Page 7 of Bred Mate (Stalked Mates #2)

K arl

We go to her house on foot after I stash my car in some bushes far enough away from the scene of chaos to ensure it hopefully isn’t easily found.

We start walking through the forest she’s trying so hard to save.

It’s not as small as she made out. Even at a decent pace, it takes a couple of hours to get there, and by the time we get there, I’m ready to eat pretty much anything.

“Here we are,” she says, a note of pride in her voice.

I don’t know what I was expecting, exactly. A big house of some kind. Some version of my father’s house, but in a more rural setting. Or a smaller house, but cozy. That’s not what I find.

A series of shacks run along the river. It’s less swampy here than it is in a lot of the state, but it’s still wet and there’s a thin sheen of green on everything.

The buildings are old and have obviously been flooded several times.

Over and over. Now they’re rotting out where they stand.

I can see mold on the curtains from here.

I can smell it, and I’m nowhere near it.

This is a poor place.

A really poor place.

This is the place where people who have nothing live with nothing. I’m guessing they hunt for their food, and I don’t mean with guns. This is a pack that wears fur more than it wears clothes. I find myself excited and horrified in equal measure.

The human side of me tells me that this is no way to live.

The animal side says it might be the only way to live.

When I open my mouth, being an asshole comes out. It’s my father’s voice, my father’s words. It’s like finding myself an unsuspecting puppet of an agenda I don’t really have and yet somehow seem to be pushing anyway.

“Why do you even want to keep this place? Better to cut it, drain it…”

I miss her fist coming. It’s small, and there’s not a lot of weight behind it, but it catches me right on the point of my chin and rocks my head back enough to make me lose balance. I’m going over backward before I can stop myself.

She stands over me, plants a boot on my chest, and snarls at me with all the fury she can muster.

“This is the point,” she says. “This is everything. If you won’t defend it, you’re useless to me, and if you’re useless to me, I’ll put you in the fucking river.”

I am as hard as I’ve ever been. So fucking aroused.

Little fucker dares threaten my life? I don’t fucking think so.

“We’ve done this before,” I remind her. “You know what happens next.”

I’ve thrown her on the ground before, and I’ve fucked her before, and I’ve taught her that I am bigger and stronger and meaner than her, and she doesn’t care about any of it. She’ll do this again and again. She’ll seek pain, and…

Click. Click. Click.

I hear three distinct clicks. When I lift my eyes up from her, three long guns point at my face.

I look up into the face of three young men with thick dark hair and big brown eyes.

They’ve got her eyes. Must be brothers. All of them are younger than she is; one’s definitely too young to be holding a gun on me.

“Meet my brothers,” she says. “This isn’t going to go the way you think it is.”

“And how’s it going to go?”

“We’re going to make sure this land is protected. No matter what. The lumber cutting’s going to be stopped. Forever. And if you won’t buy it for us, then we’ll buy it using you.”

It takes me a second to realize that the little bitch has kidnapped me.

She set this up. She seduced me. Lured me here. And now she’s closed the trap.

Ellie

I expected him to be angry.

I didn’t expect him to laugh.

He looks me in the eye and he bursts out with the kind of amusement most people don’t get to experience, let alone emote in a lifetime. He’s so absolutely tickled.

“What are you going to do? Lock me in a cage? Or are you just going to keep a gun on me all the time? Because the second any of your attention slides even a little, I’m going to have that gun.”

“Don’t worry,” Ellie says as her brothers stay silent. “I know how to keep a wild animal where it needs to be. Get him inside, guys.”

“Gittup,” the oldest one says, nudging me with his foot.

I could kill all four of these wolves, mangy, poor things that they are.

I see hunger in their eyes. It would make me feel sorry for them if I were capable of feeling that sort of thing.

Ellie is curvy, but that’s because she’s female.

The boys are fed, but not well. They’re like wild creatures, rangy and mangy and generally feral.

This is a kind of energy I haven’t enjoyed before.

“Where’s your old man?”

They look at each other with shifty eyes, and I sense a mystery held together by sibling bonds. I’ve heard about those.

“Which one?” Ellie says, putting her boot on my neck. “Stop asking questions.”

I lie there in the dirt, and I try to work out why they’re so attached to this place. Doesn’t make sense. They could all go somewhere else, make something of themselves. Staying here and rotting with the place is crazy.

“Why are any of you bothering with this shit hole? Ellie, if you cared at all, you’d get these kids out of here. It’s no place for babies to live.”

I ask the question even though I know it’s going to offend them. I didn’t realize how much it would annoy them though.

The biggest wolf punches me. He hits harder than his little sister, that’s for sure. My head snaps to the side, and I feel a massive detonation of pain somewhere in my jaw and ear.

“You take a long time to learn anything like respect,” she says. “But we’ll teach you. Unless you want to make that phone call?”

