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Story: Purchased (Bound Mates #3)
CHAPTER 3
B eatrix
We come to a halt in the middle of the countryside at a small train station. I know that it’s not usually used for much of anything besides coal, so our presence here is odd and sets up alarm bells in me.
“What are we doing?”
“Changing modes of transportation. Cars are small and cramped. I don’t care for them for long journeys,” he explains, his tone off-hand before he fixes me with a more determined look.
“Beatrix, I know that this is going to seem like a very good place to try to run. There is nobody for miles and there is a great deal of open ground. But I remind you, there is nobody for miles. Nobody would hear your screams or your cries if I were forced to discipline you for running from me.”
He speaks almost kindly, but there is a note of pure steel in his voice that tells me what happened in the orphanage will be the least of my concerns if I run.
He gets out of the car on his side. I get out of it on mine. The second my bare feet touch the moonlit ground, instinct insists I flee. It is not a choice, it is not a thought. It is an imperative.
A large hand closes around the back of my neck.
“Uh-uh,” he says, tutting lightly.
“How did you move that fast?”
“I walked around the car,” he says. “It’s not a long distance. Now, come.”
I whimper as I feel his power. He doesn’t feel like just some guy. I’ve been stopped, tackled, and even punished by orphanage guards. They were men. They were rough, gruff, aggressive. But I never felt like this when they touched me. I never felt a bolt of pure energy running through me, turning dials and switches in my mind, making me flood with need between my thighs.
I would have said this place was practically defunct, if not for the fact that there is a train here, a great big glossy black beast of a thing. It does not look at all like the trains I’ve seen around. It’s not graffitied. It’s not dirty. It’s not long. It has an engine and three cars, and every single one of them shines darkly in the moonlight.
“What is this?”
“My personal train,” he smiles.
“You can have a personal train?”
“Most people cannot, but yes, there are private trains. This is one of them.”
That’s when I know this man is loaded in a way most people never will be. He’s not just rich. This is billionaire level extravagance. He’s taken an anachronistic kind of transport and made it his own, and I am guessing it has to schedule in with all the public trains unless he’s also put his own tracks in…
I stop thinking about the logistics as he leads me up and into the interior. The carpet is a deep red, and on the inside it is furnished like a palace lounge, every item befitting royalty. I immediately feel shabby and filthy, like a dog that has broken into the house after years of being chained outside. I don’t belong here. I am not like these things. Not elegant. Not refined. Not worth anything…
“Oh, my god…”
“You have landed on your feet, pup,” he says. “All of this, and so much more will be yours once we are married. My millions, at your disposal.”
My stomach clenches. This can’t be real. Am I having a hallucination? Did they catch me when I ran and hit me with some drug that put me into a dissociative state? Am I back at the orphanage, talking to a mop?
Strong arms wind around me and squeeze me, not hard enough to choke the life from me, but enough to put pressure all around me and calm me like the frightened animal I am.
“Breathe,” he says. “You are safe.”
You are safe. He says those words, and I believe him. I feel myself calming down, even though the world has suddenly become so strange I hardly recognize it.
“There are many hours before we reach our destination. You can have a bath, get changed, eat some food. Settle in. We will talk of larger matters later.”
* * *
Armand
She is overawed, overwhelmed, and overstimulated. I can feel the tremors in her frame as I hold her close to me. I should have thought more about this. Should have taken her into a quieter carriage, not one that Louis the Sun King would have found appealing.
I take her hand and lead her to the rear. This is where I have a bed and a bathroom. The designs here are not so ornate, colors more muted, fewer fancy trims.
“I don’t have a lot of clothing for someone your size or gender, but have a bath and I will find something for you to wear.”
I would like to bathe her myself, but she is already panicked and afraid and right, in the sense that I have purchased her. She is my property. There is no escape.
The train is already moving, sleek and comfortable through the countryside. We will not be captive to roads filled with drivers of varying capability. We will not be cramped in a small vehicle with no ability to move around, have a cocktail, or feel ourselves think.
Beatrix does as she is told, disappearing into the bathroom. I pass a shirt through the door. There is nothing else on board to cover her because I did not plan on having female companionship. This little visit to the orphanage was a last-ditch effort. I thought it would be a waste of time. I cannot quite believe that my mate really was there, suffering poverty for years while I lived like… this.
