emily that might have been lifted was back two-fold under the strain of being near him almost every waking moment, leaving her sinking in a ocean of despair made deeper by the loss of her father and the pain of her family.

And Sam was incapable of keeping his thoughts to himself. If only he could think of anything other than Emily, perhaps she wouldn't feel the need to hate him so strongly even after so much time had passed.

So it was one month after the funeral that she found herself, in wolf-form, running through the forest, patrolling the western border as Sam instructed, her idle thoughts wandering down twisted, miserable paths that lead nowhere. And she missed her father.

She refocused, poked around in the other's brains, looking for something she already knew she would find.

Emily…

She snorted in disgust. Emily. Really? Was he incapable of an original thought? Was he truly that far gone into his obnoxious "imprint" world to see what he was doing to her? He stuck around long enough to tell her that her life as she knew it was forever gone, or to forbid her from going to college. But when it came to the tough stuff, when she needed him the most, when her entire world was unraveling around her, he was a failure. When it came to doing even the simplest things one should do for the one they claimed over and over to love, he was a failure. It didn't matter that his love was in the past tense, and that he wasn't hers to rely on anymore. That, after all, was the biggest failure of all.

Plus, he was a no-good, lying, life-ruining sonofabitch. She hoped he'd throw himself off a cliff, but not before ruining the other half of that whore's face.

Bitch.

Her head snapped up, and she quickly pulled herself from the spiraling daze she'd been in just moments before her thoughts had been interrupted. Her steps faltered slightly as she remembered they could all hear her thoughts. Intellectually she knew she could hear them and vice versa, but it was hard to train herself to keep her thoughts away from the others. Having a dozen boys in her head all the time was a nightmare she couldn't adjust to.

Up until this point, they had all given her space to spread her thoughts. She was new, and they all knew the awful things she was going through. They maybe didn't all understand it, but they at least knew. And they cut her some slack.

Apparently the grace period was over.

Embry…

I'm sorry, Seth. I didn't mean for it to slip out. But c'mon, he was your dad, too. And you're not making the rest of us miserable on purpose.

She heard Jared snort as Paul added his two cents. Yeah, shut up about Sam already, would you, Leah? You'd think with a dead dad, you'd have better shit to think about. This Sam bullshit is getting old. Get over it already.

Hey!

Whatever, Seth.

She waited. He would tell them to stop, to keep their mouths shut. It was hard for her, they had to understand that. She was doing the best she could with what pieces of her heart she had left. He was her Alpha. And before that, the boy who had promised her the world. He may not have loved her anymore, but the least he could do was stand up for her against a bunch of teenagers.

She waited, strained to hear it.

I wish she wasn't here.

The weight of his faint thoughts, too vague and unfocused for the rest to pick up on, fell upon her as her knees buckled. It was like a switch going off inside her head, and she saw everything so much clearer. If that's the way he wanted it…

Fine.

Fuck off, Paul. And go cry to your daddy, Embry… Oh, wait…

A dozen wolves growled at her. She growled right back.