Page 31 of The Alpha's Forced Bullied Mate

At the very least, the tension diminished enough for us to continue explaining the remainder of the ritual. We wandered the woods and pointed out three different places where the campfire might be located. Faye held onto me the entire time. She didn’t let go until we reached my house.

And even then, she went right back to holding my hand as if we had been doing it for years.

Chapter 10 - Faye

Thursday morning felt oddly bleak to me. I was walking around the pack with Hector for the first time since I arrived, trying to get a sense of where I was and what I was going to do. He hadn't let me call Kylie or either of my alphas, and I couldn’t sneak his phone away from him. He constantly had it in his hand or his pocket. Nobody knew where I was, but I had to hope that they would figure it out soon.

I sighed.Maybe if I tried not to think about it, it wouldn’t bother me.

Hector and I were walking along the trails next to the storage units, going toward Adrian's condo. I had taken this route when I'd first arrived, when I was kidnapped and taken here against my will, and I noticed that the cornfields were coming up on the right. Nothing about it had changed exactly, but for some reason, it looked a lot less familiar to me than I would have expected.

I nodded toward the line of trees that guarded the barns. “When did that get there?”

Hector appeared like he had been shaken awake. That look had been plastered to his face for a while now. He seemed to get lost in thought a lot.

But once he registered what I asked, he glanced in the direction I was looking and then gazed back at me. “Oh, I guess we did that a few years ago. The compound stretches a lot farther now.”

I kept a steady pace next to him. I followed the curve that went forty-five degrees to the left where it turned into a lush neighborhood. It seemed like the Silverfang Creek had expanded so much more in the last seven years than I would have thought.A lot of the houses seemed to be updated or in a state of getting repaired.

Many of the ones that were in disrepair long ago under Adrian's rule were now getting fixed. Already a week into Hector's reign and things were getting better. I looked at him, intending to make a joke about it, but I let it fall from my lips instead, back into the recesses of my mind to hide.

Because I wasn't sure how to act with him.

This guy used to be my bully. Now he claimed I was his mate and turned one of our most recent encounters into a soft-core fantasy. The way his hands roamed my body spoke of his desire, and the heavy trek of his lips told me he hadn’t wanted to stop.

So, whyhadhe stopped? It wasn’t like anyone would chide us for hooking up. The sooner I got rid of my virginity, the better. I didn’t want to come across as inexperienced, and at the same time, I didn’t want to rush into something with him when I was just going to end up leaving.

Ugh, talk about confusing. According to him, my only alpha was him, no one else. He said I belonged to the Silverfang Creek. Did that mean my virginity belonged to him, too?Worse than confusing. Backward.

Thinking of my Beaufort-Bravecrest family made my heart ache. I missed my regular routine, the woody smell of my apartment, the sound of birds chirping in the window, and the way Kylie snort-giggled whenever we were jogging through the woods. I even missed the familiarity of the diner where I worked and my most rigid customers like Gabe, who was too picky about his eggs and how they were prepared.I folded my hands together and then unfolded them, rubbing my fingers against each other instead to feel the cool texture of my fingerprint ridges. I waswearing one of Hector’s oversized gray sweaters with the baggy jeans that I'd grabbed from the free bin at the community center. The tennis shoes I got were actually the perfect size, and I was grateful to my brother for pointing them out. They were cute, and I could probably scribble some kind of design on them if I wanted. It wasn't like I had a whole lot to do these days other than act like this guy's mate.

I played with the frayed end of the sweater sleeve. This couldn’t possibly be the rest of my life. I needed to dosomething. “So… Can I get a job or something?”

Hector burst out laughing. It took him a minute to get under control, so long that it actually annoyed me enough to halt me in my tracks. I stopped right in the middle of the road, not even caring if I was blocking it.

My hands went straight to my hips, just like my mom’s used to. “What the hell is so funny?”

He turned to me while holding his gut as if he were about to start laughing again. “You're my mate.That'syour job.”

I scoffed. “Oh, so I'm just going to be popping out babies?”

He gave me a lascivious smirk and said, “With a lot of practice first.”

My heart stuttered hearing that while I tried to manage my medley of expressions. Interest, shock, indignance. Seriously, what was his deal? How could he hit on me when he basically forced me to be here?

And how could I want him so badly when I just wanted to fight him all the time? Fight, fuck—at this point, I wasn't even sure if I could discern them. We weren't really walking, but we weren't really talking either. We were caught on the edge of themain housing units, and I was trying to determine how I was going to respond to him hitting on me. I glanced toward the neighborhood.

My parents’ house was up ahead, third one on the right. Although it had once been destroyed, I knew what it looked like now. I knew because of the way Cliff had described it to me when the repairs were done. And anyway, their scent was there, so it wasn't like I could miss it. It was too bad that the tornado hadn't torn everything right out of the roots.

We started walking again.

I was nervous to walk past it, but the more we stepped toward it, the less I had to force my legs to move. It was a house—justa house. Nothing about it was intimidating, from its brown shutters to its seashell coral pink paint. It stood tall with two stories and rigid lines, resembling my mother right down to the prim porch with stern shapes—all sharp edges.

Hector had defended me against them. It was so weird to think about it, to recall his words. My mother and father were stunned. Of course, they did all their apologizing to their alpha instead of me, but still, the fact that Hector said anything at all was amazing.

I didn't really want to know them. But my alpha said—the guy whoclaimedto be my alpha—demanded that I try to know my parents. That made me wonder about other things. “You say the pack has changed,” I said slowly. “Can you show me any of that?”

Hector was quiet as we wandered past the yard where I once learned how to ride a tricycle… before I melted the bars right into the ground because I couldn't control my powers as a freaky witch child.

---