Page 41 of Ruthlessly Mated (Shared Mates #2)

K ita

It takes a week for my ass and pussy and everything else to stop hurting, but I have learned my lesson.

Maybe. I guess time will tell. It’s not like I planned to run in the first place.

It was a knee-jerk reaction to all the fear that comes with being this intimate after a lifetime of being so alone.

My mates are not going to let me go. They’re also not going to let me get away with anything. So, time goes by and I go… good?

I eventually find myself curled up and relaxing in front of the fire as winter sets in. Has it been three weeks? Three months? Does it matter?

I’ve stayed out of trouble, at least in the sense of grand larceny and other crimes. I’ve stayed around the house. I’ve stayed well behaved and well… Fucking bored, actually.

I think about going home. To the place I came from. I think about what Alexander said about me, about who I came from and what life I would have lived and whether or not I would be okay.

“What are you thinking about?”

Tailor always knows when I am thinking. Damon, too.

Conroy isn’t home at the moment because he’s negotiating with the contractors and security people who are rebuilding the port.

Everybody is very excited about it. Sometimes I get escorted down to the town, Coastwood.

There’s a bar there, though I’m not allowed to drink because they want me pregnant and they keep telling me I might be pregnant, and maybe I am.

It all makes me think about family. About moms and dads.

About my mom and dad, how they existed before Alexander made them not exist. It makes me think about what might happen if I had a baby and something happened to me, and Conroy, and Tailor, and Damon.

There’s two more of us, more redundancy in case of random vampire murder, but still.

“Nothing,” I say when Tailor nudges me with his socked foot from the couch. He is getting far too comfortable. They all are. I might be too. It’s nice to be in one place, to rest, to sleep, to not be consumed with the all-important desire for brutal vengeance.

“I can feel the weight of your thoughts,” he says, his tone deep. “Share them.”

“I think I’d like to go home.”

“You are home.”

“No, I mean, where I came from. I’d like to see the old place, maybe visit my parents’ graves. Pay my respects.”

Nobody decent and in their right mind would deny me that.

“We’ll talk about it with Conroy when he gets back from the docks, but I think that is a good idea,” Tailor says. “I’d like to see where you came from.”

“No,” Conroy says the next day. He comes home from working on the port, walks in the door, and dashes my dreams as if they’re nothing.

“No? Why not?”

“No. It’s another ploy to get somewhere and do something,” he says firmly. “I want you here, with us, until you have our pups. And when you do that, you will realize that there are many more important things than revisiting the past.”

“Why are you being such a controlling asshole? Oh, wait. Why ask that. It’s because you are a controlling asshole.”

Conroy

Tailor pulls me aside after Kita has had her predictable tantrum at being told she can’t have what she wants. He keeps playing into her need to try to get in control, even though we’ve discussed plenty of times how bad that is for her.

“Why are you being such a controlling asshole?” He asks the question with a frown.

“Because I already looked into her home town. Nobody survived. It doesn’t exist. It was razed to the ground by the vampires when she was taken.

There’s nothing for her to go and see. Nothing for her to return to.

It’s a bunch of ruined houses rotting in long grass.

I don’t want to take her back there and remind her of everything she had to endure all over again.

I want her happy here. I want her to come to terms with this as her home, this as her family, this as her life.

If I let her go all the way back to that wreck she’s going to be unsettled all over again. Why are you smiling?”

Tailor is giving me a look I cannot read. “You really love her, don’t you. But you go out of your way to make her feel like you’re a monster.”

“She doesn’t have to like me. She just has to do as I say. It’s simple. And don’t you tell her what I told you. It’s a secret. She doesn’t need to think about the past.”

“I don’t think you get to decide what she thinks about, Conroy. I think it’s time you started thinking about what she wants and why she wants it, instead of just trying to control everything all the time. If you want to keep her close, you have to start responding to her emotions.”

“Stop being ridiculous.”

“Does she know anything about you? Where you come from? What made you this way?”

“Does she need to know in order to do as she’s told?”

“Yes. Probably. Eventually. Yes.”

Kita

I hate this place. I hate my mates. I hate Conroy the most. He says no to everything.

If he could say no to me seeing daylight, I bet he’d say that too.

He’s obsessed with control. He doesn’t care about me, or what I want, or what I need.

All he cares about is forcing me to do what he wants, and using my body to give him pleasure and make his babies.

I sit outside, fuming to myself, trying to think what I can do to get back at him. Can’t really run away again, but I can go ahead and make his life a nightmare in other ways.

“I was drafted into the military when I was seven years old,” Conroy says, dropping a wrapped sandwich into my lap. I don’t really want to talk to him, but that opening makes me curious.

“You were? As what?”

“As a mine detector. We were light, and less likely to set landmines off.”

“My god.” I stare at him. “That’s terrible.”

“It was less than ideal,” he says. “Eat your sandwich.”

I start unwrapping the paper. I didn’t really want a sandwich, but I know he’s only going to take it as some kind of rebellious act if I don’t eat it just like he tells me to.

“I want babies,” he says. “I want to have the family I lost when I was taken. I think you want that too. But it’s not back where you were taken from.

It’s here, it’s now. It’s with us. The past doesn’t have what we need.

It’s just a catalog of badly remembered events and things we need to work to let go of.

I know you think you want to go home, but what you really want is to make a home you probably never really had here with us. ”

“Maybe? I don’t think I’ll be a good mom. I don’t know how to be.”

