Page 33 of Ruthlessly Mated (Shared Mates #2)

C onroy

Damon and the doctor have been in the back room surgery for what feels like hours. I have paced. I have thought. I have regretted. I have made plans for what we will do once he is better. I tell myself that he will get better, because he has to get better, because there are no other options.

I want him to live. I desperately want all of us to live. We haven’t had the chance to fully enjoy our mate yet, and he is just beginning to overcome the damage of a lifetime. He spoke to Kita. He found his voice. And now he’s been fucking shot.

He will never complain about it. I already know that. He’ll probably never mention it. Even if he does start talking to us. This will just be another bit of damage he absorbs.

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.”

“I just punished her for that,” Tailor says.

“If anal sex solved emotional problems, they wouldn’t exist at all,” I say. “We need to get on her scent. Now.”

“We can’t leave him behind,” Tailor frowns.

“Yes, we can. He’s safe here. She’s the one who needs to be found.”

Mandy Molloy has been helping us look. At first I’m not sure she was even aware of what she was looking for, but she’s one of those terminally helpful people who cannot help but be useful in terrible times.

She’s worked it out now by context, and the way we keep cursing about how we can’t find our mate.

“Never worked on a wolf shifter before,” she says. “That’s what you are, right?”

“Yes.”

“I expected there to be more hair. His physiology was human. You’d never know. At some point I’d love to be able to observe a transformation…”

“Doctor, we need to find our mate.”

“Go find the girl,” Mandy says. “Your boy will be safe enough here for as long as he needs to be.”

“Thank you,” I say. “Truly.”

“Don’t worry. The port brought us a lot of business. Can’t say I’m pleased to hear it burned down. Can’t say anyone here is. You will be rebuilding, won’t you?”

For the first time, I’m realizing that the port meant something to more people than just me and my mates. We were always focused on our own profits and aims. Never really thought deeply about how we were supplying the local economy.

“We’re going to try, ma’am,” I say. “Looks like we’re going to need some firepower to do that, but we’re going to try.”

“We are?” Tailor mutters the words to me as she goes back inside.

“We are. But we get our mate first.”

Tailor and I take our wolf forms and head off after our missing mate. Her scent is easy to find because we are tuned into her in a way we are not tuned into anything else.

This is a simple task.

We run until the sun rises.

We find blood.

Not hers.

Animal.

Then we find the trap site. Silver. Still no blood of hers. Good.

It smells like her here. It’s like she’s right in front of us, but we can’t see her. It’s strange. How can she possibly be here without being here? We maintain our wolf forms. Easier to move. Easier to scent.

“Run away! Run. The fuck. Away!”

She screams suddenly from the darkness. Our ears prick up. She’s here. We’ve found her. But she’s not happy. And she’s warning us. That’s what run the fuck away means.

The animal brain processes slowly. Her warning cry doesn’t frighten us, it indicates her presence.

Running is the last thing we are going to do right now.

We’re going to find her. We’re going to follow the scent until it reaches here, wherever she is, no matter what is happening to her, no matter how bad her situation is.

“Oh, my god, what the fuck. Run!”

She screams again. We bound toward her.

“Fuck.”

A red light is dancing on Tailor’s head. It means danger. As does the screaming of our mate, but it is a different kind of danger. Finally human intelligence forces its way through our animal excitement at having tracked her down.

We’re about to be shot. This was a trap.

Of course it was.

Everything is always a trap. Every instinct, every action, every thought, every breath.

“Don’t. Move.” A deep voice comes to us.

Vampires don’t have a scent. They’re an absence of life, so how could they. They are very difficult for wolves to detect. Sometimes they might smell like human blood or molding dirt if they’ve been in the ground, but that’s not the same as having a scent.

We are surrounded. We don’t know by how many, but we know that we are. Tailor presses close to my side, a low growl emanating from his throat, looking around trying to see the predators we know are here with us.

Uncanny steps are coming toward us, shuffling through leaf mold deliberately. They want us to know they’re coming. They are slow. Unhurried. Intimidating.

Vampires don’t need to run. They either walk or seem to teleport. The walking is a choice. A kind of intimidation.

We crouch down, hackles raised. They might have bullets, silver plated I am sure, but I also don’t think they want us dead. If they did, we’d already be shot. They want to capture us. That’s worse than dying. I’d rather take a bullet than end up in a vampire’s custody.

They appear finally. Three of them. They’re dragging something with them. A crate. The sort of thing people use to transport wild animals. Sheet metal. Impenetrable by fangs and claws.

“Get in the box.”

One of the hooded creatures is speaking to us.

People think that vampires can’t walk in the day, but really they can’t handle sunlight. And, as it turns out, gloves, heavy pants, long sleeves, hoods, and a mask pretty much take care of the sunlight thing as good as anything else.

I’m going to bite this thing. I’ve already decided. I decided the minute we got into the open clearing and heard our mate shrieking in fear for our lives. Someone is getting bitten.

I lunge. A shot goes off. It misses.

I tear at the clothing of the vampire. Sun hits him. He screams. It’s very, very fucking satisfying. But it doesn’t make us any less caught. If anything, it quickly makes things worse. Five more appear in his place, and guns go off, shooting not bullets, but darts.

They hit home. Drugs hit my system. My limbs go heavy. My thoughts go dull. My brain turns off.