Page 13 of Bred Mate (Stalked Mates #2)

K arl

“Didn’t expect to have to bail you out of a human jail.” My brother grins at me with an annoyingly smug smile. “Alpha of Louisiana pulled up on a bunch of petty charges. You’re really making the role your own, aren’t you.”

“They were charging us with terrorism. They weren’t that petty,” I say.

“They are now,” he replies.

Gray is looking good. He’s wearing a suit that brings out his eyes, and a shirt that looks like someone else ironed it. He’s always been good at landing on his feet, and he’s doing it better than ever now that he’s marrying an heiress.

“Our father should have left the pack to you,” I say.

“He doesn’t get on with my mate, remember?”

“Right,” I say. Gray’s mate is… well, a singular creature in a lot of ways.

Gray and I walk out of the jail together.

I’d say it feels like a triumph, but not really.

I didn’t like being caged. Didn’t like having to fight all my instincts.

It was good that the boys were with me. Gave me something to protect.

Connor was scared, but brave. Kept my mind off the walls that felt like they were closing in.

“If you wanted to buy a forest, all you had to do was ask. Callie and I would have been more than happy to help,” Gray says.

“They don’t want money.”

“Everybody wants money.”

“The guy wants a lot of money,” I correct myself. “They don’t want to be bought out now. They want to use the land for perpetuity. They want to claw every cent of profit from it from now until forever, and nobody can be bought out when they think like that.”

“You sound smarter than you used to,” he says. “Maybe leadership suits you.”

“We need to get Ellie out, asshole,” I say. “I don’t see her.”

The boys got out first. I insisted. Then Gray came back for me.

“Yeah,” he says. “About that.”

A few hours ago…

Ellie

After the cops caught us in the middle of nowhere, we were all put into different cars and taken away by different officers.

Being female, I got put into a cell separate from all the males.

I was worried about my brothers, and I was worried about Karl.

It didn’t occur to me to worry about myself until the door closed behind me.

And that’s what got me to this point. To lying in the dark, trying to sleep but also trying not to sleep. I know I need rest, but I also want to keep my wits about me. In the end, sleep gets me.

I don’t know what time it is when I open my eyes. Late. It’s dark outside the barred window. I am surprised I somehow fell asleep in captivity. But that’s not the only surprise I get. I am no longer alone in the cell.

There’s a woman with me. She’s wearing a white dress and she’s looking at me with an expression somewhere between love and sadness. Her lips part, and she speaks.

“So. Here you are. Flushed out from hiding after all of these years. I knew you wouldn’t be far away from all that nonsense in the woods.”

I look up into my mother’s eyes. I feel a brief flush of safety and warmth. Then I push it away, because giving into that would be the most dangerous thing I could possibly do.

“Fuck off, Mom.”

She smiles, though it’s not a pleasant smile. It’s the smirk of a woman who serves herself over and above anything else.

“You act as though I’m dead.”

“You are dead. Dead to me. Dead to us.”

I sit up. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Seeing her fills me with sadness and anger now that I think about everything that has happened, and everything that is going to happen because of her.

She gives me a long-suffering look. As if I am the problem in this room. As if she didn’t spend the last decade doing everything but being a mother.

“Why are you here?”

“I’m here because you’re in trouble, and I want to help you.”

“How did you even know?”

She smiles and extends her left hand. She’s got a rock the size of a small island on her ring finger.

“I’m marrying Rainer Katsoff,” she says. “So I know when trouble is afoot. I met the man you’ve roped into helping you the other day. He stormed right into the office as if nothing bad could ever happen to him. I showed him otherwise.”

“Wait. You’re the secretary who broke a bottle over Karl’s head?”

My mother gives me a chaotic little smile and spreads her hands in a sort of self-introductory gesture.

“One and the same,” she says.

She has my begrudging respect for that.

“So you abandoned us, shacked up with our mortal enemy, and you’re helping him destroy our home?”

“That’s one way of looking at it,” she says. “The other is that you are going to jail. You’re responsible for hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage, and worse, endless assaults. You’re going to bear the brunt of the blame, because you were in charge. I left you in charge.”

“I was a child!”

“You were old enough to take care of the boys. They’ve all survived, and so have you, so perhaps stop blaming your mother for a less than ideal childhood.”

The fucking nerve of this woman is unbelievable. She is so delusional she is outright dangerous. I feel the hair on the back of my neck standing upright as I try to work out why she is here and what she wants from me. It can’t just be to gloat. She looks more intentional than that.

