Page 7 of Savagely Mated (Shared Mates #1)

D arcy

At one o’clock in the morning, consequences start catching up to me. I’m asleep; well, as close to sleep as I can get. I keep waking up every few minutes from the same nightmare over and over again. The same mental picture, the same sounds.

I’m restless, hot, and guilty. My stomach is twisted into knots, physically hurting.

I want to be sick, but there’s nothing in there.

I want to go to the toilet, but I can’t bring myself to move.

I’ve done something horribly wrong, and the worst part is I’m being trained to do that horrible, wrong thing again and again.

Why didn’t anybody tell us that killing people feels bad? I feel like that should have been covered in just one of our classes. Somewhere in between the military history of Eclipse, the general excellence of the king…

Somewhere in my freaking out, I fall asleep for a few minutes.

Big mistake.

Huge.

I wake up while it is still deeply dark, but suddenly I have the very unsettling feeling that I am not alone in my room.

The window is open.

That is how the men standing around my bed got in.

“Don’t scream.”

The order is growled in the dark.

I’m almost grateful for this. Fear erases guilt. Can’t be tormented by regret when you’re fighting for your life.

I’m not going to scream.

What I do is pull the sidearm from under my pillow and fire it at the nearest shadow. It’s an energy weapon, so it doesn’t make that much noise, but it certainly burns a hole in whatever it hits.

Unfortunately, it hits the wall, because he moved at the last moment, and another of them pushed my arm so that I’d miss.

“Fuck!” someone curses. “She’s going to fucking kill us before we get her out of here. Subdue her!”

“That’s enough, Darcy. You’re being hysterical. Calm down.”

I’m not being hysterical at all. I know far better than to be emotional in battle. If I do kill them, I’ll freak out about it later. But that’s not going to save them. I still react in the way I was trained to.

The gun is taken out of my hand, but I’ve still got the rest of my body to fight with. I kick, I punch, and I bite. I don’t get very far with any of it, because three men are easily able to restrain one woman if they really want to.

“Shhhh. Stop it. We’re not going to hurt you.”

Another voice. A familiar one, but I don’t know it. Weird.

One of them steps through the beam of light cast through the window, and I see an unholy handsome face.

I remember everything in that moment. It all comes flooding back, forcing its way through the panicked part of my mind. The hot guys. The duel. The cardinal’s guard—and the way I killed him.

I don’t think they’re going to kill me. I think if they wanted me dead, I’d be dead. I have just enough sense about me to realize that, and for that realization to make me submit just a little.

I’m too mentally fucked up. That’s the problem. When I’ve got an adrenaline rush, I can protect myself. But I can’t sustain it while outnumbered.

I feel my resistance fade, and that gives them the chance to drag me out of bed, throw me over one of their broad shoulders, and carry me out the fucking window.

I have climbed out this window probably hundreds of times.

I never thought I’d be dragged out of it.

It’s scary. It seems higher than before.

They’re working their way down a ladder, and there’s nothing more precarious than being slung over someone’s shoulder while they climb down a rickety construction of old steel.

I start asking questions. Fast, panicked questions.

“What are you doing? Why are you doing this? Is it the duel? You want to do the duel?”

There’s a little snort at my mention of that.

“This isn’t about the duel. We need to talk to you.”

“This is a funny way of talking. Let me go, or I’ll scream, and you’ll have several hundred cadets coming for you.”

“Just stop,” one of them growls at me in the dark.

“Don’t argue with her. Just handle her.”

I try to scream, but that cry is cut off by a rubber gag being pushed between my teeth.

How are these guys inside the academy walls?

Where the fuck are the guards? There should be alarms and shots fired.

I used to think I could sneak out of this place because I’m very good at being sneaky.

Now I’m considering that the guards just suck at guarding.

“That should quieten you down.”

The one called Rafe looks at me with some satisfaction. I can see them more clearly now that we’re all on the ground. Einar must have me over his shoulder, and I’m guessing Rafe gagged me.

They take me out of the academy through the same passage I use that goes out under the wall, enlarged for their use. Okay, these men have been here before. They were probably cadets at some point before this. I wonder what went wrong, because they’re definitely not King’s Guard now.

They carry me down the riverbank and along the same route I take when I sneak out, all the way to a van. I don’t have a van. The sight of it freaks me out. They’re going to take me away to God knows where and do fuck knows what to me. This might be the last fucking time I see myself alive.

