Page 16 of Bred Mate (Stalked Mates #2)

“Mom, just let me fucking go,” I say, my hand pressed to my cheek. I could hit her back, but I won’t. Because there’s still respect in me somewhere. Because I’m not evil like she is. I’m still a real, full person. I’m still all together. I’m still intact.

“I’m not going to let this happen,” I tell her.

“Yes, you are. Because the other option is being dead. Ellie, I know you don’t think I love you, but I can tell you right now, this has to happen. So for once in your damn life, do as you’re fucking told.”

The nerve she has to give me this attitude, as if she has some real connection to me. I marvel at it, but the slap already told me not to challenge it. She’s deadly serious about whatever the hell it is that’s happening here.

I want to run, but she knows that. That’s the problem with being at odds with the one who made you. I’m part of her. She’s part of me. We can’t make a move without the other feeling it. I can feel myself being outplayed.

I give it one last attempt. I try getting angry, showing her that I’m not going to back down. There’s still some chance she’ll give up. After all, the one thing I know about this woman is that she’s a quitter.

“Let me fucking go!”

My anger doesn’t do anything for her, or to me.

“Not while you’re talking like that. We let you get away with being wild for far too long, leading your brothers astray. The good news is Rainer has a son who is looking for a wife. The sort of man who doesn’t take no for an answer.”

And just like that, it gets worse all over again.

“Do you hear yourself, Mom? You sound quite literally insane. Won’t take no for an answer? You’re going to give me to the fucking…” I can’t even finish the sentence. I always knew she wanted one particular thing for me, but I never thought she’d stoop this low. This is insane.

“I’m not going to marry the man you want me to marry, and I’m not going to do what he wants. I’m going to do what I’ve always done, Mom. I’m going to do what I fucking want to do, and nothing else.”

She smiles at me, unconcerned. “You’re not going to have a choice, honey. Rainer knows you’re an obstacle, and this is the only way to get you out of the way. I don’t want you getting hurt.”

“If you don’t want me getting hurt, you shouldn’t be doing this to me. I’m going to get hurt, Mom. I’m not single. I’m taken. I’m not free to be married. If you try to make me hook up with some other man, he’s going to end up…”

I was going to say dead, but hell, maybe that’s the solution to this problem. Maybe we get him good and dead. Fucker. If he’s willing to go along with this plan, he’s a bad person. If he can’t get a woman on his own, he’s probably a weakling.

“Alright. Fine. You don’t want me to fight this. I won’t,” I say.

She smiles, satisfied. She doesn’t know me as well as she’d like to, which means she doesn’t know I’m not capitulating completely.

Or maybe she does. Fuck. Maybe she’s just happy to have won one of the many little battles that will have to be won along the way to getting me to agree to this absolute insanity.

“Put the dress in the closet on, brush your hair, and try a little of the makeup in the bathroom.” She looks me up and down. “I want you presentable. You’re a pretty girl. Just like I was.”

“You’re still pretty, Mom.”

I don’t mean to compliment her, but it comes out automatically, just some kind of vestigial social nicety. She smiles when she hears it, though. But as soon as she smiles, it goes away, like she caught herself feeling something and she doesn’t want to.

God. This is a completely fucked situation and I am genuinely not sure how to get out of it.

I guess I’m just going to have to go through it.

I look at myself in the bathroom mirror and I wonder what the fuck is going on.

For years, I used to imagine Mom coming back and saving us. Then, around the time I turned sixteen, I started to accept that was never going to happen. Now she’s here, and what’s going on is making me realize I might have been luckier than I realized to get to raise myself in the woods.

“Come down for breakfast when you’re done,” she says. “Patrick is excited to meet you.”

I’m not excited to meet him, but I put the dress on. It’s a white and blue dress with a bow at the waist. Prairie style. Designed to make me look sweet and innocent. There are shoes too. They don’t fit. Too small. I leave them off and pad downstairs.

I can hear the low murmur of conversation coming from a dining room.

I could run out the front door.

I try that, padding on bare feet and hoping nobody hears me. The conversation in the dining room continues unabated, but my mother has the hearing of a wolf even if she doesn’t want to admit that’s why she can hear it.

