Page 1 of Bred Mate (Stalked Mates #2)

K arl

Argh!

There’s a scream, a big shadow, and a crash as someone is thrown over my head and into a stack of top shelf liquor bottles on display for the patrons of this once fine establishment. I sip my drink and let the mayhem unfold around me.

I used to get into this part of things, but I’m getting older. Maturing. I have more responsibilities, and less interest in the kind of rough bickering that’s happening now. Don’t want to pull a muscle, not while I’m enjoying this particularly fine whiskey they had stashed behind the bar.

A gang tried to move into our territory. Thought they’d show up with wolf patches of all fucking things.

A bullet sings past my ear. I don’t bother to move. Danger has already passed.

When my father was in charge of things around here, this would never have happened. Nobody else would ever have dared move in on our territory. They would have come with their heads lowered and they would have asked nicely if they could live in our city.

Since word got out that he moved to Hawaii to retire, every shitty little pack with ideas of grandeur has been testing my patience.

The world has gone to hell, and I am Cerberus.

The whiskey burns on the way down, tempering the rage I’ve been trying to stuff down for the past several weeks.

It was never supposed to be this way. I knew I’d lead the pack one day, but I didn’t expect it to be because my father made a series of fucking stupid decisions and then fucked off to leave me to deal with the aftermath.

Some little upstart wearing a wolf vest has the nerve to step up beside me. I’m guessing this is the gang’s alpha, trying his own little power play in the midst of madness.

“I heard there’s a real werewolf now,” he says. “Not a shifter, an actual walks on two legs fucking…”

“You heard wrong,” I say, my voice a low, dominant growl.

“I heard Orion’s lab made a freak of nature and now your brother is fucking it.”

I punch in the direction of the voice and it stops.

My knuckles ache a bit, but the whiskey takes the edge off.

I don’t have time for this shit. My phone vibrates in my pocket, picking the wrong fucking time to get my attention.

I snatch it out of my pants, throw it on the floor, and stamp it with the heel of my boot.

I hate technology.

My father’s obsession with it to engineer an army of shifter pure bloods was doomed to fail from the beginning. If nature wanted a lot of wolves roaming the planet, she’d have put them here. Truth is there’s only so much room for so many apex predators.

I turn around and survey the bar. When we walked in here, it was full of about thirty little fucking upstarts from Arkansas thinking they had a chance to move south and take some territory.

I don’t have the reputation my father did, because I was always the enforcer. Not exactly a public facing role.

Now I’m the alpha of New Orleans, and hell, in my mind, Louisiana. I am not my father. I am something much worse. They’re going to learn that. Every single wolf in this state is going to bow to me, or I am going to make them regret the day they were whelped. That’s a promise.

The bar is trashed. Bodies everywhere. I can smell a little death in the air, but most of them are still alive, just beat to hell.

My men, the ones who stayed with me when the political shit show went down, are the roughest and toughest the pack ever boasted.

Now that we’re effectively all that’s left, we’re making our mark, one mass beating at a time.

“Get them into a warehouse and lock them behind silver,” I order my men. “Let’s make a fucking example of them. I want every wolf from Los Angeles to New York to know how we run things here, understand?”

There’s a rumble of assent, and the boys start picking up bodies. There are vans outside that can carry more than this number of people if needed, especially if they’re stacked neatly.

I turn back to my whiskey. Job well done. Wish it felt more satisfying, but I guess you can’t really decide how you feel about things. You’ve just got to do what has to be done. That’s what being an alpha is. Taking care of problems forever.

“Boss?”

My friend Raglan gives me a quick nudge. “We’ve got a human problem. When the shit kicked off in here, not everyone was human. Girl saw some of the boys shifting. Freaked out. Tried to record it. We think we stopped her, but so much of this shit goes straight to the cloud.”

The cloud. We’re worried about remote fucking computer servers. I hate it. I hate everything I have to concern myself with that feels like a sneaky little trick by a weak little fucker who couldn’t stand up in a fight.

“Why haven’t they taken care of her?” I don’t even bother to turn my head as I ask the question.

“She’s pretty.”

I sigh inwardly and finish my drink. Humans who see wolf shifters have to be killed. Period.

