Page 17 of Bred Mate (Stalked Mates #2)

“Okay, so you know about good investments,” I say, forcing myself to try to speak his language.

“That means you should understand when someone is warning you off a bad one. You don’t want to be involved with me.

Not even as the wife you park in a house somewhere while you go fuck a line of coked-up secretaries. ”

There’s a flicker of light in his eyes for a second, at the mention of the word coke.

Of course. He looks dead because his brain is fried.

At a resting state, there’s nothing going on.

He needs a stimulant to feel anything. He probably needs to do a line just to get his brain to work in the morning, but he hasn’t been able to do one here because my mother is controlling everything that happens in this house and he’s a little afraid of her for reasons he can’t quite understand.

There’s a part of his mind that already knows exactly who and what she is.

“You’re rude,” he says.

Fuck me. He’s just not going to understand. He’s going to willfully refuse to get it because he’s more invested in doing Daddy’s bidding than making a good choice for himself.

“You’re a liability. We have a very big development going into the forest and your insistence on sabotaging it is unacceptable. You should be in jail, but you can have some babies instead. I don’t like you, but I will fuck a baby into you.”

“Good luck with that,” I mutter under my breath.

I think I might already be pregnant. I hope I am.

I hope I still have that bit of Karl with me.

Thinking about it makes me feel safe and connected to him, though if I was it would probably only be a collection of cells with gills or whatever at this point.

“You’ll let me do what I want to you,” Patrick says.

It’s the same sentiment that Karl’s given before, but it’s not hot.

It’s just gross. He disgusts me in a deep, visceral way.

I can’t even imagine the abominations I’d give birth to if he were to somehow impregnate me.

Bland little boring children of the financial corn.

He’s really not getting it. He sees a woman in a dress, just like my mother wanted him to. And he thinks that he can bully me because most women in dresses can be bullied, just like his father no doubt taught him. Fuck.

I used to think Karl was a terrible guy, and he is. But there are worse. There’s this. This man who owns a world he’ll never be a part of. This man who might as well be shrink-wrapped in plastic.

“You couldn’t get anything pregnant,” I say. “You look like you shoot blank checks.”

He narrows his eyes. “That sounded like a compliment.”

“Yeah. I fucked it up,” I snap back.

Karl would have laughed. This guy doesn’t. This guy just stands in front of me internally spiritually decomposing and presenting a clear physical danger I can’t allow myself to deal with because of the consequences. If I murder all these people, there are going to be repercussions.

He looks at me like I’m an annoying problem, like I’m something to put in a category and fix. I don’t know how to get out of this in a human form. I don’t really know how to navigate anything in a human form.

There’s a lot of money at stake in the forestry development, and because I don’t care about money, it never really occurred to me that anyone else would go to this extreme to kidnap me.

“You’re going to do as you’re told,” he says.

“Or what?”

I can’t help the words as they come out of me. It’s an automatic response. And it infuriates him.

Whap!

He smacks me across the face hard enough to make my ears ring.

There’s a moment in which I can’t think, in which all I feel is rage.

But when I look at him, I see that he’s not angry at all.

He’s just looking at me with that clear, calculating expression, trying to tell if he hit me hard enough.

Trying to work out what he’ll have to do next to make me do what he wants.

He’s not an animal like me. He’s not even really a man.

He’s a walking computational robot, and that makes him the most dangerous creature I’ve ever encountered.

I’m a little excited as I make a silent vow to myself to kill him.

It’s not often that I get to kill anyone.

Shifters are mostly peaceful, but there’s always some part of us that makes us dangerous in ways people cannot be.

It’s a hunting instinct, a sort of prey drive that only applies to humans.

Every shifter wants to kill someone. Most of us don’t, because we understand consequences, and because when we do we get hunted to near extinction.

But I think I will make an exception for this man.

“Good,” he says. “You know how to be quiet. I want you to stay that way.”