I start kicking again, hard enough to almost fall off Einar’s shoulders.

I’m grabbing at his back to try to leverage myself off him, and it works.

I kick him somewhere near the balls and take advantage of the moment of pain to roll over his back and onto my feet.

I rip the gag out of my mouth and stare all three of them down.

They’re still surrounding me. I know if I run, they’ll chase. I can’t shift again this soon.

Einar gives me a stern look, like I’m being silly. He has the absolute nerve to act as though I am inconveniencing their kidnap attempt.

“Calm down and let us talk.”

“No. Fuck you.”

He reaches for me. I don’t know why, and I don’t care. I kick him in the face. His head snaps back, and he falls against the wall of the van. It’s very fucking satisfying, but it doesn’t get the others off me. I am straining for the door so fucking hard.

They all start laughing as Einar starts bleeding profusely from his nose.

I wonder if I broke it. I kind of hope so.

I don’t like the way he speaks to me. He talks to me like he owns me, like there’s no reason I shouldn’t listen to him, even though the first time I met him he threatened to kill me, and the second time I killed someone in front of him.

“Let me fucking go. I’m not going to be some good little captive. I’ve been trained to fight my whole life.”

“Oh, we know,” Rafe says. “We’ve seen you fight. Very impressive.”

“But that’s not why you’re here,” Pretty Boy says. “You’re here because of how you ran.”

“Fuck you,” I curse at him too, as shame immediately overcomes me. I know what I did was shameful. I ran instead of staying to finish the fight. I committed a crime and I tried to distance myself from it. I should have known there’d be no way out, not really.

“You have wolf blood,” Einar says, his voice somewhat muffled because he is holding his nose to stop the bleeding. I think he’s going to need to get it reset. “Do you know how many female wolves are left in Eclipse outside the palace?”

I shrug. “One?”

“Right. One. Get in the van.”

“I’m not getting in the fucking van. You get in the fucking van and fuck off.”

Kirin, the pretty blond, is smirking broadly. I think he likes my sass. Rafe, meanwhile, is standing with his arms folded over his chest, his muscles bulging in the way men’s muscles do when they stand like that. They’re all dressed head to toe in tactical black, and it suits all of them.

“Put her in the damn van,” Einar sighs.

I’m a good fighter, but even I can’t kick three people in the face at the same time.

Rafe and Kirin snatch me up and put me in the back of the van, giving me no choice or chance to escape.

Rafe stays in the back with me, holding me by the back of my shirt like a wayward kitten.

Einar gets in with us, while Kirin goes to the front to drive.

“What the hell do you guys want with me? You want to fuck a wolf girl, is that it?”

“Be quiet,” Einar growls at me. He’s sitting opposite me on a bench type seat, while Rafe keeps me firmly in his grasp, his hand moving from my shirt to the back of my neck. A little thrill runs through me as I feel his fingers on my bare skin, strong, confident, and controlling.

“No. Fuck you.”

“You’re special,” Rafe says. “You’re also a rude little pain in the ass, but that usually comes with the territory of being a bitch.”

“I’m going to pretend you meant that in the female wolf sense,” I growl.

“Settle down,” Einar says. “The second we saw who, or rather, what you really are, we knew you needed us…”

“I don’t need you. I don’t need anybody,” I interrupt.

“Can you try not to backtalk for a minute so I can explain why we came for you? What’s happening to you… what is going to happen to you, is wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re at the academy, right?”

“Yeah.”

Einar nods. “You don’t remember me, because you were too young. But I was there when you first came. The director pretended you were someone’s brother’s kid, an orphan just staying for a while. The faculty covered for you. You played in the staff room.”

I have a weird feeling as he tells me this stuff, remembering a childhood that I don’t really remember anymore because nobody remembers that far back.

“I thought you’d have been sent to the palace at the usual age. But they’ve kept you,” he says. “What they’re doing is wrong.”

“What do you mean, what they’re doing to me? They looked after me. Trained me. They’re going to make me one of the King’s Guard one day.” I know the last part is a lie, but I say it anyway.

“You’re being kept for breeding.”

“Bullshit.”

“Why do you think you get to sneak out so much? Why do you think you’re indulged in ways others aren’t?”