Page 30 of Ruthlessly Mated (Shared Mates #2)

C onroy

Damon and I just got one hell of a show. It’s nice to see someone else taking Kita in hand. She needs each and every single one of us to show some kind of dominance. I was getting tired of becoming the only big bad wolf in her life.

“Decided you have to do something to actually discipline her?”

Tailor gives me a sharp look, as if he’s still mentally in a dominant headspace. I smirk at him and he drops some of the energy, slightly.

“I don’t like her blaming herself for what happens to us.

I don’t like that she’s feeling guilty for things we decided to do.

We did not have to mate her that night. We could have slapped a fine on that truck and carried on our way.

Instead we dragged her upstairs and you fucked her until she didn’t have any chemical way out.

We made her ours. We made her our responsibility.

And now she’s worried about us. All the time. Blaming herself for decisions we made.”

He’s passionate, and he’s right. We got ourselves into this. We did absolutely nothing to find out who we were dealing with. We assumed she was just another smuggler who could be taken and go missing without anybody really noticing or caring.

“Taking that much responsibility is just another way she avoids submitting to us,” Tailor says.

“I want her to trust us with everything. I want her to let us deal with things. Look what happens when she deals with it. I want to be in charge of this girl. I want her to feel safe with me. With us. And that means taking her in hand.”

Damon and I smirk at one another. Tailor is mild mannered and slow to act, but when he does start acting, he doesn’t stop until his objective is well and truly achieved. Kita better watch her ass from here on out. He won’t let her think the wrong thing, let alone do it.

Damon taps the front of the safe, and the door swings open. He starts handing out the cloth bags containing our gold reserves. Tailor takes a couple. I take one. Out of the corner of my eye, I see something shift in the rubble.

I figure it’s an animal.

Pew!

Until it starts shooting.

We are not armed.

We run.

Kita

I wake to speed, wind, and bullets singing all around. They sound like heavy rain on the exterior of the vehicle, which is mercifully dense, having been designed to repel stupidity.

Rat-a-tat-a-tat!

Tailor is returning fire from the passenger seat. Conroy is driving. Damon is next to me, slumped down, his arm around me, pulling me close.

“What happened?” I shout the question to be heard over the chaos.

“Ambush,” Damon grunts.

I am pressed tight against him as if he is trying to protect me from the gunfire, which is sweet of course. But there’s something in his voice, even just that one word that sounds like pain.

He’s always quiet and he’s always pale, but there’s an extra quietness and a paleness that concerns me.

“Are you okay?”

As I ask the question, I become aware that there’s something warm between Damon and me. I push up a little and see that I am covered in red liquid. Blood. It’s not mine. He’s been shot. In the gut.

“Fuck!”

I press the blanket that was wrapped around me against Damon’s stomach, putting pressure on it, hoping it will help him survive. It feels immediately hopeless.

“He’s been hit! Damon’s been hit!”

A bullet whips past the back of my head. Tailor swings his gun around and I see the awful but satisfying sight of the driver of the vehicle behind us stopping being an alive person in a very short period of time.

Conroy

I hear Kita yelling. Her cry is panicked.

Dammit, Damon. He didn’t say a thing. He just jumped in the car and covered her with his body.

I’m not surprised he has been hit. I’m not surprised he managed to get to the car with the reserves anyway. The footwells of the vehicle are full of gold coins sliding around on top of one another.

I am surprised we were this fucking stupid.

Middle of the day. No vampires. No obvious traps.

We thought it was safe. We thought so incredibly fucking wrong.

Raiders came out of the fucking woodwork, what was left of it anyway.

They must have been staking out the safe, assuming we would come back to open it.

And we did just that, walking right into their ambush.

Stupid.

We are getting fucking stupid. And slow. And distracted. We did not run a smuggler’s port for years by being this unaware of what was happening. The place was constantly full of those with villainous intentions and yet we maintained perfect order. Now we’ve been routed from our home. Twice.

Getting Damon somewhere safe is the main priority.

There are so few places to go now. There’s Coastwood, a small town in the middle of the desert toward the ocean, but we are known there. Could be a good thing. Could be a bad thing. Doesn’t really matter because it’s the only thing.

“Keep the pressure on!”

