Claimed (Bound Mates #2)

Chapter 6

CHAPTER 6

W e are in Prague.

Alexei travels a lot, a lot . I have never disobeyed his orders before, but on this afternoon, I very much want to go out to a bar. It all starts because as I sit at lunch with him, I watch small groups of students pass by on the streets. I used to be a student. I used to have a free life of experiments and no responsibility, and nobody looked up to me, and I got drunk whenever I wanted.

I know it’s petty to be drawn back to that time, to miss being poor and unimportant now. It’s ungrateful, really. I don’t dare express it out loud. I know if I were to say that I wanted to put on some normal clothes, dress down, and just be a normal person again, I’d sound like I was throwing all these opportunities in the pack’s face.

Instead, I am wearing a Chanel blazer and blouse with a skirt. It’s a cute outfit, but it separates me from one set of people and makes me very much a part of a different class. At first, wearing things like this made me feel special. I was overwhelmed with all the goodies associated with this lifestyle. I play with a Cartier charm bracelet on my wrist, knowing that each of the charms costs more than a whole set of classes in college. I could pay off the mortgage of my mom’s old place with the contents of my jewelry box.

I’m rich, but it’s a strange kind of hollow experience. I know if I asked Alexei, he would buy me basically anything. I could ask for a car, a pony, probably a boat. This man has more money at his disposal than anybody I have ever met, and he is generous with it.

“Of course there’s the entire Balkans region to consider…”

Alexei and the people we’re with are talking about some topic or other. Aside from the initial introductions, I haven’t been paying attention. It’s all very complex local politics, and I can’t follow it. Well, I don’t want to follow it. I also don’t care that much about it. My opinion wouldn’t matter anyway. I’m a trophy, basically. I’m the one who smiles and laughs when she’s supposed to smile and laugh.

I watch as the students grab a table outside at a nearby, much cheaper and more relaxed café, and chat with each other. I don’t understand a word they’re saying, but I can see the way they’re interacting. There’s so much lightness in their demeanors. They’re teasing one another, laughing at in-jokes, probably. They’re free of the weight of the world.

I remember when I was like that, about four months ago. Before my mom died. Before my friends were slaughtered. Before I became the first wife to the Russian wolf president.

Before I know it, I’m excusing myself to go to the bathroom. There are always guards on us, but they don’t follow me to the bathroom. They just watch the way in and out.

I know what I’m doing is wrong, but the bathrooms in this place have good size windows to the outside. Before I know what I’ve done, I’m standing in the alley next to the restaurant. Next, I am walking—actually kind of running—across the road, down the block, around the corner until I find another bar where there’s a bunch of students all drinking.

I go in, trying to get my brain to stop thinking. I don’t want to process my actions. I don’t want to think about how much trouble I will inevitably be in when or if Alexei works out what I’m doing. I just want to follow my impulses.

The bartender asks me what I’d like to drink. At least, I assume that’s what he asks me.

“Absinthe,” I say.

I heard it is what Van Gough was drinking when he cut his ear off, so it feels like it is historic that way. I also know that it’s the sort of thing that will get you off your face quick as hell, and that’s what I want. I want to stop thinking.

He gives me the shot, and I give him some money. How much, I don’t really know. I reach for it, but before I can pick it up, he sets the shot on fire. Blue flame plays across the top of the little glass before extinguishing itself.

“What the…”

“It’s part of it,” he says in better English than I deserve. “Makes it less toxic.”

I like his accent, and though I don’t know that it’s good to drink something that the tender just described as less toxic, I drink it anyway.

It’s terrible. Truly fucking awful. I don’t know why anybody would drink this. I don’t know why anybody would make it. It seems like an abomination, a crime against alcohol.

“Another one, please.”

I hear myself ask for a second, and then I watch the flame burn for a second time, and then I feel the inferno running down my throat and into my belly. I’ve never been instantly drunk before, but I’m pretty sure I just achieved that milestone.

I hear laughter. The students are chatting loudly. It feels as though there’s an almost endless supply of happy young people in this city. I want to be one of them. I wobble over to the table, wave hi, and introduce myself. At least that’s what I thought I’d do. In practice, what I actually do is stumble over to a group of strangers and fall into the table, straight into it, sending glasses and drinks and I think a sandwich and fries flying.

There’s a general cry of outrage, and some laughter. Some of the boys help drag me up out of the wreckage, setting me on my feet. Unfortunately, the rest of my body doesn’t seem to be able to align itself with them. I flop and I sort of slump. I can’t hold myself up.