I have food brought for her. Nothing fancy. Bread. Cheese. Cold meat. Hardly the meal I thought I would be gracing my mate with, but I think she needs solid food. She looks hungry in every sense.
After a time, she emerges from the bath chamber. She has a towel on her head and my shirt on her body. It comes down to mid-thigh on her, giving me a nice view of her long legs. I wince internally when I see the marks she sustained in her effort to escape.
In the privacy of my bedchamber, with a serving platter on the bed, we sit together. She devours hunks of bread, favoring the brioche. Then the cheese meets its fate. She eats particularly, avoiding the Roquefort, decimating the Camembert and Brie. She ignores the meats entirely.
She catches me noticing.
“I don’t eat animal meat,” she says.
I smile, amused. She does not know why, but I find it quite fascinating that one of her blood would avoid meat. Of course, this is killed, cured, as far from its original pumping self as it is possible to imagine while still being fit for consumption.
“More for me,” I say, finishing what she does not eat.
It is an honor to eat the crumbs from her meal.
She does not know it yet. Cannot know it yet. But I am entirely devoted to her. She is mine, not in a manner of crude ownership alone, but in a role that makes me her protector. I would lay down my life for her.
“Are you still hungry? Would you like a little wine?”
“Are you trying to get me drunk?”
“No. I am trying to help you feel comfortable and settled. You need to sleep.”
I pour her a small glass of red wine. Not enough to get a sparrow drunk, and I watch as she first sips, then drains it.
Like most broken things, she is desperate to be able to trust. I will give her that space, and she will fall into it. Force will be unnecessary. I can see her exhaustion. It is not simple tiredness. It is a deep fatigue of the soul caused by well over a decade of being denied the simple, necessary experience of being known.
She settles back against the pillows, visibly fighting sleep. I see her lids becoming heavy, dark lashes sliding down over those big eyes of hers. I wonder what they will look like when she smiles. I have never seen her so much as smirk. She may not know that happiness exists as yet, kept as she was in that prison for innocence.
The train is carrying us away from that place at a hundred and fifty mph. It is a speed that those who work there should be grateful for. The gentle rocking of the carriage on the rails is quite soothing and serves to help lull my mate into a state of relaxation.
She falls asleep awkwardly, half-curled up against the pillows. I wait until I am sure that she is entirely asleep before sliding her under the covers as slowly and carefully as possible.
I could lie down next to her, wrap my arms around her, offer my protection and affection. That is what I am drawn to do, but intellectually I am aware that sleeping in the same bed feels as though it would be too much of an imposition for her. She would probably panic if she were to wake up next to me, an interloper in her life.
She doesn’t feel strange to me.
She feels like the missing piece I have sought all my life. The piece I thought might not actually exist. I stand back and watch her sleep, feeling a little moment of contentment I have never experienced before. So this is what it feels like to have someone to care about completely and entirely, someone to be devoted to. Someone who is loved so deeply and completely, though she is a stranger.
I don’t know who she is, and to some extent, who she is does not matter. She is mine. Nature herself made her for me. She belongs to me in a fundamental way that most would never understand. Ordinary people, typical humans fall in love. They experience a cascade of hormones and chemicals that bond them to others for a while, but it is a tenuous connection that quite often does not last longer than an evening of rutting. Lifelong bonds are capable on occasion, but those can often be put down to self-delusion and convenience. Wolves? We bond instantly and eternally. It is not a rush of hormones that will fade over time; it is a writing overlaid in our very souls.
Humans are sometimes confused by sex. Wolves are not. I am not an innocent, nor am I pure, but my youthful sexual forays never held anything beyond simple lust. I never wanted to watch any of them sleep. I was never contented with their mere presence. I was never instantly, completely devoted the way I am now.
Our kind are made differently from humans in several respects. We are wilder. We can be less predictable. We have simpler needs, even more hierarchy than people enjoy, and an understanding of love that goes deeper and means more than people, who throw each other away for reasons big and small, could ever hope to understand.
There is nothing that this girl could ever do to make me abandon her. There is nothing she could do that would make me a sliver less devoted to her. In her, I see my future.
