Page 19 of Ruthlessly Mated (Shared Mates #2)

“It doesn’t make sense, sweetheart. We need to get out of this city, and away from that thing.

I know you’re angry at the vampire, and I know you don’t want to leave the relic behind, but I can tell you that holding that vampire’s maker’s body parts hostage is not going to bring your parents back.

We need to put ourselves first. We need to put our future first.”

“A girl has to give up her dreams and career the second she finds mates, does she?”

“This isn’t a career, it’s a monumental mistake.” Conroy says.

“I didn’t ask you, and I don’t care what you think.”

“We’re in this together,” I remind her. “It’s not Kita’s ancient vampire heart, it’s our ancient vampire heart. It’s not Kita’s murderous vampire stalker, it’s our murderous vampire stalker.”

Kita pushes me away. I let her. I could pin her in place. I could fuck her against the wall. I could make her submit to me like Conroy did, and I bet we’d wake up to this place in flames.

“He’s right,” Conroy says, backing me up.

“We haven’t had the chance to consummate this yet.

We need to shift together. We need to run under the full moon.

We need to stretch our legs and feel our fur and fangs.

We are trapped in human forms, but we are not people, and we shouldn’t be pretending to be. ”

“Shut up,” Kita says, apparently incensed by the idea of shifting under the full moon. “Just shut up, okay? I’m busy. I have something to do. Now you can tag along if you want, but you don’t get to be in charge of me, or what happens to the heart.”

Tension is rising again, because she will not listen to sense, reason, or instinct. She’s immune to all influence besides the plan inside her head. The mere suggestion of doing anything other than what she wants to do seems to send her into an absolute fury.

It is at this moment that Damon slides into the room, his eyes dark and watchful. I do not know where he has been or what he has been doing, but I know whatever it was it was probably important.

He moves past the both of us and grabs Kita. I don’t know how he does it, but she always calms down when he touches her. I think it’s the lack of verbal pressure. He doesn’t tell her what to do. He gives her what she needs.

Damon gathers her into a hug, then flicks his eyes at us, nonverbally telling us to get out.

Conroy and I leave. There’s nothing we can do right now, nothing that won’t send our mate into a feral frenzy and maybe even risk an uncontained shifting event, which would be very dangerous in this city. Wolves are shot on sight here.

We shut the door to the bedroom and take our conference next to the dirty plates.

“Can you fucking believe this?” Conroy runs his hand through his hair. “An explosive vampire heart in a truck. She’s got us toting an incendiary fucking dark relic around like a cargo of bottled water. We lost the port for this.”

“Getting a new mate can be disruptive,” I say, trying to downplay the drama a little.

My words come out pretty much on auto-pilot.

I too, am impressed by the sheer insanity of her actions.

This woman came into our lives looking like prey, seeming like a sweet little rebel to be claimed and tamed, but she has brought darkness with her the likes of which I have never seen.

Damon might be more familiar with it. Might be why he has that unspoken bond with her.

“Disruptive? Understatement. We’re in the most hostile city on the continent. I should never have allowed her to come here. I should have insisted on inspecting the cargo…”

“Then you would have blown yourself up,” Kita calls out from the bedroom. “That thing is trapped so many different ways, you would have been wolf mist before you knew what was happening.”

Conroy glowers, but we both fall silent. There is no point arguing with her. We have to work out a way to work around her. She needs to be managed.

“Arguing with her is a mistake,” I murmur softly. “We’ve got to engineer the situation.”

Conroy nods, though the muscle is still ticking in his jaw. He is a time bomb of a different sort. Between the two of them, I can see fireworks about to be unleashed. This is where my skill set comes to the fore. If Damon is the silent peacemaker and Conroy is the warrior, then I am the tactician.

The bedroom door opens, and Kita appears in the doorway.

“Listen, my complex revenge plot is not supposed to be an inconvenience to you. It’s something I did for me. I wasn’t planning on forming a mate bond. Just let me finish with this vampire, and…”

“What’s the end game?”

“Uhm.”

“Kita,” I say softly. “What was your plan?”

“Well, I suppose I thought eventually he’d kill me, but I’d annoy him quite a bit first.”

I don’t know if she’s telling the truth about that, or if she’s being an edgy little shit. It could be either.

Conroy, Damon, and I look at one another.

“Your plan was to annoy an ancient vampire into killing you?”

“No. I mean, it wasn’t the main point. I just figured eventually I would die, like my parents did. Dying to vampires runs in the family. It’s genetic.”

