Page 15 of Bred Mate (Stalked Mates #2)

E llie

I wake up in a bedroom with wallpaper of blue cornflowers and a matching bedspread.

The room smells like dried flowers and the aftermath of a vacuum.

It smells clean and sterile, the only nature here having been killed before it was allowed in.

When I look to the upper corners of the room, there’s not a hint of a spider, not a little thread of a web.

I’m wearing a clean white shift dress.

Someone bathed me after I was drugged. Someone gave me a fucking pedicure. My toes are a light teal. I match the fucking bedspread.

“The fuck, Mom,” I curse.

I thought we’d never see her again after she had Connor. She was dead to us. She was supposed to stay dead.

Waking up in this full-size doll house is an insult to everything I’ve gone through to this point.

I look at the disgustingly clean ceiling, and I try not to remember, but the thoughts keep forcing their way through my mind.

Over and over again they come. I try to think of something else.

Anything else. But it’s impossible, because there is no sound like a baby crying.

It pierces your mind. Makes it impossible to think about anything else.

Ten years ago…

There’s a three-month-old baby in my arms. I’m twelve years old. I don’t know what I’m doing, because he won’t stop crying. My other brothers are small and they’re hungry, and there’s no food in the house.

The Doyles next door moved out three days ago. They offered to take us, but I said we’d stay here. I told them our father was coming back soon. I didn’t want to leave.

“I’m hungry,” Tate says. He’s small and he’s skinny and I know he needs more than we’ve had these last few days.

I’ve got to feed my brothers. I’ve got to help us all survive.

It’s my job now. Nobody else is coming to save us.

Anybody who comes will probably try to put us into some awful foster home where we’ll never be able to be ourselves.

And if the boys accidentally shift, I don’t even know what will happen. We have to stay wild.

And that’s what we’re going to do.

I get us all in the old ute and we drive into town.

I learned how to drive last week. I stacked some old books on the seat to help with that, but then I couldn’t reach the pedals.

Tim fixed that problem by tying old blocks of wood to them.

So we can get along now. We can get to town and get our supplies, water and formula for the baby, and snacks for us. I can hunt, too.

We don’t need a mom or a dad. That’s for kids, and we haven’t been kids for ages.

I make sure everybody puts their seatbelts on and that Tim holds the baby real tight.

“Don’t let him go anywhere,” I tell him.

He locks his fingers around Connor’s tummy and nods at me seriously. Off we go down the road, bumping when we hit the potholes that are left from all the rain washing out the road so many times.

It’s the first time I’ve ever felt proud of myself. And it’s the first time I’ve felt as though I have any chance whatsoever of keeping my family together.

Baby Connor squeals with excitement, the boys laugh, and we all go get burgers.

The memory fades as the squeal of the baby’s cry turns into the squeal of the hinge of a door that hasn’t been tended to as well as the general decor of the house would suggest.

My mother steps into the room.

In daylight she looks the same as I remember her, which is weird because it’s been ten years.

She should be so much older. She should be lined and wrinkled and gray, but I guess now that I think about it and do a little math, she’s only forty years old.

I think of her like a ghost, or a corpse. It’s the ghost I’m seeing now.

“Why am I here?”

I could ask where I am, but I think I know exactly where I am.

“You’ve gotten old enough to be a problem,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest and smiling at me in a way that is not maternal or friendly. “I thought you’d find a man and go settle down somewhere civilized. But you stayed right in the same hole I left you.”

“The hole where you abandoned us,” I remind her. “When Connor was a baby.”

“We’re not here to talk about the past,” she says in the breezy way people who did terrible things in the past always do. Must be nice to be the sort of person who can walk away from every single one of your kids and start over like they’re nothing.

I think about Karl, how he’s been trying to get me pregnant. What if I’m the same kind of mother she is? What if I decide to walk away from my babies because they’re inconvenient? What if I’m already pregnant? Just looking into her face makes me doubt myself to my core.

“What are we here to talk about?”

“You could have gone to jail. You should be glad to be here, in a safe house and home.”