I think about ripping his throat out in a wooded area somewhere. I think about how warm his blood will be in my mouth, how his flesh will nourish me…

“Come here,” he says, making a swirling motion with his finger. He wants me to turn around. I don’t want to. I don’t trust him in front of me, and I definitely don’t trust him behind me.

“What are you doing?”

I don’t really need to ask. I know what he’s doing.

His arms extend out around my shoulders and a little flash of reflected light sparkles.

He’s putting a silver necklace around my throat.

I catch a glance of myself in a mirror hanging on the wall.

I look pale and feminine. I look weak. I look small.

And the thing going around my neck isn’t really a necklace.

It’s more of a choker really. Or, more to the point, a collar.

“I want you to look pretty,” he says. “You don’t have any jewelry on. You look feral. If you’re going to pass as my wife, you need to start looking the part.”

I pull back from the silver as it touches me. It does not feel comfortable. It’s not like in movies and media and stuff where you start screaming if the metal touches you, but it definitely doesn’t feel good. It’s like a creepy, unsettling feeling.

“It burns,” I say, before correcting myself. “I mean, I prefer gold.”

“You’ll wear silver,” he says. I wonder if he knows why he is being so insistent, or if it is just because he likes to get his own way and enjoys my discomfort.

“I’m allergic. It’ll leave a rash.” I try reasonable excuses, because I know that saying no is going to make him force me even harder.

“You ungrateful…” He narrows his eyes, and I see the flash of temper.

The memory of being hit makes me recoil, and mollifies him slightly.

He likes to see my fear, I realize. My mother has really pulled some truly villainous shit here.

She found a sadist to shackle me to, a ball and chain designed to drag me down and make me fucking drown.

The silver is around my neck, locked in place. He could have given me some light necklace, but of course he went with a thick choker, a mark of ownership. I’m being humiliated by slow degrees by people who hate me for trying to make them less terrible than they are.

“Who told you to put silver on me?”

“Your mother.”

Yes. Humiliated and betrayed. That’s what they want for me. They want me broken in a way I won’t ever recover from.

I won’t have it.

But he obviously knows the ways to control me.

She’s told him something. Maybe not the truth, but something.

They’re going to keep me silvered. They’re going to keep me uncomfortable and weak.

They’re going to drain the life out of me until one day I’m like her, not remembering how wild I am.

If this goes on long enough, I’ll be the spitting image of my mother.

“You always do what my mother says? You want your trophy wife in a cheap soft metal?”

I try to manipulate him through shame. He seems like the type to respond to it.

“You need to put a longer dress on,” he says. “You look like a whore.”

I have a brief flash of a vision of his arterial blood arcing across the room.

“This one is below the knee,” I say.

“I can see your tits, whore.”

For a moment, I almost want to laugh, because he’s so deeply unpleasant. Most men would be happy to see a woman’s breasts. The fact that he looks so viscerally disgusted makes me think there’s a reason his father is trying to marry him off.

“Get changed,” he says flatly, turning and walking out of the room.

Get changed into fucking what? Does he think I live here? Does he think I have a wardrobe? Or does he just live in some kind of magical male world where women can pull magic clothing out of the ether? All the women he knows always look like whatever he thinks they should look like.

I wonder what to do. Go ask my mother for an even more subtle and demure dress? Roll myself in the rug and call it a day? Smash my way through the window?

Honestly, I should smash my way through the window.

I pick up a heavy statue that feels like it was bought from an artist who probably really cared about what they were doing, but whoever put it here chose it because it matches the rug and the throw pillows.

I should be more impressed with being in a nice house with plenty of comfortable things, but I just want the wilds.

Before I can smash the window, the door to the lounge opens.

It’s my mother. God, it is still so weird seeing her.

I have good memories of her from when I was small, before she left.

It’s programmed into me to love her, and that is a betrayal of the wiring that knit us together before I had a choice in any of it.

She smiles at me pleasantly, and speaks to me in a bright tone.

“If you throw that, I will have you hunted down, and next time it won’t be Rainer’s son I give you to. It will be to a set of divorced dock workers who don’t mind keeping a woman in a storage container.”

“What the fuck, Mom?”