Recent events have made that more clear than ever.

Letting people live when they know what wolves are is asking for trouble of a kind that disrupts and puts everyone in danger.

Better to kill one or two people every now and then, than to be exposed as supernatural creatures in a world starved of magic.

“I’ll take care of her.”

He shifts uncomfortably. “She’s really pretty, boss.”

“Not a problem.”

I get up from the barstool, aware that every eye in the place is on me. These are my men, my pack mates. Some of them are friends, but most of them are underlings who like to do what they’re told. It gives them a place in the world, somewhere to belong, and someone to belong to.

They respect me, and they fear me. Some of them probably hate me, too.

There’s no doubt in my mind that they’d prefer to be under my father’s law.

He was old-fashioned. He’d been in power for the better part of forty years.

Most people here don’t remember a time before Orion Dulac.

Karl Dulac doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

I’ll deal with the girl who saw too much.

I’ll deal with it because it’s my fucking job, and because half the reason I’m in the mood I’m in is because someone else failed to deal with another cute girl who saw too much.

Being adorable is not a get out of death free card when it comes to me.

I’ve spent years hardening my heart. Hell, my dad ensured it would be hard from the moment I was born.

I was raised to rule the pack one day, but the truth is I’m not like him.

I’m not a strategist. I’m not a diplomat.

I’m not even really a leader. I’m a brute.

I know it, and I let everyone else know it.

“Where is she?”

“Put her in the back office, boss. Sorry.”

This won’t take a minute.

I go through the door marked Management Only to the office.

It’s full of all the crap involved with running a business.

I don’t pay attention to the location. I pay attention to the female who must die.

My tongue runs over the sharp points of my teeth as I look at her.

I like killing. I never hesitate. I bite the neck or I pull the trigger, and that is the end of it.

Seconds pass by. We look at each other.

She should be dead already.

Why is she still alive?

She looks at me with seductive eyes full of some kind of emotion I can’t quite place.

It might be fear. If it is, it’s fear mixed with something else.

Raglan was right. She is very, very pretty.

She has long dark hair, big brown eyes, and the kind of features that angels would be jealous of.

Generous, wide mouth. Cute nose. Her face is round and her chin is sharp and her body is all curves.

She’s wearing leather. I wonder if there’s a cute pink bike out there with a fuzzy toy on the end of the keychain and a bunny ear cover on the helmet.

“Please don’t hurt me,” she says.

My anger flares. How dare she ask for mercy in a world where it doesn’t exist? She thinks she’s special, that she gets to break the rules. That’s what everyone thinks these days, that consequences don’t apply to them.

I walk over to where she’s standing, bend down, get ready to snap her neck.

She punches me in the throat.

Straight arm, twisted hips, she puts her whole weight behind it.

There aren’t a lot of places a human woman can hit a wolf shifter and make an impact. She hits one, and then finds the other, significantly further south, driving her knee right up into my crotch with a viciousness that I’ve really only previously encountered in myself.

“I’m sorry,” she says, her voice timid. “I can’t die today. I’ve got things to do. Don’t come after me, okay? I don’t want to have to kill you.”

Her small hands roam my pants for a brief moment, before she snatches my keys out of the interior.

She doesn’t want to have to kill me . What fucking irony.

Just like that, she’s gone. Out through the door I came in. I hear my car start, because of course she’s taking my vehicle.

“Fuck!” I slam my fist into the wall as I try to get my breath back. My balls feel like they just had an anvil land on them, but that’s not going to be enough to stop me. I get up and I go after that little fucking bitch.

Ellie

The memory of those broken eyes boring into mine is going to stay with me for a while.

He was the most intense creature I’ve ever seen, I think, and that includes the wolves I saw becoming men earlier on in the night.

I’m not used to big cities. I’m not used to people who are this outright mean and aggressive.

I was lurking in the bar, trying to get some information, trying to get my way to someone who matters.

I don’t have time to die. I have stuff to live for.

I’ve got to get away from that place as soon as possible, and that’s why it’s okay that I stole his car.

It means he can’t follow me and I can just leave the keys in it later and avoid any criminal charges hopefully.

I figure I’ve gotten away.

I figure wrong.