Page 22 of Purchased

I shrug. “I don’t know,” I lie.

“Can you tell me the first time you realized you could take the form of an animal?”

He rephrases the question, and I realize I am going to have to tell him something. He’s not going to stop asking if he doesn’t think he knows, and I don’t want to sit here in this fancy chair for hours while he grills me.

“I’ve always known that was possible. Since I was little. I don’t remember a time I didn’t know. Except for when they drugged me into not knowing, and called me a liar, and told me I was sick in the head, and I got confused about it, but…”

I see the tension in him rising as I tell him those things. He doesn’t like them. They make him feel sorry for me. I don’t want that either, so I stop talking.

“Someone told you what you were?”

“I don’t remember. I just know I knew.”

He nods. “So you must have had contact with someone who told you about yourself. Your parents, perhaps? Do you remember them?”

I shake my head. “I don’t remember anything before the orphanage. I was seven years old when I was taken there, and it feels like that was when my life started.”

“But you knew then you were a wolf.”

“Yes.”

“And at some point, you shifted for the first time.”

“I don’t remember that either.”

He frowns, as if he doesn’t believe me. He’s right not to. The first time I shifted is blazed into my mind and my body. I could never forget it, even if I wanted to.

“Why does the answer matter? How old were you when you first shifted?”

“I was rather prodigal, just seven years old, but women, female wolves, they tend not to be able to shift until they reach full maturity and meet their mate. It is part of the bond.”

“Huh,” I say, as all the ramifications of that statement kick in, this finely painted ceiling developing cracks around the chandelier, metaphorically speaking as all the obvious inferences and such come crashing down around us. This is why he cares. He’s not trying to get to know me. He doesn’t care about my terrible past. He’s trying to work out if I am a virgin or not. I’d laugh, if it wasn’t so tragic.

“You think I’ve been fucking other guys.”

“Have you?”

“None of your business.”

“I disagree,” he says. “It’s very much my business.”

“Why? How many women have you been with?”

“A number, but that is not important.”

I laugh at his open double standards. I wonder if anybody has disagreed with him in years. He is like the orphanage director, so used to being able to dictate reality to people who have no choice but to obey him, he has forgotten that it’s possible for someone to say no to him, or disagree with him, or otherwise defy him in some way.

I sit back in my chair and watch him as his eyes gleam with jealousy at the very idea of me having ever been touched by another man. He is possessive of me in spite of barely knowing me. That facade of elegance, education, richness, it’s turning to sand in front of me, falling away to reveal the animal who chased me down in the night and refused to let me up, who held me down in the dirt until he was certain he had me captured, and who fingered me into merciless orgasm afterward.

He hates the idea of me having ever been touched by anyone else. I think it would be better for him if I had just come into existence at eighteen years of age, fuckable for him and him alone, then come and joined the other pretty owned things in this big fancy house filled with wolves who are slavishly devoted to him.

I am the only one who sees him differently. I wonder if I am the only one who sees him at all. Is that because he’s not really my mate, or because he is? I am used to watching people build up notions of selves and such. The girls at the orphanage had to do it in order to survive. They had to tell themselves who they were because there was nobody else to do it. The teachers, matrons, director all told us that we were helpless waifs lucky to be fed or clothed or housed at all.

Some of the girls decided they were the product of famous men, sent away because their mothers represented disgraceful dalliances. Their mothers were actresses, singers, models, women more beautiful than these powerful men could bear to resist.

Others decided that they were the progeny of politically unfortunate royals. I knew at least five girls who imagined themselves to be the lost princess Anastasia, in spite of the fact they were born generations after her death.

We never told one another that we were making things up about ourselves. We all played into these little lies that made life feel bearable. It strikes me as being very funny that Armand is not immune to the same process of hiding behind a facade. His has more props. He has the house, the title, the followers, but when I look into his eyes I see the animal, not the man.

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