Page 9 of Bred Mate (Stalked Mates #2)

“Hello, brat.” A deep voice purrs in my ear just a fraction of a second before I am grabbed around the waist and picked up from the floor. A chain of silver is wrapped around my neck to stop me from shifting. He’s got me, and I can’t escape, no matter how much I squirm and kick and flail.

“You like to play little captive games? I decided I wouldn’t mind playing either.”

“Please let me go.”

“Oh, no, little one,” he growls in my ear, his hands like two iron bands around my arms. There’s no getting out of this grip. There’s no getting away from him.

I feel myself starting to panic. I don’t know what he is going to do to me, but I know all too well that he’s going to hurt me. He’s going to hurt me and he’s going to love it because now he’s justified.

“Where are my brothers?”

“Don’t worry about those boys. They won’t be causing any more trouble.”

“What did you do to them?” There’s an edge of fear in my voice I can’t control.

“Worry about yourself, Ellie,” he says. “You tried to kidnap and ransom the alpha of New Orleans. You fucked up so badly I don’t even know how to express how bad you’ve fucked up. Don’t worry though, I will show you.”

He’s threatening me, but there’s no real need to do so. I know I’m fucked. I’ve had my back up against the wall for years now. Him being a hostile problem doesn’t change anything. If he hurts me, he hurts me. I want to stay stoic in the face of these threats, but I find myself trying to explain.

“I didn’t have any choice. This place is sacred to our kind.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means there’s power here. This is where my ancestors have lived for hundreds of years. This isn’t just a bit of damp forest and rancid river. This place matters.”

“Places don’t matter, Ellie. They’re not special. They don’t hold meaning. That’s just sentimental bullshit.”

“What does matter?

He pauses for a minute before pushing me down on the bed and loosening his belt. “Nothing,” he says, his voice a dark void.

He scares me. I knew he wasn’t a good person. I knew he was the only person who could help me. And I knew it was a risk. But he is a monster with no feeling besides the urge to fuck. I don’t know that he really even cares about breeding me. I doubt he wants a baby. He just wants a hole. My hole.

“You’re scaring me,” I whimper.

“Good. You abducted me. You treated me like a weak little bitch to be tied up and used like a fucking…” He grits his teeth and wrestles his temper under control. “I didn’t like it, Ellie. And you’re going to pay for it.”

“I treated you the way you treat other people.”

“No. You didn’t. Because what I do is put a bullet in people. This captive shit is for idiots.”

“You’re going to put a bullet in me?”

Karl

I see fear in her face, and for the first time in my life, I don’t like seeing that expression in someone’s eyes.

“I am not going to kill you,” I tell her.

“Oh, good to know,” she says, sarcastic even though there’s still plenty of fear in her gaze.

None of my usual methods or even desires work with this woman. I’ve always wanted one thing. Power, at all costs, and cruelty because I enjoyed it. I’m not enjoying it now. I feel like a piece of shit.

I feel guilt.

Haven’t felt that before. Not in a long time, anyway.

I step back, give her some space. She doesn’t deserve it, but I need to work out what I am going to do with these feelings that aren’t remotely sensible. She has done something so audacious and out of line she must be punished for it.

“Where are my brothers? Did you kill my brothers? That’s what you do, right? You kill?”

“They’re not dead. I tied ‘em up and put them in one of the outhouses.”

“I thought captive shit was for idiots.”

I am about to tell her she needs to be more appreciative for the mercy I am offering her, but I don’t get to say that, because that is when I get shot.

The bullet enters through the back of my shoulder and passes clean through in a spray of blood. I guess I’m not the only one who can get out of a captive situation.

“Tim! No!”

“Son of a bitch thought he could tie us up and take our fucking sister?”

Tim slams the butt of the gun into my face. There’s stupid fury in his eyes, the kind of anger that makes a man dumb. Most times, shooting someone and hitting them with a gun is a pretty decent way to disable them, but I am not someone. I am a wolf alpha, and I am not silvered.

I shift.

He shifts.

In an instant, the room is full of wolves.

His brothers come through the same window, both in their wolf forms. Three wolves on one is a rough ratio at the best of times, but it’s harder when you can’t just cut loose and go absolutely feral because there are some creatures here I do not want to harm.

