Page 38 of Savagely Mated (Shared Mates #1)

The king’s yelp does make me tense slightly, in case his guards come rushing in.

When they don’t, I realize why, and it makes me bite even harder.

They’re used to pitiful sounds coming from this room.

They’re used to hearing females in pain—and right now, this so-called king sounds like a little bitch.

I have him right up under his jaw, so he can’t bite me back as much as he’d like to.

We roll around together, slamming into the furniture as he tries to shake me loose. Still the guards don’t come. What hellish nightmares has he put women through that this does not alert them?

I taste blood, and that blood makes me even more feral. When the threats he made flash through my animal brain, when I imagine that he threatened my potential child, told me he owned me, wanted to fuck me the same way he’s fucked dozens of other women, none of whom had the choice.

The moment I open his artery, it is over. I am suddenly bathed in hot red blood. It covers my fur in a cascade of sanguine justice, and finally, the king makes a howl so pained, and so disturbing, the guards peek their heads in.

They look at the dying king, and then at me.

“Get her!”

I know these will not be weak and ineffectual wolves. These are trained wolves. These two will tear me to pieces.

I run, bounding through the window in a torrent of fur, blood, and glass. The roofs of the various gardens act as a path over which I can run—and I do run, at full speed, knowing I am quite literally fleeing for my life.

When I am not tackled off the roof and onto the ground below, I realize that the guards must have stayed back to try to save the king. The alarm has not been raised yet. I don’t know if anybody saw me come out that window. If they did, they might still be in the process of reporting it.

It doesn’t take that long to escape the palace. It is very well defended, but that’s from people who are trying to get in, not people who are trying to get out.

I leap from the garden roof line to the wall and then down the other side into the street.

Now the alarms are starting to sound. I hear them in the distance as I flee down toward the river, taking cover in the dense bushes that grow thickly along the edges.

And that’s when I see a van.

I know that van. Well, not that van, because I am pretty sure that one is still impounded, but I know in my gut that my mates are in that completely-conspicuous-for-the-area lump of metal.

I approach it somewhat cautiously, keeping an ear out, just in case it’s not who I think it is.

I hear voices though, and the closer I get, the more I hear. My mates have come for me, and are simultaneously planning a rescue and blaming themselves. I don’t know which one is sweeter.

“It was supposed to be a public audience.”

“Of course that’s what they said. Anything to get her inside the palace. That place is like a heavily guarded warren. She won’t be able to get out.”

“The royal right is impossible to withstand. Even a young woman like Darcy is going to submit. They will not give her a choice.”

“We should never have let her go.”

“What was the alternative?”

“Fight for her? Take her into the hills and refuse to allow her anywhere near that old fucking man?”

“She wanted to go.”

“She didn’t understand what she was getting into.”

“She would have gone, and if she hadn’t, the academy would have come for her, and if they hadn’t found her, the King’s Guard would have come…”

“And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could never have put Humpty Dumpty back together again,” I say, helpfully finishing his sentence.

The three of them spin around to see me standing naked at the back of the van.

“Darcy?” Kirin says my name questioningly.

They look at me as if they’re seeing a ghost.

“Yeah. Obviously.”

“How did you…”

“Well, I ran away. Oh, and I am pretty sure I killed the king. So. That’s done.”

Rafe reaches out and physically drags me into a hug, and into the van. He slams the doors shut. Then he turns to Kirin, who is already in the driver’s seat.

“We need to get out of here. Blend into traffic. Keep moving.”

Kirin doesn’t need instructions. He’s not stupid. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He gets us into traffic as quickly as possible. Within a couple of minutes, we have blended into the never-ending moving sea of vehicles that flow in and around Eclipse.

“Are you okay? Did he touch you?” Rafe and Einar ask me those questions practically at the same time. I am absolutely surrounded by them, encircled by their arms and observed intimately by concerned gazes.

“He wanted to. He didn’t get a chance. I am okay.”

“You’re shaking.”

“I just killed the fucking king. I think. I mean, if I didn’t… I don’t know. Do you remember when I used to be terrified of it, and now…”

“Wolf form is different from human form. And you were in your wolf form, I assume?”

“Yes. I was.”

“You acted on instinct to protect yourself. That’s good. You did what you should have done. What you had to do.”