I realize I will have to sleep somewhere else tonight. I like to plan for every eventuality, but I never planned to be unable to sleep in my own bed. So I retire from the bedroom carriage and go into the lounge, where Daniel, one of my closest associates and long-term friends is holding up the bar. He’s my age, with shaggy brown hair and a tweed suit that he insisted would help him blend into the English countryside. He did not allow the fact that we were in Scotland to dissuade him.
He lifts a brow in surprise, then shakes his head at me slightly.
“I did not expect to see you again so soon, Ma?tre .”
“She needs her rest. Those bastards at the orphanage put her through…” I pause and gather myself. “Add them to the investigation list.”
“Investigation list, or destruction list?”
“One, pending the other.”
I pour myself two generous fingers of Scotch and sip it slowly. This has become a momentous day. My eyes slide to the calendar on the back of the wall. Seventh of July. Right between two days of independence. Beatrix has her freedom now too. She has a chance to be who she has always been.
I imagine how shocked she will be when she realizes that she really is a wolf, that she’s always known what she is, and who she is. I cannot wait to guide her through that first transformation. I will have to take great care of her when that happens. It hurts a lot. And it causes symptoms that can be likened to a severe cold.
“We will need painkillers, Daniel.”
“Yes, Ma?tre . We have painkillers.”
“Good ones, I mean. Opiates. I don’t want her to suffer. I want the transition to be seamless.”
“As much as it can be, yes.”
I do not like the idea that there will be pain that I cannot prevent. “She’s had enough hurt, Daniel.”
He stays silent, kindly not mentioning the fact that I thrashed her publicly and thoroughly in front of a crowd. Or the fact that the first transition from human to wolf is the most painful thing a female can endure, including childbirth. Some females never emotionally recover from the first transformation, and refuse to do it a second time.
The physiology of being a shifter is a brutal thing, a supernatural curse, some call it. In females, the transformation is inextricably linked to the loss of virginity to their fated mate. When her flesh joins with the male nature made her for, she is transformed in many ways. She is not merely deflowered. The veneer of simple humanity is ripped from her and the beast is revealed. When Beatrix and I first have sex, she will discover something new about herself, something she clearly understood instinctively, or perhaps was told when she was young, but was taken from her by the orphanage.
The director knew the truth, but I wonder if he did not suppress it simply to make her easier to handle. It would be simpler to drug a young female shifter than to deal with all her rising instincts.
“We are going to the family home,” I tell Daniel. I had planned for a different destination, but Beatrix needs to be among her kind. “I want there to be nothing but peace and recuperation for her. I will take several months from my duties. I will…”
Bang! Bang! Bang!
There’s a sudden series of loud noises coming from the rear carriage. I move before I can think.
I rush back to find the bed empty and the rear carriage door open. The banging sound is the door slamming back and forth at high speed.
She’s jumped.
I run to the little balcony at the back, expecting to see the receding body of my mate twisted on the tracks. But I see no such thing. Instead, I see something large moving under the moonlight, something fast and primal and animal.
A cold thrill runs through me as I realize what I am looking at.
A wolf. A shifter. Her.
My mate has shifted, leaped from a moving train, and is fleeing into the night.
It should be impossible.
Daniel is immediately behind me.
“She took her wolf form,” he observes, stating the obvious.
“Stop the train!”
I pull the emergency cord. Even this customized vehicle has the same one as the one in many public passenger vehicles. It bypasses all other controls and immediately applies the emergency brakes.
The sound of metal on metal at this speed is deeply unpleasant. It sounds like something being ripped from the very core of the earth, a scream from hell.
It takes less than a minute for the train to slow enough, but that minute is an eternity in my world. I watch her run in wolf form, feeling everything I thought I knew melt and fall apart.
She should not be able to do this. She is my mate. I know it. I know it to my fucking marrow. We did not consummate our connection, so this should be impossible.
Nobody else will understand the problem. They will assume a hasty consummation preceded these events. They will think she is claimed. Is mine.
They will assume that my horror is to do with the fact that my mate has fled, has leaped from a fucking moving train. The fall could have killed her quite easily, but not only did she not die, she does not seem injured.
