Aella's POV

"Aaargh! I'm so fucking bored!" Aella yelled and sank into the couch by the window. She swung her legs lazily, looking around for something that she could do.

If you're bored, then go do something interesting. Her wolf said, rolling her eyes. There are a ton of things to do, girl.

What exactly is fun to do around here? Aella replied to her mate. Should I go out and start running around a training ground with teenage wolves?

She missed Louve so much. She could not imagine that she would miss someone she had just met, but that was how she felt. She had never missed a person in her entire life, except Logan on some days, but Logan was different. He was her mate and she had no other option but to have those feelings for him. It seemed that her usual characters were changing in ways that she could not explain.

She picked up the book she was reading and tried to busy herself with reading but she just couldn't. She couldn't concentrate or do anything meaningful. She was restless and anxious and she could not really give a coherent reason why.

She decided to step out of the room and take a stroll around the pack's garden. The garden was the only taste of nature she could get, apart from the woods, the only place she could walk barefoot and feel the grass under her feet, the only place she could spread her arms and feel the wind in her hair without getting a scolding from Logan.

She walked out and went downstairs, walking slowly through the garden. She giggled like a little schoolgirl as she crouched and dipped her hands into the damp soil. She put her hands to her nose and took a whiff of the soil. It smelled so fresh and neat, and she could not think of anything more satisfying.

Suddenly she heard an intrusive noise and stopped abruptly. She looked behind her and saw that nobody was there. Her sharp ears caught the noise, which was coming to her left. She quickly stood up and dusted the soil from her hands, following the sound to where it was coming from. She turned the corner to her left and the noise increased as she drew nearer.

She came out of the garden and saw Louve walking on the pack house's lawn. She was walking in a distracted manner and Aella resisted the urge to call out her name. She looked back toward the direction Louve was coming from and saw that the front door of the pack house had been left ajar. She knew that leaving the door ajar was dangerous as any intruder could come in, but instead of closing the door, she decided to follow Louve closely.

Louve stopped in the middle of the lawn and began sniffing. While Aella was wondering what was going on with the other woman, she saw Logan walk out of the pack house and call after his cousin. When she did not answer him, he closed the doors securely behind him.

Logan walked away from the pack house and towards a sniffing Louve. Aella watched them exchange some words, then Louve stormed off angrily towards the forest. She saw as Logan followed her into the forest, then she closely followed him too.

She tried to leave a fair distance between herself and Logan so as not to give herself away. She followed them into the forest, where she watched as Casper came out of the woods and Louve stared at him as though in a trance. They stared at each other with so much love, and Aella began to wonder why hers wasn’t like that of Casper and Louve. 

Granted that when they imprinted she was half-dead, but she felt like the subsequent times should have made everything better. They should have gotten closer over the weeks but all they had done was annoy each other to death. There was too much tension between her and logan, and she had tried to keep her distance so as not to increase the tension. But it was really frustrating, trying to stay away from someone whom fate kept bringing back to you one way or another.

Nevertheless, she felt happy for them, Louve especially. The woman had confessed to her how she had desperately prayed for a mate, how she had envied all those mates she had helped join together. And now the Goddess had answered her prayers.

Aella turned from the scene of the imprinting and went back into the gardens, where she continued to stroll. The garden was vastly populated by white tulips, which were Aella's favorite flowers. She sniffed appreciatively as she walked through them and the scent calmed her. Soon she was in the middle of the garden and she sank her feet into the soft soil. If she had to leave the pack eventually and there was anything she would miss, it would be the great outdoors.

The garden covered a fair expanse of land behind the packhouse, and it connected to a part of the forest and the border. Aella continued to walk until she was at the very end of the garden. There was a grove of trees there, right in front of a fairly large river. Aella had never been here before.

She walked through the grove of trees to the riverbank, where there was an extension or a walkway that stretched over a small part of the river. Aella guessed that that was where the fishermen stood or sat when they wanted to fish. She got there and the fresh breeze of the river washed over her.

She pulled off her shoes and sat on the walkway, dipping her feet into the water. She giggled happily at the contact her feet made with the water, as she had severely missed the little things of nature like this. It had been several weeks since she had been found at the border of Logan's pack, and she hadn't had contact with any body of water like this. The recent snowfall had made the water to be icy cold but her tough wolf skin could handle any extreme temperature.

Aella stared into the distance and began to reminisce about the different timelines of her life. Most of her formative years had been spent in the wild with her parents before death caught up to them. All she had known was shown to her in the wild, and she could only imagine how her life would have turned out if she wasn't brought up outside a normal pack life.

Her parents had shown her the tougher side of things, always telling her that nothing good came easy. They had taught her to always take the bull by the horns, to go to the extreme to get whatever she wanted. And to be holed up in a pack with boundaries around was very restrictive and alien to her nature. 

She wasn't even sure of what she wanted anymore. She had thought that having a mate or imprinting on someone was something she would never do but here she was, far away from her home and mated to an alpha.

She quickly pushed those thoughts out of her mind and removed her legs from the water angrily. It would change nothing to think about things she could not change. 

As she proceeded to wear her shoes, a shadow passed fleetingly behind her. She looked back suddenly, thinking it was Logan. But she didn't see anybody behind her. She looked back, thinking it was a trick of the sun. But then the shadow passed again and the hairs on the back of her neck stood up in danger. She looked back again with her fangs bared and her claws out, growling menacingly. But before she could do anything, something heavy hit her across the face. She could barely let out a scream of surprise before she crumpled to an unconscious heap on the grass.