Page 32 of Ruthlessly Mated (Shared Mates #2)

A cup goes sailing through the air and crashes into the cabinet next to my father’s head.

He is a big man with dark hair, dark eyes, and a thick beard.

As the ceramic shatters, he grins broadly and lets out a laugh.

My mother has a temper, but that has never bothered him for a single second.

He rushes forward, picks her up under her butt, and snugs her against him, pressing kisses to her lips until she stops sounding angry and starts sounding happy.

The dishes don’t get done that night either.

I am curled up watching late night television. I’m not really supposed to be up after nine, but Mom and Dad went to bed early and I think they fell asleep after all the giggling they were doing.

It’s a show I’m not supposed to be watching, with a lot of explosions.

I have it on really quiet, so I can’t actually hear the explosions, but I am imagining how they sound.

Also how the other bits sound, what it’s like when the limbs come off.

The main character has chainsaws for arms. Also sometimes his head is a chainsaw.

It’s complicated, but also simple in its brutality.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

There’s a light tapping at the window. It makes me jump and makes me more than a little nervous. I turn around and see a face in the window.

I’m mostly guilty because I know I’m not supposed to be up, and I am instantly worried that if that person knocks harder, he will tell my parents I was watching TV, and I’ll get grounded from TV, and then I’ll miss the next episode.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Damn! He’s getting louder, just like I was afraid of. He’s going to wake my parents up, and he’s already seen me so he would have seen the TV. It’s angled toward the window, and right now body parts are absolutely flying.

I turn the TV off. That’s the first thing I need to do. Then I go to the window.

There is a man there. He looks kind of evil, actually. The sort of person who is going to tell on me. He has a thick scar on his cheek and his face is very pale. I crack the window just a little.

“What do you want?”

“Hello, pup,” he says.

That’s interesting. It’s supposed to be a secret that we’re wolves.

It’s okay to be wolves, Mom and Dad told me that, but it’s not okay to tell people in case those people get scared and think we are going to eat them.

We’re not going to. I mostly eat sausages.

And nuggets. No people in either of those things, I don’t think, though sometimes I do think how easy it would be to put people in sausages, but Mom doesn’t like it when I think that way and Dad always tells me the story of how he found a mouse foot in a burger patty once.

My parents have twelve stories between them and they tell them on repeat.

“I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,” I say. “And you are very strange.”

“My car broke down. I need to come in and use the phone.”

“Oh, I could wake my dad up. He’s good with cars.”

“Yes,” the man smiles. “What a good idea. Why don’t you wake your dad up? He will want to know what you’ve been watching, I’m sure.”

How does he know? There’s a smile on his face like he knows. He clenches his fingers as if he’s going to make a fist to knock hard on the window, but he doesn’t do it. Not yet.

“Okay, you can come in,” I say. “Let me get the front door.”

“Good pup,” the scarred man says. “Go and get the door.”

I pad over to the door. The house creaks a little as I go, my light footsteps betraying me even though I don’t know it yet.

Just as I open the front door, the light on the stairs turns on.

“What are you doing, Kita?” My father is standing at the bottom of the stairs.

“There’s a man. His car doesn’t work,” I say. “He needs to use the phone.”

“Shut the door, Kita,” he says, his voice sounding weird and strained.

It’s the last thing he’ll ever say to me.

I can’t remember what the last thing my mom said to me was.

It was probably something about not putting my plate in the sink, or maybe something about not leaving the fridge door open.

I tell myself it was that she loved me, but I left the milk out way too often for that to be the thing she likely last said to me.

I’ve opened the door just a hair. I try to push it closed again, but it slams open, knocking me to the side. I hear my father make a noise like I think the people on the TV show would have made and then everything goes dark.

When I wake up, I’m not in my house. I’m tied up in the back seat of a car so fancy it doesn’t even seem real, and there’s a man next to me covered in blood, who smells of my parents, but is not my parents. It’s the first day of the rest of my life, and the beginning of my personal nightmare.

And now? It’s starting all over again.

“You forfeited your maker’s heart when you killed my parents and raised me as a feral orphan.”

“I may not have been a good adoptive father,” Alexander admits. “I did become distracted for some time…”

“You forgot I existed for a decade.”

“You were small and easily forgettable. You are still small, but I see you have found a way to make yourself harder to ignore. Does it please you, to have taken a powerful artifact?”

“I should have killed you when I had the chance.”

“The feeling is mutual, little one,” he leers through sharp teeth. “Get in the car.”

“I’m not going to get in the car. You’re asking me to kidnap myself.”

“You want me to kidnap you personally? Very well.”

He picks me up in one hand and throws me in the car where I crumple like trash, folding myself into the far corner in a tangle of all too human limbs. He is careless with me, but not entirely brutal, even though he is furious with me.

He wants something from me.

He thinks I’m going to be able to get the heart back. That’s why he hasn’t broken every limb in my body.

“Now,” he says. “What to do with you now I have you in my grasp and yet you remain non-compliant?”

“I don’t know, kill me?”

“I would not give you the satisfaction,” he says. “You are going to get my maker’s heart back, and then we are going to talk about your punishment.”

I stare sullenly at him.

“And if I don’t?”

“I’ll find and kill each and every one of your mates, slowly and in front of you. It won’t be like with your parents. I won’t glamor the memories out of your mind. I won’t spare you a single one of the excruciating details. It will be as if their deaths are happening to you.”

A cold spike rams itself through my heart. He’d do it. He’d do it, and he would enjoy each and every moment of it.