Page 23

CHAPTER 21

A rmand

I decide to be responsible. I’ve avoided Volkov for quite some time for all the obvious reasons, the fact that he’s a judgmental fucker and is only of dubious use, and says things that piss me off every time he opens his mouth, and the fact that his big old tattooed self seems to think he is better than me.

But I’m going to see him, because he’s the one person I can say things to who can’t freak out about them. If I tell any of my pack mates all that happened, or how certain I am that Beatrix is so out of control that there is no reasonable, rational way to imagine containing her, I will sow discord and uncertainty.

“Surprised to see you,” he says.

He is such an asshole.

“I thought you were supposed to be quiet and kind and empathetic. I thought that’s what therapists are. Every time you open your mouth it’s snark.”

He smiles. “I simply said I am surprised you made another appointment.”

“Why?”

“I’m a therapist, Mr. de Lune. I am not an assassin for hire. Or a crime scene cleaner.”

“Oh, I see,” I growl. “You’re rubbing it all in my face.”

“I don’t know if I am rubbing it in your face, but the outdated, useless, and rather cruel practice of rubbing a pup’s nose in its business if it does it in the wrong place does come to mind.”

“So you are. I’ve come for therapy, and you’ve decided to be antagonistic.”

“No,” he says. “I’m sorry, Armand. This is a safe space.”

I laugh at that declaration, my voice taking on a slight edge of madness at the idea of any space being safe.

“The chateau is in chaos.”

“I don’t know that it is. I think you are, but the pack, as a whole, seems very calm and orderly to me. Most of the chaos seems to be contained to you and your mate.”

“That’s good,” I say. But I know there is a point at which it will affect them.

“Shall we discuss what happened a couple of days ago?” he suggests.

“Beatrix handled the whole situation much better than I did. She’s ahead of me in so many ways. The pack could be brought down completely. My lineage could end. And she is happily running about the place, evading the law…”

“Would you like to sit down?”

I stay standing—and pacing.

“She’s a monster. A menace. And I should be capable of handling her. And sometimes I think I am, but the police are…”

Pew!

A bullet comes through the window, shattering the glass and missing my head by a hair. I’m so stressed about the detective situation I can barely be bothered worrying about it, but I suppose it’s one more thing I have to address.

“And now someone’s trying to kill me,” I sigh, stepping away from the window, taking refuge by a bookcase with some level of inconvenienced annoyance.

“Jenny, I imagine.”

“Shit. I forgot to deal with her. Can we do this another time?”

“A time you’re not mid-assassination attempt? Certainly.”

“Thank you.”

I have a good idea where she shot from. To hit the room from that angle from outside, you have to be in bushes at a particular spot. I have thought about this a thousand times over. An alpha must know all the potential assassin lairs around his abode. The place she shot from is a series of bushes that will have to be cut down now. Pity, really.

I could call on the pack security, but I don’t bother. I go down by myself, circle around the back and follow the smell. The widow’s scent has been quite strong lately, bitter and sad and afraid. I follow that smell while skirting out and around in case she has a smaller weapon. I have to wonder where she got a rifle from, but I suppose the old man of hers might have had one.

“Jenny. I think we need to talk,” I say, standing behind her with my arms folded over my chest, an expression of faintly paternal disappointment on my features.

The woman lets out a small shriek and scrambles away from the gun, her eyes wide.

“That was quite a good shot,” I say. “If you’d accounted for the wind then right now I wouldn’t have any problems anymore.”

She stares at me, as if she expects me to kill her on the spot. Fortunately for her, killing women is not on my agenda, and given the spate of murders I’m already desperately trying to cover up, adding an extra body to the count feels like a bad idea.

I offer her my hand.

She doesn’t take it.

I reach down and I pull her up by the fabric at the scruff of her neck. “In my office, Jenny. Now.”

I nudge her ahead of me and she traipses in front of me, her head down, bowed in, well, probably not shame, but the facsimile of it. I pick up the rifle and put it under my arm and we both go back to the chateau where I am going to have to deal with this issue once and for all.

When we reach my office, I disassemble the rifle, just to remove the threat of the thing.

“It only has a basic scope,” I note. “That was a good shot given the circumstances. Well done.”

