Page 16 of Hunted Mate (Stalked Mates #1)

G ray

I tracked my mate after finding her missing from my place. I just didn’t track her fast enough.

It was one thing to know where Callie was when she had a routine and a pattern that almost never shifted. Now she’s become almost entirely erratic, absolutely unpredictable.

Now I am looking at a warehouse door that looks like it’s been peeled open like a tin can, and a bloody scene that is yet to be remediated.

One of the New York wolves is dead. Very dead.

The others are shaken in a way that is quite amusing in a dark sort of way.

We are predators. We are not used to prey fighting back.

We are certainly not used to prey winning.

“My mate did this?”

“Your little fucking human monster did this,” Karl snorts, laughing. Of course he is here with me. I didn’t have time to lose him while looking for her anyway, and catching up with her was more important than getting rid of him.

“She shot Adam.” That piece of information is volunteered by the wolf responsible for the underground hunters. He’s not quite an alpha, but he has the blood. Just like I do. Just like Karl does. There are too many potential alphas here. It feels crowded.

“No. I don’t believe it. She didn’t shoot anybody,” I say. “She’s a researcher. She looks up information on the internet. She goes to the library and checks out old newspapers. Sometimes she goes for a drive and asks people questions. She’s a quiet, mousy little…”

Even as I’m talking I know I’m wrong. She’s not quiet or mousy. She uses that as her facade, but underneath it all she is focused in a way even our best hunters often are not. I am deliberately forgetting the way she pulled a gun on me, and seemed quite intent on using it.

“She took two other humans with her. That means instead of having one loose end you refused to tie up, we now have three.” Karl claps my back hard. “Good work, little brother. The New York alpha will be thrilled, I’m sure. I know Dad will be thrilled.”

“Fuck off, Karl,” I growl. “There were a lot of mistakes made along the way in order for this to happen, and you know it.”

“You were the first domino to fall.”

“She was going to give up looking for us,” I say. “And we kill as a last resort only. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Wrong, little brother. You kill as a last resort only.”

I turn to my idiot brother, who does not know he is an idiot, as idiots often don’t.

I need to ensure that he actually understands what is at stake here, and what is going to happen if he does the very stupid thing I know he wants to do.

When we were pups, Karl would break my toys as soon as he realized that I liked them.

Callie could end up being another toy to break in the eyes of my fraternal bully if I don’t ram the facts through his thick skull.

“She’s the heiress to a major fortune. If she dies there will be heat the likes of which none of us have ever seen.

Do you realize that? She’s young, she’s beautiful.

She has a social media account where she only ever posted one picture of a wolf in Yellowstone, and that has over three million followers.

Trust me, if she dies, every journalist from here to the West Coast will be on the story.

There will be more true crime podcasts than you can believe, and they’ll all get wind of her obsession with werewolves.

And boom, instantly, we have hundreds of people seriously looking. She cannot die. She is not expendable.”

“Now that’s actually a good argument,” he says. “Pity it took you so long to make it.”

“I need to find my mate. Don’t talk to me again, Karl, and stay the fuck out of my way.”

“Feisty,” he laughs.

I leave the warehouse alone, and angry.

This should never have happened. Callie should never have been put in this position. I should have left before she found me. But I didn’t. I stayed even though the time to go had long come and go. Then I let her find me. I knew there would be some kind of consequence for staying. Fuck.

“ Fuck .”

I hit the steering wheel of my van with the palm of my hand and curse. This is getting messy, and it is all my fault.

I cannot imagine the fear Calista must have felt when she was taken from my place, or what she was going through when she was forced to shoot someone. She’s a lovely girl, not the type to go around shooting the very species she has been searching for, for years.

I need to find her. I need to make her safe.

Where would she go? What would she do? I know I am not the only one looking for her. I think what I said to Karl will hold things off somewhat, but I am well aware that the New York wolves will want revenge. There’s a lot of stupid in the world right now, and all of it is out for blood.

In the end, or rather, the beginning, I decide to start at her house.

Yes, the big fancy house that quite obviously bears her name, the place she is most likely, and therefore by some rationales, least likely to be.

