Page 29 of Bred Mate (Stalked Mates #2)

E llie

Our baby is born in the spring. The birth is a relief in general, because it means the interior of my body stops being a gymnasium for the world’s most active infant. She emerges into the world fighting, and immediately punches the doctor.

Everybody laughs. Except me, because my insides are quickly becoming my outsides. Once my body stops being confused about where the various parts are supposed to be, I get to embrace and see my daughter for the first time.

She’s beautiful, with dark hair and dark eyes. She looks just like Karl with just a hint of me. I’m told that’s normal, that all babies look like their fathers when they are born.

She is immediately spoiled by her father, her three uncles, and me.

We name her Yvie, and she is such a pure delight that I stop thinking about much of what has gone on before.

The forest we used to live in still calls to me from time to time, but giving birth here has redefined my sense of home.

I belong to a new place now. Yvie is the eldest child of the alpha of Louisiana.

She is a princess, and she is treated as such.

I fall into motherhood and matehood, and looking after my baby, and months go by in which all is so intensely well I can barely stand it.

It’s sickening, really. Karl is well settled into his new role.

The leadership challenges have stopped with the birth of our daughter.

It is amazing what a baby can do for a city, not just a family.

Yvie is down for her nap one afternoon when the front door opens in a disconcerting way.

A man steps through into the foyer. He has dark gray hair and he’s very tall and his features have a certain familiarity to them.

He walks in like he owns the place, which immediately irritates me.

Sometimes Karl’s henchmen do that. He doesn’t like it when I call them henchmen. I don’t like it when they hench.

“Can I help you?” I ask the question with a good amount of salt in my voice.

He glances at me briefly, in the way men do when they think you are irrelevant, and though it has been months since my last violent impulse, I suddenly have the almost uncontainable urge to rip his throat out.

He tries to walk further in, but I block his path.

“Who are you?” I ask the question with even more obvious annoyance.

“I own this house,” he growls. “Who are you?”

“That’s my daughter,” my mother says, pushing past him. “Ellie, this is Orion.”

Oh, great. She’s come traipsing back and she’s bought some aging bodyguard with her. Karl is going to be pissed.

Speaking of Karl being angry, Karl has come out of his office and is standing behind me, making an even more effective blockade for our uninvited guests.

“I thought I told you not to come back here,” he says, staring at my mother.

“You did tell me that,” she smiles. “So I went to Hawaii, found your father, who had tired of his then current wife and offspring, and convinced him to bring me back here to the home he owns. The home you have no right to tell me to leave now.”

“The fuck, Mom,” I exclaim.

She smiles even more broadly. She’s loving this. I have a sinking feeling in my stomach. I’m thinking of my youngest brother.

Connor is eleven years old now. He’s shot up about a foot since she last saw him. He’s been doing well in school, but I get the sense she’s about to derail all of that. I don’t want her here. I don’t want him here when she is here. She probably has a missile launcher in the back of the car for him.

“Hello, son,” Orion says. “It is good to see you.”

“Why are you here?” Karl is curt in his response. “Where are your wife and kids? Why are you with this creature?”

Orion looks taken aback. “My relationship ran its course. Margaret and I are together now. We are here because you just had a baby.”

“You came here to make our child related to itself?” I snap the question.

The two of us are very much on the back foot. We get hardly any sleep as it is, and neither one of us is prepared to receive family or enemies. These two feel like both. I realize I am carrying a bottle brush in one hand and my shirt has baby stuff on it.

“You gave up your role as alpha,” Karl says, instantly defensive. “You left this house to me.”

“That was when your brother had a werewolf at his disposal capable of drawing the loyalty of the pack. Now I have one by my side, and not any freshly made genetic freak ingénue who does not truly want the role. I have found a true wild alpha female werewolf.”

“She’s going to eat you alive, buddy,” I murmur.

