Page 6 of Savagely Mated (Shared Mates #1)

“Shut up, Stilton,” Rafe interrupts him impatiently. “Not a single one of us care what you have to say, and well you know it. Run along. This isn’t a duel. We’re dealing with a street rat.”

“None of you are King’s Guard anymore,” Stilton says. “And you’re not Nile Cops either. You have no standing to deal with rats of any kind.”

I snort. This is turning out far better than I had imagined it would. I don’t know these guys well enough to talk shit to them, but apparently Stilton here knows them quite well.

“You’re all under arrest,” he says. “You’ll see the inside of the cardinal’s dungeon for this.”

“That’s not going to be an option for me,” I pipe up. “I have to be back by seven.”

“Your mother will have to wait longer tonight, little boy,” Stilton says, now roasting me.

“I don’t have a mother,” I shoot back.

“I don’t care. It’s a figure of speech. Did you three pick the village idiot to kill for sport out here?”

Now he’s really insulting me. Fuck it. I came to fight, to test my mettle, to prove to myself that I am the equal of any man. I don’t really care who I do that with. These red-cloaked bastards are threatening my freedom, which is far worse than threatening my life.

I started to sweat when I was facing Einar. Now I’m sure that I won’t be able to fight effectively in all this clothing. There’s just no way. Fortunately when I get dressed, I keep the old motto in mind: if you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready.

I pull off my oversized top, and I kick my cargo pants off. They fall in a heap at my feet, leaving me standing in sneakers, short shorts, and a tank top.

“It’s a girl!”

The shout of surprise goes up, making me smile to myself. I love a good surprise, and this is a great one. There’s not a whole lot of time to enjoy the moment, but I make the most of it.

“Come at me, bros,” I say, twirling my sword again.

“Get her!” Stilton shouts the order, and the cardinal’s guards engage. Behind me the three men who were supposed to be trying to kill me now find themselves fighting alongside me.

The guards are instantly upon us, following Stilton’s orders. They have their swords drawn and they seem perfectly happy to kill us all.

One comes for me, his eyes flashing with vigor. Apparently the fact that I am a girl will not save me one little bit.

“Get the female! Get her out of here!” I hear Einar roar the words at Rafe and Kirin as he dashes forward to try to intercept the guards, but it’s all happening too fast.

Fortunately for me, I was not boasting about my sword skills without the ability to back them up. Years of training activate inside me and I react without thinking. Before I know what I’ve done, my saber has already gone through a cardinal’s guard.

Sword fights in movies last for long minutes. There’s a whole lot of clanging and banging and dancing back and forth. In real life, a sword fight lasts less than thirty seconds if the people involved know what they’re doing.

When you practice with blunted weapons, there’s always a point at which the armored body resists, or the other weapon stops yours.

But these men are not wearing armor, and my blade doesn’t stop.

It slices through a man like a hot knife going through butter.

There’s a smooth, slight feeling of very satisfying resistance that is more like a massage to the blade, and that is it.

They can’t teach this in the academy. In later years, you cut through dead pigs, but the guy I just hit was alive.

I pull my sword free and a spray of hot human blood hits my face in an arterial spatter.

The guard drops in front of me, bleeding profusely from the wound in his gut and making the worst gagging sounds I have ever heard as he clutches his stomach.

He starts to cough up blood not a second or two later.

It’s awful. He’s so vulnerable. He’s so hurt. He’s dying. And I did that to him.

I let out a sobbing gasp and drop my sword.

I can’t do this. I can’t see this. I can’t be this.

A streak of silver flashes over my head as someone strikes out and misses me because I am shifting, falling out of my human form entirely and taking animal form in pure panic.

Another cry of surprise goes up. My secrets are legion and layered inside me, but already two of my biggest ones have been displayed to all those present. I come from a bloodline that is not entirely human. I am a wolf. An animal. And I am frightened.

I run.

I am much faster as a wolf than I could ever be as a person, and I use that speed to escape back into the city. Wolves streaking through the streets are rare, so I will most likely be confused for a dog.

