Page 30 of Hunted Mate
“Smell her. She’s got Gray’s seed all over her. He’s her illegitimate mate. We can use her. Remember who his father is.”
“Pack law says we kill her.”
“And I say we keep her and use her.”
None of these people follow their own laws. This is the second, no, third time I’ve been spared when I should not have been. Either there’s something about me that’s just very moreish to wolves, or I’m one of the luckiest people in the world.
“Is it this one? Or the next one? They all look the same to me.”
“Warehouse 75,” the other person says.
The van keeps driving, and I keep quiet and they take me to the location they’ve clearly prepared. Wolves have to have a den of some kind. Historically that’s a fortress or a castle, somewhere they can protect themselves from aggressive humans. That never used to stand out because everybody with the slightest bit of sense had a fortress or a castle. These days there aren’t so many structures, but a good warehouse does much the same in terms of function.
Being taken from one dodgy warehouse to another feels redundant. They could have just done whatever they were going to do at Gray’s warehouse. I guess the old adage applies.This is my scummy fucking shit hole of a warehouse. There are many like it, but this is mine.
“Put her in with the others,” a voice says. “And take that hood off. No point keeping her blind now.”
The hood is pulled off my head, and I am left to face the horror of my new situation. It has been a while since something very bad happened to me, but I have come to accept that sometimes very bad things happen to me. Losing your parents young gives youa thickening of the skin that you’ll never really shave all the way down no matter how much therapy you do.
Gray’s warehouse is full of tech and surveillance equipment. This place, when I see it, seems to have been designed to hold people prisoner. Wolf jail.
There’s a cell slash cage in front of me with three other people in it. Two men, both middle aged, dressed in camouflage. They look like hunters. Then there’s a woman in a short skirt with a tight bodice. She’s pretty. She’s also terrified. The men are angry. I am pushed into the cell with them and the door is shut and chained behind me.
We look out at the warehouse, which contains all sorts of things that would be really useful if they were inside the cell with us. Guns. Knives. Big containers that lock and unlock and probably contain other weapons. The wolves take themselves away to some other part of the warehouse to continue their murderous deliberations.
Meanwhile, in the cage, one of the men starts talking to me. He’s rough and angry and scared.
“You saw those fucking freaks? They shouldn’t exist. Have no fucking right to be walking this planet.”
“I don’t know, isn’t it kind of cool?” I keep my tone even. I’m not here to bond with the other inmates. I’m here to survive, and that starts with making the wolves think I am still somehow on their side. I assume they can hear us in here. It would be stupid to imagine we’re not under surveillance of some kind.
My response does, however, immediately piss the man who spoke right off. He turns on me with a vicious, beady-eyed stare.He smell like sour beer and hate. He can’t get to the wolves. He’s imprisoned. And he’s looking for someone to hurt. I’m available.
“Kind of cool to be an animal? You’re a wolf fucker, aren’t you. Just like the other girl. It won’t work out for you. They fuck you and then they put you in holding and then they kill you.”
“Uh. Okay.”
Those two sounds, not even words really, seem to enrage him entirely.
“Fucking bitch,” he curses.
He comes at me and grabs me by the throat. There’s not enough room to get out of the way before he takes hold of me. The cage is too small and I am too slow.
I feel his hatred flowing through his hands, squeezing the breath from me. I try to reach for my gun as he slams me back against the chain link of the cell cage, but I don’t get a chance because the wolves are already on it.
A wolf man comes over, throws the cell door open, grabs the hostile man out by his hair and in an instant there is more blood on the warehouse floor than I ever imagined seeing in my entire life. I’d like to scream, but I am frozen, and the lady in the cell is doing that for me to great effect and at very high volume.
I see the flash of a knife being wiped on the camo fabric of his clothing, and then it is gone.
He didn’t even bother shifting. There wasn’t even a point. He just slaughtered the guy like an animal. He slit his throat and ended it almost immediately.
It’s over.
Just like that. The wolf shifter who just saved me looks at me with a frown, as if I’m the problem and he had to solve it. I get the feeling it would be better if I did not become any more of a problem.
“Holy shit.” The other camouflaged man looks shocked. The girl is still shrieking. I stand still, horrified by what is playing out in front of me. I thought I was still alive because wolf shifters don’t actually kill people, but the man now being dragged away by his ankles, leaving a sanguine smear on the floor very much disabuses me of that idea.
Just an hour or so ago, all I wanted to know was that wolves were real. I wanted to know that my memories were indeed my memories, not the frightened fabrications of a child. Not a sickness. Not a mental illness. Something real.
