Page 13 of Hunted Mate (Stalked Mates #1)

G ray

I am going to kill whoever gave her that scar.

I’ve been suppressing my rage since I first saw it, and the flash of it just now only served to reignite my fury.

The moment I knew she’d been hurt by another shifter, I felt as though I had failed.

I didn’t even know of her existence when it happened, and still I have this sense of having not protected her when I should have.

Now I have shifted in front of her, and mated her a third time. She was in my blood from the beginning, but I will never be free of her now—and she will never be free of me.

“Uhm, Gray? Are you mad at me?”

“No,” I say. “I am not mad at you.”

“Why do you look like that right now? What did I do?”

She’s done plenty. She’s disobeyed me at every turn and put a gun on me, but none of that is the reason for my current expression.

“It’s nothing you’ve done,” I say. “I’m just thinking about how I am going to protect you.”

I don’t want to bring up the scar itself.

That would probably hurt her feelings. I know she’s self-conscious about it.

But it doesn’t mar her body in my eyes. In my eyes, it’s an explanation, a battle wound.

It’s a testament to both fortune and strength.

You need both in this world. You can’t just be good. You have to be lucky too.

I am still going to hunt down those who hurt her, and end them.

But first, I am going to make damn sure this woman knows who she belongs to.

This mating and breeding is not recreational in any way.

She’s been claimed by me, and as far as I am concerned, she is what most humans would call my wife.

We are bonded physically and mentally and emotionally. We are one.

Our relationship will not be honored by the pack.

Relations between shifters and humans are strictly forbidden because there’s no way of being able to keep things quiet about our kind if we start breeding out.

People notice when their kids turn into beasts on random full moons as they’re growing up.

Most of the time, that’s not what happens anyway.

You don’t get shifter kids from outbreeding.

Instead you get hairy little humans, or ones who have tails at birth. Genetics are tricky demons to tame.

The modern rules are designed to stop our kind ending up in research labs, imprisoned, enslaved, or simply slaughtered.

All of the above have happened at one time or another, and that is why my job exists.

Destroying the evidence of our existence is paramount.

I know others will try to kill Callie. I am going to have to find a way to stop them.

She seems blissfully unaware of all of this. She’s too consumed with her own questions and curiosities.

“I need to know a few things, Gray. Starting with… what the fuck. Is. This?”

She turns around and gestures at the bank of equipment in the office.

“You were watching me for how long?” I know she knows I’ve been watching her. This is more of an interrogation tactic than it is a real question. She’s trying to get as much information as possible. It’s habit.

“I’ve been watching you since your research started to concern us.”

“Who the fuck is us ?”

“Is it common for a journalist to insert the word fuck into every single sentence?”

“It’s not uncommon. Answer me.”

I don’t like that tone of hers. I wouldn’t have thought she’d be able to give me attitude after the way I just had her writhing and coming, but that’s okay. I can always handle her again if she needs it.

“Us is the people who will kill you if they discover what you now definitively know. You can never tell anybody. You need to disappear from the publishing world.”

I see her face shift as she struggles to come to terms with the very bad news. Her life as she knew it is over, and as the orgasms fade, the reality of that fact is finally starting to work its way through her mind.

“This is how you tell me you’re kidnapping me.”

“You wanted to follow the wolves,” I tell her. “Now you’ve found them. But they are never going to accept you. That scar you wear? That is your fate if they ever find out that you are with me. I will try to protect you, but…”

“Then shouldn’t you just let me go and live my life? They don’t need to know what I know. It can be our little secret.”

I think about that for a moment. I don’t want to ruin her life by dragging her out of it, but I also know that she already knows too much. She’s not going to be able to resist looking for more information. She and I are not going to be able to stay away from one another either.

Bam. Bam. Bam.

A harsh, demanding knock at the door makes us both freeze. That’s bad. Very, very bad.

“Quiet,” I say, pushing her into a closet. “Don’t. Fucking. Move.”

I close the door on her frightened face, glad to see that she seems to understand the urgency of the situation.

Bam. Bam. Crash!

The door flies open under the fist of someone who has no boundaries, and my half-brother Karl walks in.

