Page 65 of Ruthlessly Mated

I wish I’d been the one to get shot. Tailor was tortured unconscious. Damon has been shot. I have managed to avoid most of the damage, but I am the most responsible. I am the alpha. I am the one who should be protecting everyone.

“Mr. Conroy?”

The medic is standing behind me, drying her hands off on a towel. Her overalls have a lot of blood on them. I try not to look at the blood. I try to look at her eyes. They’re a hazel-y green and they are warm even though they are tired. Her name is Mandy Molloy. I’ve just remembered that.

“He’s going to be okay.” She sounds very confident. “The bullet missed most important things. I fixed a hole that was where a hole shouldn’t have been, but I think that’ll be the end of it. He will need some weeks to recover. I suggest you keep him away from strenuous activity and anything dense and lead based.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” I say. “We all owe you a great deal.”

“You owe me a few pieces of your interior decorations.”

I am confused for a moment, then I realize the car is still covered in bloody gold. We should do something about that more or less immediately.

“I’d say that’s the least we owe you,” I reply. “You’ve done more for us than you can imagine.”

“I’ve stopped him from dying. That’s it. I’m going to get a drink. Maybe change these clothes. You can go back to see him when he wakes up, but he probably won’t wake up for quite some time.”

I go out to give the good news to the others. I find Tailor sitting on the porch in a rocking chair pretending not to be asleep, or maybe he’s pretending to be awake. I can’t tell. He’s languishing in a state of stasis that evaporates the moment he hears the good news.

“He’s going to be okay. He’s been patched up. Doctor says she’s confident he’ll make a full recovery if we can keep him from getting more shot.”

“That’s good news,” he smiles.

“Yes. Kita will be happy to hear it.”

I turn to Kita, but she’s not there. I could have sworn she was out here with him. I assumed the two of them had gone off to canoodle in some way.

“Where is she?”

“Isn’t she with you?” There’s instant tension in his voice.

“I thought she was with you,” I reply.

Where the hell is Kita?

We can’t find the girl anywhere. I find it hard to believe that she would have run away with Damon so gravely ill, but that seems to be exactly what she’s done. It’s quite literally un-fucking-believable. I do not think I have ever been so angry in my entire life. One of her mates might die and she leaves?

“What the hell? Is that who we made our mate? Someone who wouldn’t stand by us? Who escapes at the first opportunity?”

“Calm down,” Tailor says. “There are a lot of reasons she might be gone. She might not have run away. She might have been captured. We could have been followed. We can’t assume the worst every single time something happens.”

“You’re assuming the worst. You’re just assuming it in a different direction.”

Maybe she’s in the car.

The car is empty aside from a bloodstain on the back seat where she tried to keep him alive. God. She should not have had to do that.

We have not protected her properly.

All the anger I was directing at her is instantly directed at myself. We let this happen to her. It’s not her job to deal with threat after threat. It’s her job to take our cum and bear our pups.

Tailor puts his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry. We’ll find her.”

“If we were followed, why didn’t they come in here and shoot us all?”

“Maybe they just wanted her?”

“She was upset about Damon. She blamed herself,” I say. “She probably ran away out of guilt.”