Page 15

CHAPTER 15

W aking up from chloroform was not as easy as Hollywood would have you believe. Justine was, sadly, figuring that out the hard way.

In fact, now that she was thinking about it, it wasn’t all that different than waking up in Vegas with the worst hangover of her life. The toxic-waste taste in her mouth, the pounding headache, the slight numbness in her extremities…yeah, that was all similar.

The difference was that when she had her hangover, Khill was there to take care of her. Now, she was slumped over in a wooden chair with her ankles zip-tied to the chair legs and her wrists tied behind her.

This was so not good.

But she’d seen more than her fair share of police procedurals on TV and watched a shit ton of true crime documentaries, and she felt like if anyone should be able to handle this situation, it was her.

(Of course, she was halfway convinced that because she could operate on animals and had watched eleventy-billion episodes of Grey’s Anatomy she could perform a lap coli on a human, too. So, sometimes her confidence overrode her reality.)

Taking a deep breath, Justine took stock of her situation.

Low, exposed ceiling beams, bare concrete floor, unfinished sheetrock walls, dampness in the air, no natural light…all hallmarks of a basement. Not good news. Tied to a chair in a murder basement sounded like the start of a horror flick. Or a bad Netflix documentary about a serial killer—a documentary she would not be the titular character in. She’d just be, like, victim number five or something. That’d really piss her off.

She had to swallow a squeal when a giant dude suddenly appeared within her line of sight. And from there, her fear bled away, allowing annoyance to take its place.

Fucking hell. She knew this guy.

She narrowed her eyes on him. She hadn’t recognized his voice, but she knew that stupid face. “You’re…Desmond, right? What the hell is going on?”

That handsome face twisted into an expression so angry Justine braced herself for a blow. But to his credit, the werewolf reined in his emotions quickly. “It’s David,” he corrected through obviously gritted teeth. “And you’d remember that if the orc hadn’t interrupted our date.”

He said orc in the same tone she used when describing how heart worm killed dogs, wearing the same expression her vet tech wore when expressing a grumpy Doberman’s anal glands. But pointing that out didn’t seem wise.

She swallowed hard. “David, I wasn’t in the right frame of mind the night we met. I’d just had a bad breakup. I never should’ve been at the Monster Match.”

He knelt in front of her, and the wild look in his eyes made her heart rate kick up. “You were exactly where you should’ve been, Justine. It was fate.”

Now, admittedly, Justine wasn’t great at romance. She loved it in fiction, but in reality? Not as much. She generally believed in what she could see, feel, and quantify. So, while she wasn’t close-minded to the concept of fate , she couldn’t say she fully endorsed it. Not to the extent that it’d put her in a murder basement with a werewolf, at least.

Except…if she hadn’t been storming out of that Monster Match, half-cocked, looking for someone to fuck her misery away, she wouldn’t have ended up in Vegas, which meant she wouldn’t have ended up drunk-marrying Khill. Would he ever have confessed his feelings for her if she hadn’t drunkenly agreed to marry him?

Huh. Maybe she believed in fate, after all. “I guess it’s possible,” she admitted quietly, more to herself than to the wolf.

David’s eyes lit up, which, for some reason, made her even more nervous than his feral expression did. “Yes,” he said. “If you hadn’t shown up that night, it might’ve taken me years to find you. Decades, even. My fated mate.”

Record scratch in her brain. “Wait…what?”

He grabbed hold of her knees, and she couldn’t hide her flinch/recoil combo. Scarily enough, that did nothing to dim the light in his eyes. “I knew it the moment I saw you, Justine. You’re mine .”

What kind of deluded idiot thought his fated mate was a woman who’d just spent the entire night getting absolutely railed by her orc husband? “But…I’m already married.”

“No!” He shoved a hand through his hair furiously. “It doesn’t matter. Marriage is nothing compared to the mating bond. You’ll see that in time.”

That’s when the restraints finally made sense to her. This maniac planned to keep her here, held hostage, until she agreed to be his mate . Yikes.

She was at a loss here. Nothing in all her years of consuming media about criminals and crazy people had prepared her for this .

What were the odds that her orc in shining armor would show up and save her from a forced mating situation?