It shouldn’t be possible. The thought keeps running through my head, torturing me with circular logic. The only way a female shifter is able to make the change is if she has been mated by her fated mate. But I am her fated mate, and she and I have definitely not ever had sex. I would certainly know if I had ever been inside her.
I am confused. Horrified, actually.
A dozen thoughts crowd my head all at once, coming thick and fast in the few seconds we have before it is safe for us to give chase.
Could I be wrong? Is she not my mate? Did I fall for some hot, broken, not-so-innocent girl in a shitty situation? Am I so lonely, so desperate, that the smell of a fertile female is enough to confuse my senses? Did I fundamentally settle for the first young woman to cross my path on this particular journey? Have I given up on myself? Was the pack right to force me to seek a female, or have they pushed me to bond with a ruined girl? Or is it the blood that the director mentioned, some Siberian heritage? Is that what spoke to me? Have I been drawn to a foreign lover that has confused my senses?
All these thoughts amount to nothing.
The blunt truth of it is that by all laws of wolf nature, I know she is not truly mine. She cannot be.
If I were to let her run into the wilderness, it would be proper and right. Some would say that I should let her run. I should let this evening be an expensive, humiliating mistake.
But she’s fucking mine.
I leap from the train, my suit shredding from my body as I take my wolf form. I am fast, but she is also fast, and she has a head start of a good quarter of a mile. She is running at full speed, and has been all this time, while I questioned myself, questioned her, questioned all I know about nature and the pack itself.
My paws find the ground, propelling my powerful self in chase.
It would be easy to lose her if sight was the only sense I had to fall back on, but I have scent, and hers drives me wild. I pursue her at full speed, giving chase like the wild thing I am.
She won’t escape me.
I won’t allow it.
I will claim her. Reclaim her, if I have to.
The train recedes in the distance as we run from it, leaving behind comfort and all pretense of natural humanity. The ground is slightly wet. It must have rained earlier today. Not surprising, given the climate.
Our paws will be leaving deep tracks. They’ll spur hunts if we’re not careful.
What the hell am I thinking. We are not being careful. We are being wild.
Hot breath and pounding paws soon draw up alongside me.
I am not running alone. My retinue has followed me, and we are able to do what wild wolves do, taking turns in the lead, running our prey to the ground, but allowing ourselves to slow and store our strength while another pack member takes the lead and shapes the direction of the prey.
It is an unspoken process. The second I took my wolf form, they took theirs. They follow me without question. Not out of loyalty, but because they always follow me. I am what I am, and they are what they are. This is all instinct.
Beatrix has lost the protection of personhood. We are beasts, and she is our prey.
In spite of all of this, our inherent advantage in numbers, our greater male strength, our determination and practice at hunting, if she was not exhausted, I do not think we would be able to catch her. She is fast and light, not carrying near the muscle most of us are. At first she sets an impossible pace, but over time and distance, she starts to flag.
She is tagged with a quick nip on the back rear leg by Daniel, and then on the right by Marcel. They drop back as she slows, a limp in her gait that will only worsen with time.
Ordinarily, anybody who hurt my mate in any way would die, but those rules, like so many others are suspended right now. They are all extensions of me, doing my bidding. The alpha’s mate does not merely belong to the alpha, she belongs to the pack.
These methods might seem cruel, but she could stop. It will all end once she is no longer running. Until then, she is a fleeing creature attracting the relentless pursuit of a pack.
Stop. I will her silently, as she keeps running on pained legs.
Stop , I snarl, though it does nothing to stop her.
If I want her to stop, I have to make her stop. This needs to end, before my pack takes her apart one nip at a time for the sin of insolence. I surge forward, taking the lead again. This time, I am prepared to use the last reserves of my energy. I have caught up with her. I have run her ragged and now…
I do not grab a limb; I draw even with her and nudge a front leg with my nose. She does not have the energy to right herself, so instead she gives into gravity, stumbling, rolling. I am right there on top of her, teeth fastened on the back of her neck, forcing her down to the ground, biting hard enough to slice through her resolve.
The message is clear.
She will drop the wolf form, or she will suffer.
She chooses to suffer.
I hear her yelp beneath my teeth. I feel them puncture the thickness of her hide.
