Page 15 of Hunted Mate (Stalked Mates #1)

He didn’t even bother shifting. There wasn’t even a point. He just slaughtered the guy like an animal. He slit his throat and ended it almost immediately.

It’s over.

Just like that. The wolf shifter who just saved me looks at me with a frown, as if I’m the problem and he had to solve it. I get the feeling it would be better if I did not become any more of a problem.

“Holy shit.” The other camouflaged man looks shocked.

The girl is still shrieking. I stand still, horrified by what is playing out in front of me.

I thought I was still alive because wolf shifters don’t actually kill people, but the man now being dragged away by his ankles, leaving a sanguine smear on the floor very much disabuses me of that idea.

Just an hour or so ago, all I wanted to know was that wolves were real. I wanted to know that my memories were indeed my memories, not the frightened fabrications of a child. Not a sickness. Not a mental illness. Something real.

Now it is far too fucking real.

“What’s going on here?” More wolves come to handle the situation.

They look like generic bad guys. It’s not a good way to describe them, but it’s also the best way to describe them.

They’ve all got short dark hair. They’re all wearing black jeans and dark jackets.

They’ve all got mean expressions on their faces too, as if they’re being inconvenienced by having to imprison and kill us.

Their leader is the biggest of them. His jacket is leather and his boots come up to his knees.

He looks the most annoyed out of them all.

“Get rid of them. Except the one Gray’s been fucking,” the leader of this little group of very unkind wolves says.

The same guy who just cut the other man’s throat comes back to the cage. He looks at me, then he looks at the other lady. He’s confused.

“Which one of you has been used by Gray?”

“Me!” my cell companion shrieks. “I’ve been fucking Gray.”

The wolf looks at her, then looks at me.

“I’m his mate,” I say quietly. “Not her.”

“The whore’s the one who saw too much,” someone yells out. “Not the rich blonde.”

The sound the woman makes when she realizes they’re going to kill her is heartbreaking.

She sounds like a lamb who knows she is about to be slaughtered.

The man remaining behind starts to smell like pee.

I can guess what he’s done. I don’t blame him.

There’s something terrible about seeing someone else die and knowing that others intend for you to be next.

I won’t let it happen. Not to me. And not to them. Maybe Gray’s coming to rescue me, and maybe he isn’t, but nobody is coming to rescue these people. That’s how it is most of the time. Nobody comes. Nobody rescues.

“Leave her alone.”

I pull the gun.

I didn’t want to play this card this quickly. I wanted to keep it secret longer, until I was sure I needed to protect myself. But I can’t keep watching people die. One person was enough. I don’t ever want to see that again. I don’t want to smell blood again.

The wolf stops and looks at me. His eyes are dark, just like his hair is also dark underneath the beanie. He has a round, but brutal face. Rare combo. He’s angry at finding himself at my mercy.

“I may not have enough bullets to kill everyone here,” I say. “But I definitely have enough to shoot you, and turning into a werewolf won’t stop the lead in your brain.”

“We’ve got a problem!”

He shouts to the others who had already wandered off again. I guess I didn’t tell him not to call for backup. I think about shooting him for doing that, but I’m going to save my bullets.

Three more wolves show back up. That’s four total.

“I have four bullets for each of you, boys,” I say, glad for simple, brutal math. “And, if you don’t let us go, I will not only unload into you directly. I will…”

One of them goes for a gun from the repository of weaponry displayed on the warehouse walls. Could have seen that coming, I guess.

The moment has come. I am about to discover if I have what it takes to hurt someone badly, whether I’m the sort of person who pulls the trigger, or someone who freezes in place.

Bam!

I shoot him.

It’s easier than I thought, and louder, but the ringing in my ears drowns out the screams that are starting to get a little tiring.

I understand being stressed out by the prospect of being murdered, but I’m saving the other lady in the cage.

It would be nice if she could save her shrieks for when she’s actually in danger.

“What’s your name?” I ask over my shoulder.

“Molly,” the woman gasps.

“Shut up, Molly.” I turn my attention back to the wolves. “We’re leaving now,” I say. “And you’re not going to follow. Because if you do, I will shoot you. I will shoot you right in the face. I’ll be able to do that because I won’t be driving. Molly will be driving. Won’t you, Molly?”

“Uh…” she makes an incoherent sound.

“Shut up, Molly,” I say.

I look down. That’s a mistake. There’s a dead man on the floor, lying in the blood of the other dead man.

Justice, but not poetic. There’s very little of poetry in the world.

It’s awful. It’s bleak. And I’ve killed someone.

And there’s no undoing that. I can feel something changing inside me, a slow, dark, sludgy slip of something. I think I might have ruined my soul.

The other shifters are looking at me. The leader especially is judging me deeply, maybe even harshly.

But he’s also interested. He has a little gravitas to him, of the kind that makes him think nothing bad is going to happen to him.

He’s not worried. He’s not scared of what’s coming for him, for the death that I represent. He thinks he’s exempt from it somehow.