The ballsiest move would be to come here.

Callie seems to be developing a hell of a pair of those lately.

Sure enough, the van that smashed the doors is parked in the back. It is a lot worse for wear, but it looks mostly intact.

I go up to the front door and call for her instead of knocking.

“Callie!” I shout her name, not because I don’t think she’s here, but because I don’t want her to shoot me because she thinks I am someone else. I want her to recognize my voice and let me in.

It takes a few minutes, but I hear shuffling around inside so I stay where I am, even though the porch is exposed as all hell. If someone in there decided to shoot through the door, that would be it for me.

Finally, the door flies open. A female hand comes out, grabs my lapel, and hauls me inside the foyer.

It’s Calista, and she looks… perfect. She’s showered. Her hair is wet, roughly toweled, but not styled. She’s wearing a pink tracksuit and sneakers. She looks cozy and cute and it’s hard to imagine she’s been through anything terrible lately.

I wrap my arms around her and hold her close. “I am so sorry, baby. You should never have had to go through… all of that.”

“Yeah,” she says, her voice muffled against my shoulder. “It was all of that.”

She’s talking as if it didn’t matter, but I know it was not okay. I know that doing what she did is going to leave a mark of some kind. The wolves at the warehouse were shaken, as if they’d encountered a predator even more frightening than them. That’s a matter of energy.

“Are you okay? Did they hurt you?”

“No,” she says. “I wouldn’t let them hurt me. They hurt one guy. They killed him like he wasn’t even a person. They just put a knife through his neck. And then they were going to kill the other two. So I shot someone.”

“It’s okay,” I tell her. “You were acting in defense of others. You did a good thing.”

“It doesn’t feel like a good thing. It feels like…” She trails off and presses her face into my chest.

I wish I had stopped this from happening. I should have saved her from the necessity to look after herself that way. My whole function is to protect her now, and somehow I managed to fuck that up absolutely immediately.

“We have to get out of here,” she says. “Or maybe we don’t.

I haven’t decided yet. I assume the wolves will try to come for us, but good luck breaking in here without people noticing.

This place is under all kinds of surveillance.

That damn van is going to be drawing attention. I need to get rid of that.”

“I don’t think it matters,” I say. “The van, I mean. We have other things to worry about.”

She pulls out her phone. “Yep. See. There you go.”

She’s opened a gossip site. There’s a picture of the van already, and her driving it.

Who wore it best? Heiress in a hurry.

“That doesn’t make sense,” I point out.

“They’ve been waiting for me to go off the rails for years. Then the office partly burned down and I took some time off, and I guess they think I’m ripe for shaving my head,” she says.

She really is watched by a lot of people, far more than the average woman. I wonder if she even understands what it means to have a stalker given how many followers of various guises she has.

“I need you to come with me,” I say. “I’m going to New Orleans, and I want you with me. I don’t want you to be out of my sight again. I can’t trust anyone.”

“Why?” She narrows her eyes suspiciously and pulls away a little.

“The alpha there wants to see me. I spent a little too long on my assignment with you. That’s why my brother was sent to find me.”

“That guy’s your brother? He seems like an asshole.”

“He is, and yes. You get that with older brothers, especially in wolf packs. They think being born first should give them some kind of seniority. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t.”

She frowns. “I don’t think I should go to New Orleans if there’s an alpha there who sent more people after you. I don’t think much of the politics of your kind, having been incarcerated and nearly killed. They keep people like animals, like they had the right to kill us in cold blood.”

“No harm will come to you if you are with me,” I assure her. “I will not allow it.”

“You couldn’t stop me being kidnapped. I bet your brother had something to do with that too,” she says, eyes narrowed with suspicion. It’s a fair question. Not even a question. A wager.

“He did. He wanted you out of the picture.”

“Okay, well, sure, let’s go on a road trip to meet the person who sent him after me. Why not? Now I have a body count, why not expand on it? And what about Molly and Mark?”

“Who are Molly and Mark?”

“They’re the other people who were captured and waiting to die,” she says.

“What about them?”