Ellie is somewhere in the mix. I can’t see her because there’s one set of jaws on my throat trying to rip it out, and another set of jaws at my belly.

They’re trying to kill me.

I’m trying to kill them—well, some of them. Not the baby. He’s in the mix, though, and his teeth still have some of that needle sharpness to them.

Ellie

What an absolute fucking mess. I knew my brothers might get a little rough with him, but I thought that would be an advantage.

I thought he’d be outnumbered and do what we said.

In under a minute, the entire interior of the cabin has been smashed to pieces by their fighting.

We don’t have much, and what we do have, we need to preserve.

They are fighting viciously, their snarls and growls almost deafening me along with the sounds of furniture being splintered.

This fucking guy.

All he needs to do is make a fucking call.

Why can’t he just make a fucking call?

I know how to stop this fight. It’s not going to be pleasant, but they’ve brought it on themselves. I grab a bucket, dip it into the nearby river, and then I dump the full contents of a bottle of colloidal silver into the bucket of water and throw it at them.

It splashes across all four, which isn’t difficult because they’re in a vicious roiling dog pile.

As the silver hits, it splashes across their fur and knocks them out of their transformation.

Four wolves turn into four human males. Tate is still latched onto Karl’s neck.

The other two are writhing around on the floor in something like pain.

Silver burns deep, but the transformation saved them from the worst of it.

It hit their wolf hides and as they shifted back to human, they were spared the pain.

Karl’s not as wounded as he was before. Transformation took care of that, too. There’s a bit of blood where the bullet ripped through his body, and some surface scarring that will heal up over time, but for the most part he is healed.

“Get up!” I yell at them. “This is pathetic.”

My brothers look shocked. “Get into the other house. Get dressed. Leave us alone. I am going to deal with this one the way he deserves to be dealt with.”

They slink away, shamed and warned by the intensity of my tone.

I understand that they were trying to protect me, but they’ve achieved absolutely nothing besides breaking the last of what we had.

This is the problem with men when they lose their tempers.

They don’t think about the bigger picture.

All they care about is killing the thing they’re angry at.

Karl is left behind, panting, naked, exhausted, slightly bloodied, and scarred. He looks hot, but I’m not going to allow myself to be distracted right now.

“If you’re going to be useless to us, you can run back to New Orleans, back to your big empty house and the humans you kill because you’re too weak to run a pack,” I snap. “You can leave us here, and we’ll defend ourselves.”

“I’m not leaving you. You could be carrying my child.”

“If I am, I won’t be for long.”

His eyes go hollow at that. He reaches for me, grabs me by the arm, and yanks me close. “You’re going to have my baby, Ellie. That’s the deal.”

“It’s the deal if you save the forest.”

“I am going to.”

“You’re going to fight every person who comes here individually?”

“That’s how a pack defends its territory, sweetheart.”

He closes the space between us even more, pulling me hard against his body. “I’m about to make damn fucking sure there’s more than a forest to defend, too. I’m going to make you the mother of my pups.”

I’m glad I sent my brothers away. The energy in the room is still high, but it’s another kind of energy entirely.

“Keep it down,” I say. “Sound travels out here. Nobody needs to hear you speaking to me that way.”

“Doesn’t matter. They’re going to hear you screaming when you come anyway.”

I slap him. Not as hard as I should. Not nearly as hard as he deserves. He catches my hand, but only after I’ve already whacked him across the face.

He grins. There’s blood in his teeth from the shifting and the fighting and the general fuckery. It should put me off, but there’s something wild about him and this, the passion of it all that makes me feel aroused as hell.

“I just wanted you to call someone and shift some land around,” I complain. “Why are you making everything violent and sexy?”

“That’s not how the world works.”

“It is when there’s money involved.”

“You’re really just asking for a few million dollars, aren’t you,” he laughs, yanking my pants down in one motion.

I don’t fight him. I’m not immune to this energy, to his raw dominance and to my own fucking need.

Karl picks me up, perches me on the windowsill because there’s no other furniture left in the place, and he fucks me hard from the very first thrust, his cock spreading me open wide and driving deep inside me.

One hand is on the back of my neck, gripping my hair, and the other is on my hip, keeping me in place.