“You’ll work it out. You’ll have the advantage of being present, which helps.”

“That is true.”

The sandwich is chicken, cucumber, tomato, mayonnaise. It’s good. Unexpected, much like this conversation.

“So,” he says. “I love you. You know that?”

“Uhm.” I pick at the sandwich, wondering why this feels so awkward. If he’d picked me up and thrown me over the couch and fucked me roughly, I would know what to do. This gruff admission of feelings is different. “I guess?”

“I do. I love you,” he says. “And I want the best for you.”

“You want babies from me.”

“Yes, but I think that’s best for you too. You need a family. Something that stays, something that grows. Something that doesn’t explode.”

“Okay.”

I still don’t know what to say. I just sit there, stare at him, and try to work out why he is being so weird.

“I need the same thing,” he says. “I need something that stays, and grows, and doesn’t explode. And I need you to know I love you, and when I say nothing matters except you, I mean it. So when I say no to something, it’s not because I want to be mean to you. It’s because it’s for the best.”

“You want babies, right, Conroy?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not a baby. I’d be the mother of babies. And that means you don’t actually get to say no to me because something is for the best.”

“That is what Tailor said,” Conroy replies gruffly. “I think it would be easier if I could.”

“Uh.” I take a bite of the sandwich. It is tasty, and it buys me time from what feels like an impending argument.

“My favorite color is green,” he says.

“What are you doing?” I am so confused.

“We need to get to know one another,” he says. “That’s what I’ve been told.”

“Tailor told you to tell me what your favorite color is?”

Conroy frowns. “He was setting me up, wasn’t he.”

“No, I don’t think so. I…”

“He was. I was saying you can’t go back to your home town and he said you don’t know me very well and I have to talk to you, but this is…” He looks at me and exhales roughly. “Stupid.”

“My favorite color is yellow,” I say, throwing him a bone. He is so out of his depth and clearly not in sight of his comfort zone.

“Oh. Good. What. Er. Not sure what favorite colors are for, but glad we know them.”

“Yes.”

“Is the sandwich good?”

We are being awkward as hell and it’s weird and it’s kind of cute, but I also don’t know what’s really going on here.

“Yes, thank you.”

“Good. You can’t go home because your town was razed to the ground, burned out completely. Everyone was slaughtered and their bones scattered by wild animals. So you have to stay here. Okay. Good talk.”

“What?” I stop eating. “What?”

“Yes. Tragic. Sorry. Vampires are evil. Very bad things happened. Okay. So. You’re good to stay here now?”

I try to understand what he’s saying. The words are easy, but the ramifications are deep and terrible.

I truly thought that the town still remained; even my parents’ house would still be there, with another family living in it.

I never thought Alexander would have erased the whole place.

It is like my life as I remember it, the brief period of warmth and safety, is gone. Forever.

“That’s how you tell me…”

“I should have gotten Damon to do it, but he still doesn’t like talking, and Tailor refused, he said I was the one who knew and therefore I was the one who should tell you, and…”

Tailor

I’m listening in with Damon. Maybe we shouldn’t be doing this. Maybe we shouldn’t have placed bets on how badly this is probably going to go.

“So Tailor set us up,” Kita says. “Wow. He’s such a piece of shit. And to be honest, I don’t like the way he dresses. Please. Waistcoats? How pretentious.”

Damon is smirking now. I am wearing a waistcoat, of course.

Conroy looks confused. I don’t think he’s noticed anything I’ve worn since we met. He’s a fan of details when those details involve war, or money, but he would happily wear the same forest green sweater and denim pants and combat boots day in and day out from now until the end of time.

Before I can stop myself, I am striding outside.

“Waistcoats are not pretentious, they are a stylistic choice, young lady, and given that I am one of the vanishingly small number of mates you have who does not want you whipped within an inch of your life, it might be time to think about speaking about me with a little more respect…”

I trail off as I see a very amused grin spreading over her pretty face.

“You knew I was listening.”

“Of course I did.” The smile disappears as she throws the remnants of the sandwich at me, and my very nice tweed waistcoat is covered in mayonnaise and tomato and chicken, none of which improve the pattern at all. “You set him up.”

“I was trying to get the two of you to talk.”

“We don’t need to talk. None of us have ever talked. That’s what makes this work. If we start talking to each other and sharing feelings beyond fucking or fighting, who knows what we’d start telling each other.”

I really thought Conroy was the most emotionally guarded person in our little pack, but now I see very clearly that Kita is far worse than him. She doesn’t fight with him so much because they are different. She has friction with him because they are far too similar.

“We have to get to know one another. We have to share our joys and our sorrows.”

“We all need matching waistcoats,” she cuts in, narrowing her eyes at me.

She’s reacting worse to this than she would to being just straight up fucked without warning. We have trained her to accept sexual domination, but we haven’t taught her to share the deeper parts of herself.

“That’s enough,” Conroy interrupts her. “There’s no need to be rude to Tailor. He’s trying to help you. He’s trying to make us all healthier and better. And you have no right to speak to him that way.”

Kita’s eyes flash and before she can open her mouth again to say something that will absolutely derail proceedings, Damon is behind her, his hand wrapped over her mouth.

“Quiet,” he purrs into her ear. “Relax.”

She obeys him, the way she always does. She has submitted to him from the beginning. Their connection is so deep, so natural. She and I, on the other hand… I wonder if there is anything between us besides my presence and her receptivity to domination.

“I’m going to go for a walk,” I say, walking off.