There’s nothing safe about this home, that’s for sure. This is like some simulation of a home, the idea of one, but none of the reality. It looks like one. I bet every inch of it has been designed to look like a show home. But it’s inhabited by her.

I don’t say anything. I don’t want her to know what I’m thinking. It’s too much that she’s looking at me.

“I wasn’t the best mother in the past,” she says as if she missed a few school lunches, or maybe couldn’t make a dance recital or two.

“But I’m going to make up for that now, because baby, if you don’t stop doing what you’re doing, you’re going to end up dead.

Rainer doesn’t like it when people get in his way.

If it weren’t for the fact you’re my daughter, you’d have disappeared last night in a whole other way.

Your brothers, too. Now I’ve told him that the boys aren’t going to be a problem.

He believed me. He didn’t believe me about you, though.

You’ve been too much trouble for too long.

There’re too many stories about a dark-haired mad woman who rips cooling systems out of trucks and assaults grown men just trying to get their work done. ”

I smile out of pride.

“Boys did that too,” I said.

“Yes, honey, but they do it because you do it. They follow you. And the man you’ve got hanging around? We’ll take care of him too.”

“You killed him?”

“We won’t need to. We just have to take you out of the picture, and the whole thing falls apart.”

She smiles at me, and it’s a creepy, demented sort of smile. One that makes me feel like I’m being hunted. This woman doesn’t feel like my mother anymore. I don’t know if she ever did. Right now she’s a malevolent stranger.

“I never thought I’d see this day,” she says. “I’m glad I get to.”

“Get to do what?”

“See you getting married.”

My stomach turns. “What do you mean? I’m not getting married.”

“Of course you are, sweetheart,” she says. “That’s what you need, a marriage. To a solid man who doesn’t entertain your fantasies about acting like a wild thing and living in a forest. You need someone who can keep you grounded and ensure that you live a good and healthy life.”

She’s talking like someone who cares, but the words are hollow. She’s like an animatronic of a mother, playing the role without feeling a thing.

“I’m not going to get married, Mom. Who would be stupid enough to marry me?”

I want to follow up with another question: who would be stupid enough to try to force this?

But I don’t, because the hair has been standing up on the back of my neck since I woke up. Bad things are happening to me, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

“Don’t worry. I’ve found someone who wants the job,” she says. “And if you’re a good girl, you might even find that one day you’re happy. I know this isn’t what you want, but a mother has to make decisions for her children that they don’t like sometimes because she knows what’s best.”

The fucking audacity to say that after she left her practically newborn baby to be raised by me a decade ago is astonishing.

“Do you have Connor too?”

“Who?” She frowns slightly, as if she almost recognizes the name she gave her third son, but doesn’t quite put two and two together.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “Nothing for you to concern yourself with.”

I’ve got to get the hell out of here. “I need to go to the bathroom,” I say.

“Don’t try climbing out the window. It’s nailed shut. There’s no getting out of this house any way except through the front door.”

“That’s a fire hazard,” I tell her.

“Yes. Well, we like to live dangerously sometimes,” she says. She’s enjoying this, because she’s getting to exercise power. She needs some kind of outlet for her animal self, but she doesn’t have anything besides whatever the fuck is happening now.

“Why are you doing this?”

“For you, sweetheart.”

“Don’t those words just make you feel sick saying them?

” I ask bitterly. “You haven’t seen me since I was twelve.

You’re not doing anything for me. You’re doing this for you.

I bet you put Rainer up to the task of developing the forest so you could eliminate it.

Because you want to erase what happened there.

If you can get rid of the place, and if you can get me married, and if the boys scatter to the wind because they don’t matter, just like you intended for them not to matter, then it’s like you were never evil. ”

She slaps me across the face. Faster and harder than I thought. I catch the brunt of it.

“Don’t you talk to me like that,” she says. “I am your mother!”

She says it with perfect offense, as if she’s done nothing wrong.

She doesn’t want to be reminded of what she is, not of her wolf nature, not of the way she abandoned us.

She wants me to shut up and play my role in this little game of hers because some little part of her, some twisted, gnarled little nut of it is telling her to keep me alive.

I don’t know where that comes from, but I know there’s no way I can trust it.