“So you’ve come to reclaim the state?” Karl crosses his arms over his chest and leans back against the counter, his expression inscrutable. “After I’ve spent months establishing leadership, putting down rebellions, settling matters, starting a family?”

“No,” his father laughs. “I’ve come to see my granddaughter. The offspring of a true werewolf. Our bloodline grows stronger for this mating, my son. You have made me more proud than I can express.”

Karl looks confused. I don’t blame him. I am also confused. I assumed these two were here to do very terrible things, but they mostly seem chill aside from how rude Orion was to me. But it’s possible he’s just a rude man.

“Wait a minute,” I say. “Is this about what happened last time you were here, Mom?”

“Maybe,” she says. “I believe I stated that explicitly, but the two of you have the dead-eyed stare of new parents, so it may be going over your head.”

“Is your revenge banging his father?”

My mother feigns being scandalized. “Of course not,” she says. “Or perhaps. Hard to say. If it is revenge I am greatly enjoying it.”

“Can we see the baby?” Orion asks.

“She’s asleep right now,” I say. “And if you wake her up I will turn both of you into throw rugs. And if my mother tries to eat her, things will be significantly worse.”

“Is that any way to speak to your mother and father and father in-law?” Margaret takes villainous pleasure in constructing that sentence.

“Goddammit, Mom. Come and have some tea.”

“Baldwin!” Orion greets the butler with a hearty embrace. “How are you, old man?”

“Nice to see you again, sir,” Baldwin says. “Have you not brought the children back with you?”

“The children?”

“Your children, sir,”

“Oh. My children,” Orion says. “They’re with their mother.”

“You two really do seem to have a lot in common,” I say to my mom.

“Really?”

“Yes, of course. Both powerful, both supernatural, both in the habit of abandoning family and pretending you’re good people anyway. Your delusions are really complimentary.”

“Thank you, darling,” she says, not having listened to a damn thing I said.

We have to escort them into the dining room, and we have to feed them and tolerate their company even though the reunion really doesn’t feel like a good thing.

The air is thick with hidden agendas and secret plans.

There is no way my mom doesn’t have an ulterior motive for being here.

Neither one of them give a damn about a baby.

“How does the forest sound now?” I mutter the question to Karl.

“Don’t tempt me,” he growls back.

“Seriously, Mom, if you crave human flesh, you can’t see Yvie. It’s not safe.”

“I ate before I came,” my mother says in the most disturbing way possible. “I’m perfectly safe, darling. I’d like to see my granddaughter.”‘

“You haven’t earned access to her,” I say. “Not after all the shit you’ve pulled.”

She sighs. “I think you’ll change your mind once you see the present we have for you.”

“My childhood back?”

“Not quite,” she says.

Karl leaves the room for a moment, and I know why. He’s gone to get our daughter. For obvious reasons, neither one of us likes it when she is out of our sight for very long.

I don’t bother to make polite conversation in the interim. I let Orion stare at me in the calculating old man way he has, and I let my mother pretend everything is fine even though it is clearly not remotely okay.

Sitting with parents like this is like sitting in a room full of old sins.

They might be pretending to be better people now, but they’re not.

Neither one of them should be here. I know what Orion did to Gray’s wife, sending her to a secret laboratory to be experimented on.

I know he’s manipulative and dangerous. I’m really not sure which one of these two is worse.

“There’s no point hating us, darling,” my mother says. “You’ve made a new little one who has us both in her veins, and you and your mate are half made of us.”

“Let’s hope genetics are not destiny,” I say. “Yvie is never going to suffer like Karl and I did, because we’re not going to leave her to survive on her own, or throw a fucking axe at her face.”

Orion bursts into laughter. “Is that what he said happened?”

“Yes.”

“Technically true,” Orion says, smoothing his beard. “Did he mention he was trying to kill me at the time?”

“You deserved it,” Karl says, stepping back into the room with our baby in his arms. She is sleepy and snuggly, and quite content for the moment.