“And miss out on all the fun I know we’re going to have? I don’t think so.”

They drag me indoors, the biggest two boys. The littlest one follows. I feel bad for him. He deserves more than the damp festering hole they call home.

They cook over an open fire in the middle of the room on a pan that looks like it hasn’t been washed in a decade.

Dinner is venison, and nothing else. Just like I thought, they’ve been hunting in the woods.

There’s nothing in here to indicate that they shop anywhere at all.

I get the idea that what she’s wearing is probably close to all she owns.

They settle me in a chair and wrap me in silver. I’m fortunate that they wrap it in light fabric so it doesn’t start to cause a rash over time.

Ellie feeds me with a fork.

“Here comes the plane. Open up, big boy,” she trills.

She’s enjoying herself a little too much.

I narrow my eyes at her to let her know she’s going too far.

Don’t know why I’m bothering. She already knows she’s gone way too far.

The things I am going to do to her once I get untangled are absolutely fucking unspeakable.

Ellie

I know I am pissing him off. Big time. But it’s necessary. Part of the game. He needs to be pushed. I don’t want this to go on forever. I want him to make the fucking call and make this go away. I want him to buy the forest and be done with us.

He’s a proud, dangerous man, and if it weren’t for the silver chains, he’d be bursting into his considerable wolf form and dominating all of us. He might kill my brothers. I wonder if he’ll kill me. He looks like he wants to.

I remind him of our terms, just in case he forgot already.

“You want out of this, it’s easy. You make the call that gives us the forest. Forever.”

“So you can live like animals and die in a sludge pit?”

I have to lift a hand to stop Tim from smashing him in the head with the butt end of his rifle.

“Yes. So we can live the way we’ve always lived.

We want our lives intact. We want our world to stay as it has been for so many years.

We want to be wild. And we’ll do what we have to in order to make that happen.

You’re going to help me, Karl Dulac. I don’t intend to give you your freedom until you do. ”

“You want me to buy you a forest, is that it?”

“Yes. How much can it cost? A few million? Hardly anything compared to your father’s assets.”

I could call my brother and I could make this happen in an instant. I know that. But calling my younger brother to rustle up finances is not the kind of humiliation I am into, and I am not going to be terrorized into obedience by this little wretch.

“You’re not going to get what you want this way. You’re not going to get anything besides a beating,” I tell her.

“You’re silvered,” she says. “You’re not getting out of here unless we say so.”

“And who is ‘we’? Haven’t exactly made the introductions.”

“These are my brothers. Tim,” she gestures to the eldest. “Tate, and Connor.”

“Ran out of ‘T’ names?”

Connor is the youngest one, maybe about ten. He gives me a dark look, like I’ve pissed him off by mentioning the fact that his name isn’t one of the T’s.

“He’s got a smart mouth,” he says to his sister.

They all defer to her. Ellie has easy leadership of this pack of siblings. She’s the oldest. She’s the alpha, and I’d put money on it that there’s nobody to look after any of them besides her.

“Where’s everybody else?” I ask. “Can’t just be the few of you here.”

“You don’t need to know where everyone is. You just need to get our forest back. From the valley to the river, and across to those mountains. It’s all ours.” She looks at me with fierce eyes.

“Alright. I don’t want to deny you the land, but this isn’t the way to do things. Putting me in a chair, wrapping me in silver, demanding I do what you say. If this land is owned by a forestry company, we’re talking millions to buy it out. Millions in what you want to be unproductive dollars.”

I sound like my father. I hate it, but I know this way of speaking makes people think you know what you’re doing. It’s a shortcut to being trusted. I want out of these chains.

“I don’t care what it costs,” Ellie says. “We’ve been petitioning the alpha for years now, and bit by bit, our land got sold off anyway. So I don’t trust what you say, and I don’t care what it costs. These are old forests. Logging them is a sin.”

I’d say I agree with her, but the truth is I don’t care about trees. I’m a hunter. An enforcer. I’m not an environmentalist. I understand the concept of territory, but there’s fuck all here to begin to care about.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do about this. Right now, I’m planning on getting out of the chains and whipping and fucking Ellie’s ass for daring to put them on me. Then I’ll deal with the brothers, Tim first. He thought he could fuck me up. Head still aches from that.

“If you won’t give us what we want, we’re going to send a ransom demand to your family,” she says. “There’s no world in which we don’t get what we want. Do you understand?”

“You say one fucking word to my family, and I’ll make you regret it,” I growl.

Her eyes flash at me with light. I was hoping to scare her, but I’m realizing all I’ve actually done is give her a little more leverage. Now she knows I don’t want her to contact my family, I bet she’ll be in someone’s ear by morning.

“Tomorrow’s coming,” she says. “And when it does, I want to own this forest, alright?”