“I know. He didn’t give me a choice. I mean, he knew he wasn’t giving me a choice, he just thought that I’d have to let him…”

“Good girl!” Kirin shouts from the front.

He’s absolutely thrilled. The other two, not so much.

They look concerned. I think they’re more worried that this all happened on their watch.

They shouldn’t blame themselves. They should blame me.

No matter how many times I was warned, I did whatever I felt like in the moment.

“Can you guys check the news?” Kirin calls back. “Could be intel on where we should go.”

The back of the van has a television in it, along with other surveillance equipment. Einar flicks the picture on. Immediately, we see a very cheerful lady making cupcakes. Einar changes the channel, and we see some dogs being cute.

“I don’t think there’s any news on this. Check the mobile apps.”

Rafe is already on his phone, scrolling.

“There’s nothing,” he says. “Trending tags are limited to sports and the Delivery 2 Go murder.”

“Wow, that’s a whole murder ago,” I say.

It’s hard to believe there was a time when I really couldn’t do anything all that violent and in a couple of days I’ve quintupled my body count.

I don’t know how to feel about that. I don’t know what to feel about it.

I’ve become a talking point in Eclipse City.

“Looks like the social media has her name,” Rafe says. “Darcy. Someone from the academy must have leaked it.”

“That’s okay. Nobody is charging her for that.”

“Why isn’t there any news about it? They didn’t really even raise a lot of alarms when it happened. I think they did at the end, but… I got away really easily.”

“Half of being a modern royal is keeping things quiet,” Rafe says.

“They will not want it to be known that someone attacked the king and fled the castle. It makes everybody look bad. Makes the palace look as though they have security problems. Telegraphs to enemies that an attack is likely to be successful in the future. Makes the king look weak.”

“He wasn’t really the king.” I say. “He had common wolf markings when he shifted. The guards would have seen that too. I don’t know if they’d do anything with that, or…”

“Those guards are already dead,” Einar says. “They allowed the king to be attacked and potentially even murdered on their watch.”

“Told you we didn’t need to worry about her.” Kirin throws the words over his shoulder. “You couldn’t keep Darcy in captivity if she wanted to be there. She’d escape on principle.”

I smirk.

The horror is starting to give way to relief and even a little bit of excitement. What just happened will change everything, one way or another.

“What are we going to do?”

“I think we should head for the mountains,” Einar says. “It’s time to get clear of Eclipse for a while. I know you don’t care for the wilds, Darcy, but it’s going to be dangerous, and we won’t know where the danger is coming from. You can never risk being seen again.”

“Never?”

“Not in the short term. The king’s maiming, or death, or whatever it is, will not unfold in public as it does in private. They know very well what you did, and they will want you as dead as those guards, or worse.”

I know exactly what he means by ‘or worse.’ It’s the same thing the king meant when he said I belong to him.

“I believe they will try to hunt you down in silence and kill you, would be my guess. Unless they come to the conclusion that you acted in self-defense and are unlikely to be an ongoing threat, but I doubt the kindness will go that far. It really depends on what happens. If the king dies, it depends on who they decide to replace him with.”

“But he has twenty-one heirs. You’d have to kill an awful lot of people to eradicate his line.”

“His line is meaningless. He may have bred, but he doesn’t have the royal genes.”

“And who will decide who replaces him?”

“The cardinal, of course. The cardinal speaks to the wolf god.”

“Wolf god,” I snort. “It’s all such bullshit.”

Nobody disagrees with me.

We leave the city without being stopped, and without any news about the king or the palace breaking.

Life is going on as if nothing happened.

It’s an almost eerie feeling to go through social feeds and realize that people assume everything they need to know is here, when in reality everything they think they know is a lie.

Halfway up the mountain, consequences erupt.

Red suddenly flashes from the undergrowth, as a fully tactical assault is unleashed on us from several different angles. The tires are spiked, and the doors are hit with spear-cups that sink into the metal and then crank back to yank them open.

The rear of the van is flooded with men in red tactical suits.

There is no time to fight back. A red bag is dropped over my head, and I am carried, screaming and flailing out of the van. I feel something wrap around my neck almost as soon as the bag goes on. I don’t know what it is, but I know I can’t shift. I’m all out of juice.

“Run!” I scream to my mates. “Run!”