“There’s more than enough pressure!” Kita shouts back. I can hear her panic. It echoes mine, though I manage to refrain from screaming it.

This all happened so quickly. Getting shot takes hardly any time at all.

If Damon dies, I do not know what I will do.

He is a brother to me. The three of us have depended on one another for years.

We trust each other in ways we’ve never trusted anyone else.

And we are bonded, not just as friends, but as mates.

“Just keep it on there, sweetie,” I call back over my shoulder.

“Sweetie?” she shouts back. “Since when am I sweetie?”

“Tailor, do you want to crawl back and help her? I’m going to keep this on track to Coastwood.”

Tailor places the weapon on the seat and goes back over to try to help. I have not felt this helpless in a long time. It feels as though our power is being stripped away from us one terrible event at a time.

I grit my teeth and swear inwardly to not only survive, but to save everyone. The vampire, the raiders, they’ll all pay.

Sooner than I expected, we’re pulling into Coastwood.

It’s a small forestry town located in the hills above the bay.

It’s not known for its wealth, but it is known for having five bars and four churches all laid out within two blocks.

The houses here are dilapidated, vehicles rusted out from the salt air.

Trees up the hill shade half the town most of the time, but the view out to the ocean has been cleared to allow people to enjoy it.

The doctor here has a good reputation. She used to get called down to the port often enough when smugglers arrived with various smuggling-related injuries.

Her place is on the edge of the town as you go in, taking up space in a clearing on the right where straggly grass is growing out of control in a lawn on which we park.

“Medic!”

I shout as we pull up to the doc’s house, helpfully denoted by a big red cross painted on the wall. The paint is peeling and fading, but it’s enough to indicate we are in the right place.

I wonder, briefly, what she’s done with the money she got from her port jobs. Maybe that’s the only real income she had aside from forestry-related injuries.

Her door bursts open as if she kicked it off the hinges, and she emerges like a superhero. Graying hair, thick-rimmed glasses, a white coat just barely shrugged on over a sweater fraying at the hem, and denim pants that terminate in scuffed sneakers, she levitates off her porch and to our car.

She has the kind of bearing that suggests crossing her would be a very bad idea. She comes bustling over and barks orders at us in a very comforting way.

“Let me see. Good. Yes. In the house, the two of you, stretcher by the front door, bring it out here and let’s get him on it.”

“He was shot,” I explain. “We were ambushed down in the port. Raiders and scavengers.”

She looks down at Damon with a charming expression. “Now,” she says. “Few questions before we save your life. Is there any chance of you being pregnant?”

Damon coughs up a laugh. Blood comes with it. Fuck.

“Yes. He’s been shot,” she says, as if she’s making a diagnosis. “Go and get the stretcher, will you? He’s probably done enough bleeding out for one day.”

She is capable and confident and shifters heal far better than humans. All she really has to do is stop the bleeding and I think his body will be able to regenerate. That’s easier said than done, though.

Tailor already has the stretcher out beside the car. He and I get in the back, slipping on bloody gold coins as we lever him out as carefully as possible. Kita keeps the pressure on his stomach as well as she can until we’ve got him up and moving.

Kita

It all happens so fast. The doctor lady has Damon in her surgery almost quicker than I can blink. Tailor and Conroy are gone too. I’m standing by the car, in shock.

I can’t believe this. Everything just keeps going badly. Then it gets a little fractionally better, and then it gets worse. It feels like we are being fucked with by the universe, as if we’re not allowed to be happy, or safe, or ever have anything good.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I shout the question to the universe.

I am so furious. Damon has been harmed. He might die. And it’s all my fault. I don’t care if Tailor would be angry at me for thinking that, it seems that way to me.

“Kita! Get in here!” Conroy puts his head out the door and shouts at me. “I don’t want you out of my sight.”

I go inside. There’s a faint smell of surgical things coming from the rear of the house. Blood, too. That must be where she’s treating Damon.

Tailor and Conroy are pacing in the front room, which has chairs so you don’t have to pace, and a coffee table so you have something to pace around if you want to pace.

I go in and stand by the front door, arms folded over my chest. I keep my mouth shut, because I want to scream at the top of my lungs. I want to blame them, but really I blame myself.

Tailor comes over and puts what I know he thinks is a comforting hand on my shoulder. “It’s going to be okay.”