I look at her and I wonder how anyone could ever fail a kid the way our parents did.

It seems utterly unthinkable. I love my daughter more fiercely than I have ever loved anyone.

I would die for her in an instant, and I know Karl would too.

My mother licks her lips.

“No, Mom!”

“I’m not going to eat her!” My mother sounds offended.

“You’re not going to hold her either,” I tell her. “This is as close as either of you get for a good while.”

“I just wanted to see her,” my mother says. Orion nods along, approving.

“She’s beautiful,” he says. I feel myself softening because he said something nice about my baby, but it’s only a temporary thing.

“Well, we plan to keep her that way,” I say, subtly reminding him of the scar on his son’s face.

“You know what’s funny?” My mother speaks up. “It’s that the two of you think you are better than us, when the truth is you are exactly what we are. You are brutal, ruthless murderers, and she will be too.”

“Maybe,” I agree. “But we’ll look after our own. Because that’s what family does.”

“Exactly,” she says. “And that is why the two of you are in this lovely house, with all this money. Because family looked after you.”

Karl

If you’ve ever seen a postpartum woman shift into a wolf and attack a woman wearing a cornflower blue pantsuit, you know how fucking funny it is.

Margaret doesn’t know what the fuck hit her.

Of course she shifts into her werewolf form just to survive the altercation, but she still ends up pretty savaged.

To her credit, she manages to avoid attacking back until Ellie can be pulled off her, butt-naked, her human form covered in blood and screaming blue murder.

I look down, certain that this will be scaring the baby, but Yvie lets out a little giggle and stuffs her fist into her mouth with glee.

“I needed that,” Ellie says when the rage has subsided a little.

She struts out of the room, shameless and bloody. I follow her to the bathroom where she showers and I play with the baby before she feeds her.

“Do you think I overreacted?” She asks me the question as she sits in the rocking chair in our bedroom, baby drinking happily.

“Not at all,” I say. “If anything, I think you under-reacted.”

She smiles at me broadly. “I love you,” she says. “You always back me up.”

“Always, baby,” I assure her. “Always.”

“What are we going to do about them?” She gestures with her head to downstairs.

“I don’t think your mom wants to eat the baby. But I don’t think that means she won’t if the mood takes her.”

“Yeah. I mean, she didn’t eat me,” Ellie says. “And I guess she didn’t eat Connor either. Overall, she has eaten zero babies.”

“Doesn’t mean she’s proved herself,” I say. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of them.”

I go to see what the elders are doing. Margaret has managed to procure another pantsuit, this one in a sort of fawn beige that does a good job of hiding her heinous strength. Baldwin has assisted with the bandaging.

“You need to get your mate under control,” my father says.

“Oh, relax, Orion,” Margaret says. “It was barely a scratch.”

“I won’t be getting my mate under control. In fact, I think I’m going to let her off the leash more often,” I say.

My father looks taken aback. He got used to me being his yes man before he left. He probably expects deference now, but I am alpha now. He bows to me.

“Well,” Margaret says, straightening her pants. “The two of you could certainly do with some pointers on hosting.”

“We’re not hosting. You weren’t invited.”

“True,” my father says, rising to his feet. “We wanted to see the baby. We saw the baby. It’s a baby.”

“Hm,” I agree.

He helps Margaret to her feet. “We’re proud of you, son,” he says. “This house feels like a home again. There’s two things that make an alpha an alpha, and that’s babies and blood.”

“Alright, Dad. Enjoy your… honeymoon?”

“Oh, imagine if we got married, Orion!” Margaret laughs. “It would make these two step-brother and sister.”

“Don’t you fucking dare,” I growl.

“I could be your mommy,” she says brightly.

The chaos in this woman is not contained.

I am sure my father thinks he has her under control.

I could tell him he does not, but he’s got the silly smile of a man who thinks he knows better.

He is about to live out the consequences of his taste, and nobody can save him from that fate.