Again, he nodded. “I’m never going to leave you.”
After placing my clothes in a pile near Mars, I called my wolf, dropped down onto all four, and took a deep breath. Dear Moon Goddess, please make this quick. Please don’t make this hurt as much as it did last time because my mate won’t be able to handle it.
Won’t work. Can’t shift. Mate … My wolf gazed at a patient-looking Mars. Mate won’t love us once he sees.
She howled inside of me, cramps erupting all over my body. I clenched my jaw. We hadn’t even started, yet it was like I could already feel the pain creeping into my veins, pumping through my entire being.
It had been exactly fifty-four days since we last shifted. My wolf had always been terrified but not like this. Not only did we have to worry about the shift itself, but this time, we also had the added pressure of feeling our mate’s distress while it happened.
Mate will hate us.
“We don’t know unless we try,” I whispered to myself.
Mom hates us.
I frowned, tears filling my eyes from all of her harsh words. I remembered the first time I’d tried shifting after the attack and the look of pure disgust on Mom’s face—that you’re not my daughter, this isn’t my daughter look.
Mom hates us so much for it. We are nothing to her. She traded us to have a prosperous pack. Ares will try to trade us back. He will call us cripple, worthless, incompetent too.
“Please,” I whispered again.
If he rejects us—she paused for a long time—don’t blame me. I tried to warn you.
A sharp ache split through my side, and I dug my fingers into the dirt. I clenched my jaw to try to keep my whimpers to myself. My skin suddenly stretched further than it should have. Instead of turning into fur, it continued to stretch, and so did my muscles. I could hear my bones snapping and joining back together in a terrorizing symphony.
Time passed, and I stopped counting the minutes until I shifted. Instead, I thought about each bone in my spine morphing into one of a wolf, breaking and bending at familiar angles. I needed to get through this.
My thoracic spine cracked, and I let out a piercing scream, feeling nothing but debilitating throbbing.
“Aurora”—Mars knelt down in front of me, placing his hands on the ground and scooting down to my level—“you don’t have to do this.”
I growled at him and then cried out to the Moon Goddess. Larger than human canines ripped through my gums, making them bleed. The blood slowly dripped out of my mouth, rolled down my neck, and fell on the dirt beneath me.
My lumbar spine cracked next, contorting into a shape that I hadn’t felt in a couple of months. The snap was worse than my thoracic, but the worst was when my cervical spine cracked, right above the stone.
Sweat dripped down my neck, and I tried so hard to shift. I tried so fucking hard. But the tenderness at my joints was unbearable. My bones continued to crack, every muscle in my spine seemed to be reverberating, tears streamed down my cheeks, and I couldn’t even quiet my cries.
We can’t. We can’t do it. Too much pain.
I furrowed my brows together and wildly shook my head back and forth. We had to.
We can’t.
My body suddenly felt weak, and my head was cloudy, the soreness so raw. I couldn’t do this. My wolf was right. All we were was weak. I slouched forward, trying to take some pressure off of my back. The stone was burning into my muscles and vertebrae so intensely that I felt like I was in flames.
Mars approached me, and I was about to scream at him to leave me alone. But then I saw his wolf standing over me.
He shoved his face into the crook of my neck and licked his mark. “You can do it, Kitten. You can do it.”
My heart clenched, and I used all the strength I had left. I pushed through all the hurt that I had ever felt. And I let the last part of my body—the vertebrae right near the stone—crack, so I could shift.
Chapter 29
Mars
I had absolutely no words for it.
Aurora had gone through hell, had been screaming, crying, and hurting for nearly ten minutes before she completed her shift while Ares and I looked on helplessly. And it was all to show us who she was, but it wasn’t what either of us had expected.
I’d watched her spine bend at three different angles and her bones break and fuse so many times that I lost count. My entire body ached, just from seeing it. I couldn’t even process how much pain and suffering she must have felt every time she shifted.
Nearly as big as us, she stood in her brown wolf with those piercing blue eyes. The mere size of her wolf made the shift almost unbearable for her, and I just knew that a shift like this would have killed her if she hadn’t had the stone.
My gaze slowly traveled down her body as I tried to remember every inch of her like this because I didn’t know when I would see something so beautiful again.
“Ares,” she said through the mind link, calling out to us.
While it usually bothered me when she called me that name, I didn’t mind right now. We were both here with her, and she needed the reassurance that Ares wouldn’t hurt her after what he had done earlier.
I wanted Aurora to be able to shift with ease. I didn’t like that she was in pain. She said that only half the stone was inside her, which meant the other half was still out there, carrying powerful