He is tall, dark haired. It’s long and tied back at the nape of his neck.

He has a scar running down the left side of his face that goes right through his eye.

That eye is milky white. No color in the iris, just a dark little hole in the middle where light still makes it through, but bent and twisted.

“Why are you still here, Gray?”

He doesn’t say hello. Doesn’t even acknowledge the door hanging half off its hinges. He doesn’t care what he breaks. He doesn’t care if he’s rude. Karl can be defined by the singular quality of not caring about anything other than his mission. He’s my father’s favorite son, or was.

“What do you mean?”

“New Orleans wants to know why you haven’t reported in. The research was well over a week ago. There’s been no more discernible material coming out of her direction, right? So why aren’t you back in New Orleans?”

“What are you doing here, Karl?” I answer his question with a question. I don’t like being checked up on, and more worryingly, I know they don’t send Karl for check-ins. They send him when they want someone dead.

“Following up.”

“Alright, well, I’m not a pup, and I don’t need to be followed up on. Do you want to go and grab a drink?”

I want him out of here, before he scents Callie.

But it’s already too late. He leers at me, his canines long and white. Borderline vampiric in appearance, though he’s a hundred percent wolf.

“I can smell it, you know. The sex. The human. The seed. The fact that you’ve been fucking someone here.”

He’s an invasive fucker.

He doesn’t care that he’s being rude and awkward. He doesn’t give a fuck, because he’s as close to a psychopath as the pack will tolerate. It’s not that he doesn’t have any feelings. It’s that he knows how to use them as weapons. They’re scalpels he dissects other people with.

“I’m allowed to fuck, Karl. You don’t own my dick.”

“Wrong,” he says. “I own your fucking dick. I can have your dick torn off and fed to you if I like.”

I want to hit him. Actually, I want to rip him apart. Sadistic, stupid fucking errand boy. His power comes from the fact he reports directly to the Louisiana alpha, and he thinks being born a few months earlier to a different mother, but from the same father, gives him some kind of power over me.

I grew up in a power struggle with this fucker that won’t end because he just won’t end it.

“Alpha wants to see you in New Orleans in two days,” he says. “If you’re not there, you’ll be dragged there.”

“Do you want to go out for a drink or what?” I want him distracted. I want him out of here.

“Yes. Asshole.”

“Good. Then let’s go.”

“Do you have your purse?” Karl smirks at me. God, he’s a fucking dick. But he’s letting me draw him out of here, and that’s all I care about.

We get in the van and we leave, and I know I’m giving Callie a chance to escape, but better she escapes now than I watch Karl do his best to tear her apart. I’d defend her, of course, but it would be brutal and bloody either way.

“So why are you really here? Not just to check up on me. Long way to come just to fuck with your brother.”

I ask him the question as we’re driving, hoping that he’s got an answer that doesn’t have anything to do with Callie.

“Pack business. New York has been getting out of control lately. New Orleans is concerned. Local packs are getting slack about keeping things quiet. And they’re getting rough about the fixes.”

I relax a little. This is well within his purview.

It’s not about Calista. It’s about cracking heads locally and throwing his weight around.

The New York packs have a reputation for wildness.

There are multiples of them, unlike the Louisiana pack, which is united under Orion.

There are different strata of packs here.

Economically well-off wolves have their own pack.

The rural wolves are another group. Then there’s three separate city packs, each of which have their own identity and can be considered gangs.

It’s the city packs Karl is here to deal with, I’d bet. I haven’t had much to do with any of them because my job has been managing Calista Hart. I stay out of the way, I don’t tread on any toes. I work with humans, and I move on. Usually.

We get to a bar that must be run by one of the local packs, because I know Karl wouldn’t drink anywhere else.

There are a few signs and hints that it’s a shifter bar.

It’s called The Dog’s Paw, which is quite funny because there’s nothing more insulting to most wolf shifters than being called dogs.

Someone has an edgy or self-deprecating sense of humor.

The clientele are a mixture of shifters and humans. Everyone here has the same edge, a kind of energy that transcends man and shifter alike. It’s rough, and it’s largely, but not entirely, male.