I think she’s joking, but I also think she is entirely serious. She is prepared to die in aid of inconveniencing and annoying the vampire she considers to be her mortal enemy.

“Well, we are going to interrupt your plans, because we want you alive,” I tell her. “We’re actually all very invested in you staying alive.”

“I’ll stay alive as long as it doesn’t get in the way of my plan for vengeance. Deal?”

“Something of a deal.”

Damon ushers her to the table, and we all take a seat. Four chairs for four of us. We sit around the circular round table staring at one another with varying expressions, each of us with a different plan.

“So talk,” she says. “What do you want?”

“I want babies,” Conroy says. “I want a mate to love and protect and to breed.”

Kita blushes. “You want babies with me?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Really?” She seems terribly surprised. “After everything you’ve already been through? Or wait… you just want babies. You don’t care that I’m clearly a psycho.”

“You’re a very cute psycho,” Conroy says in a rare burst of charm. “And everything in my body wants me to impregnate you, so yes, I want babies. With you. What I don’t want with you is a van full of dead vampire parts.”

Kita smirks.

Interesting. Maybe the two of them have some chance of actually getting along at some point. Maybe it won’t just be fighting the entire time.

I feel a little pang. Conroy and Damon seem to have this very natural, instinctive connection with Kita, and here I am, thinking every angle through. This is what I do. This is what has served me for as long as I can remember. And this feels terrible.

Kita

He wants babies. My babies. There’s something about him saying that to me that makes me instantly so fucking wet it’s like I forget about everything else besides what it feels like to have him deep inside me.

Conroy is a massive beast of a wolf, a domineering alpha who makes me want to fight him all the way until he pins me down and…

“I don’t want babies,” I declare. “They’re gross.”

Conroy looks me dead in the fucking eye and smirks. “I don’t care if you want babies. I am going to fuck a litter into you.”

“Asshole.”

“I might use that hole too. It would save you from getting knocked up too soon.”

I stare at him, horrified, but knowing he’s fucking with me. It’s just like I’m fucking with him. We already have this thing where we talk absolute shit to one another and I’m finding it very fucking hot.

Damon is by my side, his hand rubbing up and down my back in a soothing manner.

His presence remains so calming, and so warm.

I glance around at Tailor, who is sitting bolt upright in the chair and looking at me with an expression I can only describe as mathematical.

I feel like a problem in the course of being solved.

It makes me want to shrink away from him.

I feel small and problematic and guilty.

He’s cleaned up nicely, but when I look at him, I see him as he was when Conroy pulled him into the truck.

He was so badly fucking hurt. He hasn’t complained about it one bit; he’s barely mentioned it as an inconvenience.

I fall silent again.

“There’s not going to be a part of your body that isn’t going to be used by us. All of us,” Conroy says. “I’ve been gentle with you because you were a virgin.”

“You were not gentle with me! You threw me on a table in the middle of a bar and fucked me in front of every criminal in a thousand-mile radius! I lost my virginity publicly! Like a…”

“Like a what?” Conroy grins, almost daring me to finish the sentence.

“You know like what,” I blush. I don’t usually blush. Shame is for people who haven’t spent their whole lives planning elaborate and terrible revenge. I’ve spent my life doing my best to eradicate any softer impulses, because I knew I’d need to be pretty much emotionally indestructible to survive.

“You belong to us,” Tailor says. “There’s no ‘like a’… anything. No matter what happens, you will always belong.”

Those words should probably feel reassuring, but they feel like ropes wrapping around me, choking off my air.

I don’t know why Conroy telling me he’s going to fuck babies into me feels so fucking hot, but Tailor telling me I belong to them makes me want to set myself on fire and run screaming through the city streets. Very different kind of hot.

Damon’s hand slides up the back of my neck and settles in my hair, flexing and then gripping firmly. It brings me back to my body and makes me stop worrying for a moment. This man has my brain off switch, and I think I love him for it.

Having one mate suddenly would be complicated enough.

Three of them is almost too complex. I have things to do.

I have revenge to get. I have a lifetime of pain to avenge, and I figure if this is fated, I can’t really fuck it up.

On the other hand, the vengeance? Alexander? That I can definitely fuck up.

I’m going to finish what I started. I’ve been honest with them. They know what I’m about. They can choose someone else. They can choose something else. Actually, now that I think about it, the best thing I can do for them is just go ahead and try to keep them out of the way.

They’re going to try to get me out of this situation.

And I’m going to do my best to keep them out of it.

I look around at three men I already care for more than makes any kind of sense, and I know that things just got really, really fucking complicated.