I should have known better. I know very little of her, but I do know that she is stubborn. I know that she has remained herself even though she has been roundly punished and rejected for it. Force is not the answer. It will never be the answer.
I release my jaws before blood taints my teeth, and I lick the place I bit, her fur gorgeous beneath my tongue. I groom my mate, making what was hurt feel better.
She is panting beneath me, her ribcage rising and falling with the effort of exercise. I wonder if she will faint, if she is so drained by all this chaos and fear that she can no longer retain consciousness. It happens quite often when a young wolf overextends themselves. There is a limit to what they can stand. The body can draw more energy than it should, pull from reserves that should never be tapped, and the result is exhaustion that lasts days.
In the end, that is what gets her. Not a lack of strength, but a lack of fuel.
The wolf form fades, leaving a naked young woman under me. She is thinner than she should be. I see ribs and I see sores. I see bruises that did not come from me, or from this rough round. I see softness too, curves and swells, and beauty in the raw, but it will take more careful tending than this to draw it out.
Almost immediately, she starts to struggle, both for consciousness and against me. She pushes against my pelted chest and I too shift, taking my human form. I need to be able to speak to her.
She needs to be able to argue with me.
* * *
Beatrix
“Let me go.”
“ Never .”
He snarls the word, looking down at me with eyes the color of the moon. There is a fury in him that was not there before. He has taken my running rather badly. They always do. When they think I’m sweet and broken and helpless, a baby bird to be nursed back to health, that is when they are sympathetic. But now he has seen me in my strength, I am feeling him in his.
I want to bite him, but he keeps me pinned in the dirt, covering my body with his own. His chest is rough with hair even in human form. The night air is cold, the ground is wet, but he is hot against me. Not just warm, but practically a furnace.
“You want to get up?”
I don’t, actually. I want to stay here for as long as I possibly can. Under the stars, surrounded by wolves, beneath the body of one who hunted me down. This is what I have dreamed of my entire life. I have been a wolf without a pack, a waif without a home.
And now he is over me, making me submit, ensuring that I know I am his.
It’s terrifying, and it is everything I have ever wanted.
I want to run, but I can’t. He won’t let me. There is no way of getting up or getting out unless he lets me.
The way his eyes burn into me makes me feel as though I am pinned to the ground by a look alone, pure silver, anathema to a werewolf, somehow contained inside him.
“Do you want to get up?” He repeats the question.
“Yes,” I lie.
“Then you must promise not to run again. People could see us, and that would be dangerous. Being a wolf means having power, and that means there are responsibilities. Or do you know this already?”
The question is pointed, but I do not know what it is pointing at.
“I have responsibilities?”
“You have the responsibility not to fucking kill yourself,” he growls. “You deserve another thrashing. Is that what you want? A beating? Do you want to be pinned in this mud and whipped for being so careless?”
His threats excite me. I feel his passion for me, the passion not of a stranger, but of an alpha wolf. I squirm, not to attempt escape, but to feel his strength. I like him better now. I like this raw animal thing, rather than the controlled, dominant, elegant man who has taken me.
“I want you to rip me the fuck apart,” I say, a dark truth emerging from me in a moment of raw revelation.
I see his eyes flash, his brows rise. I have shocked him.
I do not know what his response would have been because at that very moment, a car drives up to us, four wheels just barely making it through the mud. Was there a car on the train? Or is he followed by other pack members in case he needs to make quick moves off the track? I think the latter. This is a man who is deeply prepared and surrounded by those who serve him instantly and without question.
I wonder if he can handle someone like me, someone who has never served anyone, and never will. I ran because my instincts demanded I run. I want my freedom more than I want anything. I want to be able to express my animal nature. I am tired of being kept in small rooms for the body and the mind. I am tired of being told who I am, and how it is wrong.
Armand looms over me, his face a mask of perfect confusion and concern. He is wondering if he just wasted ten million dollars. I think he did. I think he burned it on impulse, and he is just beginning to regret it.
“Is everything alright, alpha?”
“She’s intact,” he says. “And so am I. Let’s get going.”
“Yes. Of course.”
Blankets are provided and I am bundled up and back into captivity, needing a bath this time more than ever.