I still have enough sense to take the back routes, rushing into the poorest areas of the city where there is no surveillance because any drone or camera would be immediately stolen and stripped for parts.

There, when I am absolutely certain I am not observed, or followed, I nose around until I find some laundry being hung out to dry off one of the balconies.

I feel bad about stealing clothes from a person who almost certainly can’t afford them, but there’s no choice.

If I get caught going back into the academy in my wolf form—and I will be caught—there will be hell to pay.

Shifting is strictly illegal if it’s not being done to protect the king.

It’s so rare that a lot of the citizens of Eclipse don’t believe it’s actually real.

I take my human form, I put the clothes on, and I go as fast as I can back to the academy, trying to push the image of the dying man out of my mind.

I am shaking from head to toe, feeling hot and nauseous with disgust at what I just did.

Every time I take a breath or blink, he’s there, dying in front of me all over again.

“Darcy! What are you doing out here!”

A tutor from the academy snaps my name. I look up.

It’s Mr. Bracken. He teaches first aid. Ironic.

He’s looking at me with simple annoyance.

We’re still several blocks from the academy, which means I am well and truly caught for the crime of being out of school.

That really doesn’t feel like a big deal right now.

“Where have you been?”

“Nowhere.” I don’t bother to make up an excuse. My brain isn’t working well enough to fabricate one. I want to scream and cry, but I can’t because that would be suspicious as fuck, and I don’t want anybody to know I just killed a cardinal’s guard.

The only small bit of comfort is that I won’t be tracked back to the academy. My presence here is a secret. Female shifters all belong up at the castle. So if anything, they’ll be looking in the king’s harem for a secret shifter female fighter. Crazy.

“You were supposed to be in class, and then in detention. You’ve been missing all day. Don’t think we don’t notice. We do.”

God. Detention. I wish I had been in detention, instead of making the memory of what it feels like to have someone’s lifeblood spatter across my face.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I should have gone. I forgot.”

“You didn’t forget,” he says. “You did what you always do—whatever you wanted to do. It’s not good enough.”

I lower my head and I let him lecture me all the way back to the academy.

I feel terribly guilty for what I did, and for getting myself into the situation, and now I even feel bad for running.

I just roached out of that fight, scuttled for my life like a cowardly invertebrate.

I exposed my face, and my shifter form, and everything else in front of three strange men and a whole unit of cardinal’s guards, assuming any of them survived the fight.

I have done something terrible today. Something that can never be undone. I’ve stained my soul, and given my mind a memory it will never be able to release.

“Do you want me to go to detention?” I ask the question as we get back to the academy.

“You can go to your room and to bed without dinner. I will inform the director that you have been located, and I am sure she will deal with you tomorrow,” Mr. Bracken says. “Go. Now.”

I have never been so pleased to be sent to my room. But when I get there, it doesn’t feel like the same place it was when I left this morning. It’s not the same, because I’m not the same.

The bed seems smaller. The books seem pointless.

All that information I thought I knew and understood, it meant nothing when push really came to shove.

There’s nothing in any of those pages about what to do when you kill someone and realize, really know to your core that you’re a fucking monster now.

I get into the scratchy, awful bed, I close my eyes, and I will for sleep to take me.

I pray that I am exhausted enough, but every time I close my eyes, he’s there again, the dying man.

He’s looking at me with a fading gaze, blood oozing from places it shouldn’t.

He’s telling me he’ll never go home again, never breathe air again, never taste food, or hug someone, or even know what an awful scratchy bed feels like.

He’s telling me I took something from him that wasn’t mine to take. I’m not a soldier. I’m a life thief.

It was self-defense. He would have killed you if you hadn’t killed him.

A little part of my brain tries to argue back, but it doesn’t work. They were trying to get us to surrender. I was the one who decided to fight like it was an academy drill. I was the one who plunged my sword inside him.

Eventually, I fall asleep, but that just makes the images even more real. Asleep, or awake, I am tormented late into the night.