Page 50 of Brutally Mated
“Is it true?” Thorn steps in behind me.
“Is what true?” Skor says.
“Did you use magic on her?”
“Of course not.”
“Liar!” Tabby sobs. “He’s a more powerful magician than I am.”
“If that were true, I would have defended us on the first night when we were almost all devoured by a series of ever-increasing horrors,” he says.
“You didn’t have to. I did it for you. You let me show my gifts, while you hid yours. You’re awful! You’re terrible! You’re the worst!”
“She needs rest,” Skor insists.
“There’s no time to rest,” I reply. “We need to move on. We drew attention to ourselves on the train, and the decoupling has been tied to us as well, not to mention the reports of human trafficking. We’ll have to get a car. Thorn, you can handle that. Skor and I will stay with Tabby.”
“I don’t want to leave her with him,” Thorn says. “She’s terrified of him. Make him go.”
“I’ll go,” Skor says. “If it makes everyone happy. I’ll run to the next town, hire a car, and be back before dark.”
“Good,” I say. “That sounds like a plan. We will stay here.”
Skor gets up, makes himself ready, and leaves. Tabby stays by my side until she is sure he has gone.
“He really did do magic,” she says. “I’m not lying about that.”
I don’t know how to respond to that. I am aware that we need to maintain something of a united front when it comes to her, but I also have to ensure that she feels believed.
“You are very powerful,” I tell her. “Perhaps there was some interplay…”
“He’s a fucking dark wizard,” she says. “I swear it on my undead mother.”
“That is something we will talk about when the time is right.”
She looks me in the face. “You already know,” she says. “You already know, but you don’t want to know, so you don’t want to acknowledge it, you just want me to be quiet about it. But he used it on me.”
“In what way?”
“He made me…” she blushes. “He made me mate with him.”
“Did you not want to?”
“I was… I had no choice.”
“Choice is a funny thing with you, isn’t it,” I say, remembering very well how she claimed to be abducted not twelve hours ago. “Are you ours because you want to be, or are you ours because you had to be?”
“Had to be,” she says swiftly. “I have to uphold the honor of my tribe, but you were never supposed to survive, and I was supposed to go back and have pups for our pack. I ruined it by helping you to live.”
“Do you really wish to be rid of us? Do you feel no mate bond?”
I see her blush deepen, and I know she absolutely does feel it. We have all mated so frequently and so intensely that even our initial mutual reluctance is starting to feel like a far-off thing.
“Would you not have mated with him if he had not used power?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Probably. The point is, he does have power, and that’s not allowed.”
“You sound like a pup tattling on a playmate,” I tell her, my voice holding some affection.