I have not felt this hopeless in a long time.

I thought Karl would come for me, but I bet he’s probably tired of the whole situation.

He’s been putting up with my bullshit for how long and all it’s gotten us is arrested.

Also, on the way out, I’m pretty sure I saw machinery with floodlights on it.

I’d bet that while we sit in these cells, heavy machinery is going to be ripping through the last of the houses on the home range.

We’ve lost.

I’ve lost.

Everything I cared about is gone.

“It didn’t have to be this way,” my mother says. “You could have had a piece of the pie if you’d just agreed to be slightly civilized. You could have gone to college, you could have met a nice man. You could have had a normal human life.”

“We’re not human, Mom, and you know it.”

Her eyes narrow at me, because I just said the one thing nobody is allowed to say to her. If we said it to her as kids, she made sure we suffered for it. It looks like nothing has really changed.

“That’s a delusion,” she says. “And a dangerous one.”

My mother is a shifter who won’t fucking shift.

She denies she’s one. And she hates our wolf sides.

She’s convinced herself that none of it was ever real or true.

Even seeing her own kids shift isn’t enough to convince her.

Some people don’t respect proof, no matter what you give them.

No matter what they know about themselves.

“I can’t let you keep getting into trouble,” she says. “I can’t let you be in the way of what needs to happen. So you’re going to come with me, sweetheart.”

“No. I’m not.”

“Yes,” she says. “You are. I’m sorry, baby, but this has gone on too long. You’re living like an animal, and I won’t have it.”

The cell door opens, and two big, burly men step in. I’m not going to be given a choice in this. I don’t know what she plans to do to me, and I don’t intend to find out.

“Watch out for her, she’s vicious,” my mother says as they grab me.

“Don’t worry, ma’am. We know how to handle trouble,” one of them replies. I feel a brief prick in the side of my neck, and a moment later, everything goes to cozy, lovely black.

Back in the usual flow of narrative time…

Karl

“I tried to bail her out,” Gray says. “But I must have gotten her name wrong.”

“Alright. Let’s go in and get her.” I grab him by the lapel and stride back into the police building. Gray slaps at my hands, but I want him right beside me. This is the most important thing. We have to get Ellie out, and we have to do it now.

“Can I help you?” The cop behind the desk talks to me as if he’s already forgotten I just got out of here. He’s a middle-aged guy with a defeated look in his eyes. He might actually have forgotten me in the interim. Doesn’t look like there’s much going on up there.

“I’d like to bail my… girlfriend.” I say. I was going to say mate, but of course humans don’t recognize mates.

He sighs and slowly turns toward the computer, which is so old it has been yellowed by sun and probably runs on Windows 97.

“What’s her name?”

“Ellie.”

“Ellie…” he draws the pause out. “What’s her last name?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “We got arrested together, but I never asked her last name. We were busy with other activities most of the time.”

“You’re going to need to know her last name to post bail for her.”

“Just tell me what Ellie you’ve got in there, and I’ll take her.”

I want to punch him in the face, but instead I slide a crisp hundred-dollar bill across the counter. “Please.”

What the fuck is happening to me? I barely recognize myself.

“Alright,” he says. “Looks like we’ve got an Ellie back here. Bail’s set at three grand. You want to pay that now? Can’t get her out if not.”

Three grand seems fairly reasonable all things considered, so I pay it.

He goes away, and I wait. I hate that I let my mate be arrested, that someone was able to sneak up on me and take her. I should have prevented all of this. But hopefully a night in jail won’t have been too rough on her.

“Here she is.”

He comes back with a woman wearing bright pink leg warmers, an oversized shrug sweater, and dirty sneakers. She looks at me, confused. I look at her, even more confused.

“Who is this?”

“Ellie,” the cop says.

“Ellie? Who the fuck is Ellie?” The woman looks confused. “I’m Aline.”

“Thought you’d spelled Ellie wrong,” the cop says. “Guess I’d better take you back.”

“Wait. No. I was out. I got bail. You told me I got bail!”

“Sorry, Aline. They’re looking for someone else,” the cop says.

“Are you sure? They paid my bail. You already told me. You can’t take it back. No take backs. That’s the rules.”

“You’re coming back with me!”

“What did she do?” Gray cuts in.

“What did you do, Aline?”

“Nothin’,” she says, sulky.

“Did you see a girl in there?”