She stares at me, wide-eyed. I note that she put on a camouflage jacket and pants for this attempt. None of it quite fits her. More of her late husband’s things, I suppose. She is petrified, poor thing, no doubt expecting a brutal end. I perch on the desk and fix her with a firm but kind look.

“Jenny, you can’t kill me right now. Not yet. Give it a few years, you can take all the shots you want, but right now it’s just not a good time.”

She chokes on her words. “Not a good time? I can’t kill you because it’s not convenient for you right now?”

“It’s not convenient for anyone. You’re mourning your mate, but there’s a point at which you’ll realize it is for the best. I’ve initiated stipend payments so you don’t have to worry about losing any of your assets. Your house is yours. I suggest you take the time you were spending plotting my demise and think about what you want for yourself.”

She gives me an incredulous stare.

“You’re not going to hurt me?”

“I think I have hurt you enough. I am sorry for the pain I caused when I killed your mate. I maintain he deserved it, and you are better off without him, but I caused you hurt nonetheless and you are understandably furious. I don’t blame you for wanting revenge. I just ask that you serve it more coolly.”

This might seem merciful, but it is at its core, practical. I have wronged the woman, and she is right to try to gain her vengeance.

“Is this because of the detectives who were here?”

Brave question.

“No, Jenny. It’s because you just tried to explode my skull.”

“Oh.”

“Do I need to assign a detail to babysit you?”

“No, that won’t be necessary, Ma?tre .”

I disagree there. I need to know that she is being taken care of, and that there is someone ensuring that the darkest plans emerging from her miserable mind do not come to fruition.

I pick up my phone and send a voice message. “Beau, can you come to my office, please?”

Beau is similar to Jenny in age, which is to say, significantly younger than her mate was. He served in the foreign legion for a time, and is a big man with blue eyes and dirty blond hair with a lighter trimmed beard to match.

“Do you know Jenny?”

“Barely,” he says, with a little bow to her. “ Enchante, mademoiselle .”

For a woman who was just on the verge of murder avenging her mate, she is remarkably receptive with a hint of an answering smile.

“I need you to ensure that Jenny is comfortable, safe, and not getting into anything she shouldn’t,” I tell him. “For the next thirty days, I’d like you to be her constant companion and bodyguard.”

“Understood, Ma?tre .”

“Very well. The two of you may be on your way.”

I sit down in the aftermath of the attempt on my life and I am surprised by how calm I am. My mate is God knows where doing God knows what with bodies and tags, I just had a bullet whistle by my skull by the grace of the same deity, and now I am left wondering if this is the end of things. Have we covered our tracks? Will we atone for our sins? Beatrix especially.

Ironic that I just sent Jenny away with an armed guard, but my murderous little scamp is doing as she pleases.

I also have the strangest feeling I’m still forgetting something. I used to be on top of all pack business. No matter how many irons were in the fire, I used to feel as though I had everything under control. Now I wonder if anything is under control.

I take a deep breath.

“ Ma?tre …”

“Yes, Antoine?”

“We’ve discovered a vehicle accident on the backpack road. Must have happened a couple of days ago.”

“The detectives!” I suddenly remember what I forgot to do. “I meant to send an escort after them. Was anybody hurt?”

“Well, the tree they hit isn’t happy. But they’re missing.”

“Missing?”

“The car is empty. There’s blood in it, but nothing else. We followed some tracks not far off and found a collection of bones. As if they’d been eaten by wild animals. But there are no wild wolves in this region.”

He gives me a pointed look. We all know what this means. She’s struck again. I really thought I’d gotten through to Beatrix. Calmed her down. Made her behave, but it feels as though the second my back is turned she is off murdering people.

I cover my face with my hands. “Can you please bring my mate to me, if it’s not too much of an inconvenience for her, if she’s not in the actual act of murdering an authority figure.”

“I believe she was speaking to Mr. Volkov, Ma?tre , and he is very aggressive if interrupted.”

“Fine. I’ll get her.”

* * *

Beatrix

“I just feel like this is what I was made to do. Clean up. Take the rubbish out. Keep bad people away from those I love. The dreams I had… the memories. They’re all times I couldn’t stop something bad happening. And now I can.”

