To Love Hate

Chapter One

"In three words I can sum up everything I know about life,

it goes on."

-Robert Frost

"Oliver, you are being dramatic. I went straight there and came straight back. It wasn't like I had choice, I was held back by a client and had to improvise. What did you expect me to do? Just leave her in pain?" I coat the tips of my fingers with soap, scrubbing vigorously at my nails as my gut wrenches.

He's right. I broke our rules, stayed out past late and left them all worried sick. But to admit that would be to dismiss the fact that I needed to break the rules, that saving one life was worth it.

I hazard a glance towards my husband, assessing his usually bright emerald green that are darkened into a shade of sternness. He unfolds his tight arms and lets out a frustrated sigh, running his fingers through his clipped brown hair.

"Mae, you know the rules. You can't just vanish like that and not tell anyone, who knows what could've happened?" His voice is strained as he pleads, causing guilt to crash over me like a tidal wave. "And none of us would've known. We need to stick together, play as a team. I know you meant well but to come home and find you gone... it's not a risk I'm comfortable with you taking."

I run my hand underneath the cloudy water of the faucet and turn to face him, my heart hammering in my chest. A fight brews beneath my skin, itching to break out and wear his words down but one look at the broken crevices of his face convinces me otherwise.

My icy fingers rest gently onto his warm skin, but he doesn't flinch from my cold touch. Instead, his face breaks even further and he just grabs my body, crashing it into his own in a firm embrace.

He grips me as if I would crumble into dust should he remove the pressure. Oliver's body shakes as he exhales deeply, and I lean into the heat of him as he cradles me to his chest.

"I was so scared," he admits, the words a whisper on the wind. "When you weren't here... I waited two hours."

Enough time for me to be stone cold, thrown in a ditch somewhere or tied up as an example to the others of what happens when a human breaks curfew.

I pull back, staring up at his concern as my brows knit together. He was scared, despite the fact that he'd shown me nothing but pure frustration the moment I stepped through the door. Any anger he had was a front for the fear that crippled him, that crippled us all.

He thought that I had been killed, or worse, taken.

"I'm sorry," I admit, my defeat a bitter pill to swallow. I shouldn't have to be sorry, I went out to help an injured human near dusk. These rules that suffocate all of us are insufferable, made worse by their necessity and the cruel creatures that enforce them.

The calloused skin of his palm brushes against my cheek. "I know, just please, promise me Mae that you won't do it again. Stick to the sectors, let the patients come to you. The wolves that patrol around here are far less likely to cause us any trouble."

Because they were all mated. New wolves, the ones young enough to be an issue were all in the higher sectors or sent to train in the national guard. The streets of these lower sectors were roamed by older pack officials, ones that stuck to their rotations and intervened only when necessary.

"I'm nearly twenty-five," I tell him, but his expression only hardens.

"It's not worth the risk," he repeats, firm once more. He turned twenty-six three months ago but I was still of age to be taken and paired to one of them. "Think of Avery."

I tore my gaze away from as ice filled my veins, shaking the memory from the deep dark place in my mind I shoved it into. I was there the night she was dragged away into the darkness as tall monster sunk his canines straight into her flesh. I'll never forget the blood, or that the last thing I ever heard from her lips was a scream of terror and agony before her lifeless eyes rolled to the back of her head.