I always wondered what it felt like to bring death. Not a lot of the time, just a little of the time. Just in the way good people do when bad things happen, or medium people do when they’re mildly inconvenienced. Now I know.

It’s like having the light sucked out of you all at once. Something’s taken, and it’s not ever coming back.

The wolf man looking at me knows what I’ve lost.

“I can see why Gray chose you,” he says. “You’re a beast.”

The way he says it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand erect again. He’s not just calling me a name. He’s acknowledging something inside me. Something he sees, and something I suddenly feel.

“We’re leaving now,” I say again. My voice is sure and steady, and there’s not even a quiver of fear in it because the good thing has been sucked out of me.

I walk out of the cage fearlessly and go to the van we were brought here in. The keys are still in it.

“Get in!” I order sharply. The other two are lost. Sheep, not knowing where the wolf really is. At my order, they obey and get in the van.

“What’s your name, guy?” I ask the man in the camouflage.

“Mark, ma’am,” he stammers.

Molly and Mark. Their names match. As do their expressions. Am I rescuing them, or kidnapping them all over again? They don’t know. I don’t know.

I was going to get Molly to drive, but she’s too busy looking stunned and scared, so I get into the driver’s seat, and I lean my pistol hand out the window and I fire a few shots, not to hit anyone, but to keep them suppressed while I reverse out of the warehouse. I’ve done enough killing for one day.

“Open the doors!” I scream out the window.

They start to open them, but it’s not quite fast enough and the rear of the van catches the lower part of the doors, ripping the metal off at the base.

The property damage is pretty severe.

I guess it doesn’t matter. Because these fuckers don’t matter, and their stuff doesn’t matter.

A few days ago, Gray burned my research down, and now I have killed someone and rescued some others and crashed a van, and kept driving anyway. Like an action movie, except with more concussion for my passengers.

“Are you two okay?”

“We’re alive!” Mark shouts back.

“How did the two of you see them?” I ask the question as I drive at a slightly more sedate pace. “The wolves, I mean, how did you discover their curse?”

“Me and Brent were hunting in the forest,” Mark says.

“Tracking wolves, you know, culling the excess. Called Molly in for a good time. Then… just got tangled up in all of it, you know? Heard noises in the night, went to check if anyone was nearby messing with our things, saw some people around a fire…”

He doesn’t need to continue. I know what happened next.

“Why did they bring you back here?”

“We shot and ran,” he says. “Thought we’d gotten away, but they tracked us to a motel and they dragged us out and took us to that warehouse.”

“Right. Okay.” I am trying to make sense of things.

The wolves kill people who discover their secrets, but obviously they don’t just kill them.

Sometimes they take them prisoner first, if they think they might be useful.

I don’t know exactly why people were caged.

Maybe they had other uses for them first. The possibilities are awful and barely worth thinking about.

I shudder at the notion of how many people might be held by werewolves, only to die at their monstrous hands, or fangs, whichever comes first.

“You were brave,” Molly says. “I wouldn’t have been that brave. You saved my life.”

“I had a gun,” I remind her. “I had a gun and no choice.”

“It’s safe to say they’re going to keep tracking us,” I continue as silence falls. “Now I think we should either split up, or stay together.”

I need to talk to Gray. I need to find out how far they’ll go with this tracking stuff, though I’m betting it’s anywhere in the world.

Wolves are rotational persistence hunters. They run their prey down, but not singly. One tags in, and lets another tag out. We can expect them to be on our trail pretty quickly. They won’t want to draw attention to themselves from law enforcement, I imagine. Gray avoided them for sure.

“What do you two want? I can drop you somewhere if you like, or we can try to make it through this together.”

“Uhm, are you… Calista Hart?” Molly asks the question with some obvious nervousness.

“Yeah,” I say. No point denying it.

“We’ve been rescued by one of the richest ladies in the world!” she squeals, and punches Mark in the arm. “We’re lucky. I’m staying with her.”

Mark nods. “I reckon they’ll find us in hours, and they’ll put us down like dogs. You made a real good mess back there.”

“Thanks. Sorry about your friend. I would have… I mean…”

“Brent was always an asshole,” Mark says. “It’s not right to put your hands on women.”

“It wasn’t right for him, that’s for sure. Big mistake,” I say.

“Huge,” Molly pipes up.

There’s a certain air of euphoria starting to come over the van now, as we realize we all just survived something we probably should not have. The horror of seeing death close up fucked us all up, but now there’s more life than before.

We made it. We shouldn’t have. We should be dead, but we’re alive.

I hear Molly and Mark start making out in the back of the van.

I don’t know where to go. I don’t want to drive into the wilds, upstate or anywhere else.

I don’t want to flee like prey would flee.

I’m not the sort of person who runs from a fight.

I just proved that. I’m not going to be forced out of my life by these werewolves.

I might have spent an entire lifetime proving to myself that they exist, but they don’t get to dictate my whole life.

I know exactly where to go.

And I know just what to do.