“With one easy trick: killing people,” Volkov says.

“Exactly! You get me.”

He really does seem to get me.

I’m still not sure I like him, but I have been able to open up more lately, and when I tell him things that everybody else would freak out about, he just takes it in stride.

“But Armand doesn’t like it. It scares him because of what might happen if we ever get caught. I just don’t think we will because of the plausible deniability of animal attacks. People don’t believe in werewolves, but they do believe in animals.”

Volkov nods. “Can you imagine a time when you will feel safe without having killed anybody?”

“Maybe? I guess it depends if men keep showing up and telling me they’re going to save me, or look after me, when I know all they really want to do is use me and hurt me. Those officers in the alley? The ones who started this? I could smell what they wanted to do to me, and it wasn’t help me. If they’d separated me from Armand…” I give a little shudder.

“You think you would have been hurt?”

“Every time a man gets his hands on me, I am hurt. Armand’s the exception.”

“Is he?”

“Yes. Because what he does to me, I want. He smells like family. He smells like home. And he smells like love. He worries about me, and for me. He wants me to be happy. You can smell all of that. The others are sniffing for a whole different experience.”

“When you explain things that way, they make sense to me. You put a lot of stock in your senses. Do you think there’s any chance…”

I’ll never know what the question is, because an impatient knock at the door heralds Armand’s arrival. He walks in without waiting to be invited, like he owns the place, because he does. The intrusion annoys Volkov more than it does me.

“I need to speak with my mate,” he says. “You can fix the damage I do afterward.”

“That’s a very flippant…”

I don’t get to hear the rest of Volkov’s sentence, because Armand has grabbed me and is physically abducting me.

“Hey! I was doing therapy!”

“You’re beyond therapy,” he declares as he carries me off.

* * *

Armand

I have come to a decision. Enough is enough. An alpha has to take responsibility. Has to do things that he does not want to do, and will not necessarily make him popular.

I put her down in the hall for a brief moment.

“Tell me you didn’t kill Barbier and Gaulle.”

“Okay, I didn’t kill Barbier and Gaulle.” She pauses for a moment, then cocks her head to the side. “Who are Barbier and Gaulle?”

I lose my temper. I don’t want to, and even as I lose it, I try to keep it in, but there’s some part of me that just can’t believe she’s done it again. I’ll never be able to trust her, and that breaks my fucking heart.

I’m going to have to treat her like a prisoner. I’m going to have to constantly keep watch over her. She’s never going to have freedom the way other pack members do because she just can’t be trusted.

“Christ, Beatrix! They were on their way home! It was over! Now there’s going to be an investigation to find out where the investigators went after they crashed.”

“They might think they wandered off and fell off a cliff? Or that wild animals ate them. They think there are wolves here. One attacked a man in the village not that long ago,” she says, speaking as if she’s not the responsible party.

“They might. Or they might think that it is a little odd that every officer who comes near this place ends up missing.”

“The world is a strange place,” she says. “Remember the Bermuda Triangle?”

“Nobody remembers the Bermuda Triangle.”

“Exactly.”

“You have to stop killing people.”

She takes a deep breath and looks at me with those beautiful deep brown eyes of hers. There’s so much contained there, so much I miss when I focus on her chaos.

“I didn’t kill those men.”

“They didn’t dismember themselves in the bushes.”

She snorts, grins, then breaks and outright laughs at my curt response. “I’m sorry,” she says. “That just sounds so funny when you say it that way, makes me think of what it would be like if they tried…”

“This is serious,” I growl. “You have to take responsibility…”

I trail off mid-sentence. How the hell is she going to take responsibility when she is so clearly constantly out of control? I am asking for something she cannot give. I have to stop doing that.

At her core, Beatrix is terribly afraid. Her tendency to violence and her insistence on justice come from the same place. But these men were leaving. They had an accident. Or maybe she created it. Maybe she took her wolf form and ran out in front of them. Maybe she hid in the back of the car and made it crash. I’ll never really know. I don’t really want to know the details. They’ll only be more incriminating when I’m inevitably interrogated.