I reach the door and try the handle. It turns a fraction, and for a moment I feel a true surge of excitement. I’m going to escape…

A moment later, it hits the lock plate and I know I’m not going anywhere. Not without a brutal, bloody fight.

“If you’re ready to join us, you’re welcome,” my mother calls out.

I stride into the dining room, hoping my gait makes my dress look stupid.

I don’t want to look appealing in any way, but I can see the way the bust of the garment is making my breasts look amazing.

I know that, because both sets of male eyes in the room I enter settle squarely and intensely on them.

There’s an old man here. My mortal enemy. Rainer Katsoff. His silver hair and his bright blue eyes might be appealing to someone who doesn’t care about moral fortitude, which explains my mother’s attraction to him.

My problem is sitting next to him wearing a crisp white shirt.

He stands up as I enter. He’s tall. About 6′3.

Tall enough to be handsome to most women.

I hate him immediately. He’s in this room, which means he’s fundamentally a coward doing his father’s bidding.

As he stands, he reveals blue slacks and a black belt with a golden buckle.

Nothing too flashy. Every inch of him reveals a general clinging to status quo and what looks good.

The longer I look at him, the more I hate him.

“Patrick, this is my daughter, Ellie,” my mother says. “Ellie, come and sit down. You must be starving after an exciting evening.”

“You mean being rounded up, put in jail, and then dragged off here while drugged into submission before being forced into whatever this is?”

“You’re being unpleasant,” my mother says. “You’re hungry. You need to eat something and improve your mood.”

“I’ve been hungry since you left me in the forest a decade ago.”

My mother rolls her eyes, as if I am being oversensitive and a little annoying. Her ability to downplay her criminal negligence is politician worthy.

Patrick is looking at me with the eyes of a dead fish that somehow move. There’s something about his face that’s just very flat and expressionless. It’s like he was alive at some point, and it was sucked out of him.

I sit down at the table, then I stand up again, because why am I making any effort to be polite?

Rainer is entirely indifferent to my discomfort. He is too busy trying to fit as much cheese inside a croissant as humanly possible. Ironically, my sworn nemesis is the least irritating person in this room right now.

“This is not going to work,” I say. “I am going to defend the forest no matter what.”

“It’s already been bulldozed,” Rainer grunts.

“Not the whole thing. I’m going to put it back. I’m going to tear apart anything you put there. I’m going to blow it up. I’m going to…”

Suddenly my head is spinning and ringing at the same time. It takes me a moment to realize that I’ve been hit. I don’t even know who did it. Someone behind me? The illusion of gentility is absolutely shattered as I collapse to the floor.

“Get up.”

I don’t know the voice. Turns out it’s Patrick, and when I don’t get up, he grabs me by the arm and just drags me out of the dining room like a sack of potatoes.

I hate this. I could kill him so easily.

I could kill them all so fucking easily.

The notion of being captive to humans is ridiculous—until I think of all the creatures humans make their captives.

There is no corner of the wild world they do not seek to tame. Why would I be an exception?

He takes me into a lounge, where he lets me go before shutting the door so we have some privacy in a room where there’s a big stuffed couch and an even bigger stuffed deer head mounted on the wall. Of course Rainer likes hunting and displaying his kills. Douchebag.

I look up at his son for a split second before scrambling up to my feet.

“You’re not my type,” he says. “So don’t worry.”

“So you’ll let me go?”

He shakes his head. “I’m going to put you somewhere safe. Don’t worry.”

I look at him and I see absolutely nothing to trust. I am very much worried.

“Are you being bribed into this or something? You don’t have to do it. You can just pretend to take me somewhere and let me go. They won’t be surprised. I’m really hard to keep anywhere. I don’t have a problem with you.”

He keeps giving me that dead fucking fish look, like he’s not invested in this situation at all, but he’s not going to let the whole thing go.

I hate it when people have absolutely no discernible motive for doing anything and yet seem to be absolutely intent on doing it.

It’s the worst. Most people are lazy. They get blamed for that and shamed for it, but I’d take a lazy person who will leave me alone over this bland walking wallpaper creature who has been given his orders and will carry them out no matter what.

“Just do as you’re told,” he says, as if that’s an option I have. As if that’s an option any captive creature has.

“What do you do?” I ask him.

“I manage a fund.”

Of course he fucking does. Breaks the world down to units of money and trades away every bit of feeling in the process.