“I am not going to let anybody hurt you. When the authorities come, and they will come now, you will be well out of the way, and you will not hurt anybody. Don’t fight this, Beatrix.”

“Don’t fight what?” She frowns slightly, then screams as I throw her over my shoulder.

“You can’t stop yourself? That’s okay. I can stop you. I had this prepared for you earlier,” I tell her. “I hoped I wouldn’t have to use it, but I see I will have to.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she giggles. She still thinks this is funny. We will see how funny it is when I start handling her as she deserves to be handled.

The stairs to the private dungeon go down from our room, winding down through the chateau unseen, hidden in walls until it hits bedrock and keeps going into the earth.

This is the dungeon I threatened her with, a space prepared for her to be held captive. It has all the basic creature comforts, including a bed, which I sit on as I throw her over my knee and spank her hard, relentlessly, my palm landing on her ass with the kind of slap that leaves a bright red mark every time it lands.

She yelps and wails, but this is only the preamble. I have much more thorough punishments planned for her. I spank her long and hard, until her toes drum against the floor and her ass turns bright red. I spank her upper thighs and her inner legs when she swings them open in the futile attempt to escape.

I hear a few incoherent snatches of words from her, but I am not listening to apologies or explanations. I am punishing her roughly and thoroughly, my hand bounding off her bouncing bottom time and time again as I thrash the lesson into her.

A bottle of lubricant stands on the night table. I pick it up and drench the cleft of her hot red cheeks with it, watching as the clear fluid runs down her parted ass.

“You’ve been a very bad girl,” I lecture, my tone imparting real weight to those words as I press my thumb to her ass and slowly push it in, claiming that last little bit of her. The part I had left untouched, because it felt too filthy, too defiling. It was the last piece of her physical innocence and I might have let her have it if not for the fact that she insists on disobeying me time and time again in the most brutal and sanguine of ways.

I pull my thumb out and replace it with my fingers. The lubricant is doing a good job at enabling this conquest.

“I warned you so many times,” I say, smacking her cheeks with my free hand. “And you’ve pushed me to this, haven’t you?”

A little mumbled yes floats to me.

“I’m going to fuck this tight little ass. You’re going to take my cock right here,” I say, plunging my fingers in and out of her tight hole.

She is tight. And she is sorry. The sound of her well-spanked whimpering is very appealing.

I have been so patient with my little mate. I have tried to give her the chance to relax, to feel safe. I have tried to keep her from danger, but she insists on becoming the danger. We will see how she feels about that now she is going to suffer the consequences.

I pick her up and bend her over the bed. She has very little to say for herself and that is good because I do not want to hear words or excuses. I just want to hear her wail as I fuck her.

“Breathe,” I order. “It will make it hurt less.”

With that, I start to slide my rock-hard cock into the tight, hot interior of her asshole. Little by little, she takes this humiliation, her empty pussy dripping with arousal beneath the hole I have decided to claim.

Her ass grips my cock tightly as she submits to me, giving me her obedience now that it is too late to mean anything for the lives I was trying to save.

I fuck her with short, firm, punishing thrusts. I don’t want to actually harm her, but I do want her to feel disciplined. I want her to know that she is in trouble, and her hot little hole is paying for it.

I am careful to keep my knot outside her as I rut her toward my orgasm, not hers. She will not come tonight. She will have her ass fucked and spanked and then she will go to sleep in this dungeon alone. That is the punishment I have decided on.

“It hurts, doesn’t it?” I growl down at her. “It hurts to have your sore, spanked bottom fucked nice and hard by your alpha, doesn’t it?”

I slide my fingers into her mouth, effectively gagging her from replying.

My orgasm is already building, the satisfaction of having her submitted as hot as the sensation of her tight ass taking its first fucking. I pin her down harder and fuck harder, my cock stretching that naughty ring of muscle until I cannot take it anymore.

I pull free, fist my cock, and direct the flow of my cum as my seed splashes over her spanked ass.

“Fuck, yes,” I grunt, smacking it into her bottom. “This is what you get now, Beatrix. You get fucked and used and left in my cum, marked with my cock and my seed.”

She whimpers, but stays in position as I tuck my still turgid cock into my pants, turn, and leave her in the prison of her own making.