A couple of the guys pick me up between them. One has me under the arms, the other has me by the feet. Prague spins in a big historical swirl as they cart me off somewhere. I hope it’s fun. Maybe there’s another party.

We end up somewhere cool and quiet. A room of some kind. Messy, I think, hard to tell. My eyes are sort of blurred. Focusing is not the easiest. They put me down on something that feels soft, but not good. A mattress without a sheet, I think. I smell all sorts of masculine scents and such. My human senses would recoil from it, but my wolf side is intrigued.

I am comfortable—not because I think I am safe, but because I know I am the danger. The alcohol has dulled my human senses, but done nothing to my animal side. If anything, that part of me feels sharper and more keen than ever before.

I lie there, quite drunk and being tentatively violated by these two terrible men.

“She’ll be a good snack for Master,” one of them says.

“Oh, he’ll be so pleased. Pretty thing like this. Look at her tits.”

I am already thinking about killing them, of course. It’s a strange thought to have because it doesn’t come from my human side. My human self, a pretty young woman still innocent in so many ways, could never consider hurting anybody. This desire comes from the animal part of me, the part that knows that these are jackals, scavengers, not true predators, and they deserve to be taught a lesson.

“What have you brought me?”

A new voice enters the room, along with a chill. I don’t know who this is, but I sense that it is the master they referred to. I suppose they’re catching young women for the use and abuse of this creature, this man whose shiny leather boots enter my field of vision before my gaze manages to creep up the length of him.

“Very pretty,” the newcomer says. “We don’t get many like this here, do we?”

He comes and stands over me, tall, dressed in leather. His eyes are narrowed, his skin pale. His hair is blond and his eyes are a frankly creepy ice blue. He has a sort of haughty demeanor that suggests he thinks he is better than everybody else. Psychopath , my senses tingle.

The two who brought me here leer at me with a sort of general pleased-ness. They’ve done well in the eyes of their master, as they call him.

“Should we strip her for you, sir? Or would you like the pleasure? She’s not been very feisty. Shouldn’t put up much of a fight.”

Men almost always underestimate women. These men have underestimated me more than most.

“Strip her,” the master says, his voice taking on a note of perverse pleasure as my eyes widen.

My two captors start to bend to his will.

As my dress comes up over my thighs, I realize that this is not funny. They’re laughing. The master is chuckling. Even I manage a giggle, but this is no joke. They are predators. Unfortunately, I am not prey.

Before they can touch me in a too terribly intimate way, I shift. It has never been this easy before. I don’t know if it’s painful or not, because I can’t feel anything. One second I’m lying helpless on their bed, the next I am all muscle, fang, and fur. This is only the second time I have shifted, and unlike the first time in which I was entirely out of control, this time I am only completely out of control.

Their screams are very satisfying, and my hunger is intense. I didn’t really eat at lunch. I picked prettily at a salad, playing the role of demure bride. I didn’t think I was hungry then, and even if I was, I didn’t want to eat too much in case I appeared, well, I don’t know. I cared about how I looked to Alexei and his sophisticated friends—but my wolf self doesn’t care about how she’s perceived, certainly not by meat.

I’ve been told shifters don’t eat people. I’ve been told we hunt animals, deer, elk, anything with hooves. But in this moment, I am certain that humans are prey. They are made of meat as much as any prey animal, and they are of the soft and squishy edible kind. They are not sinewy like predators. They are tender and they are delicious, and their arterial blood is like great spraying fountains of sugar. I lap it up, roll in it, I bite and I feast and I consume to my heart’s content.

Alexei

Anya is taking a very long time in the bathroom. The conversation is relatively intense, and it takes me far too long to realize that she is not actually coming back in anything resembling a timely fashion.

“Excuse me, I believe my mate may need my help,” I excuse myself.

Going into the ladies’ bathroom is not my habit, but I am already getting the feeling that something is going quite wrong. Call it a gut feeling.

There’s nobody in the bathroom. But there is an open window, and as soon as I see that, I know that there is a problem.

I cannot believe she snuck away from me like a spoiled little girl. When I find her, she’s going to be in so much pain. I am going to absolutely whip her ass, as the Americans say.

A good twenty minutes have passed since she first left the table. That is not good. Her scent is messy and difficult to track because the city is so busy, but we eventually follow it to a bar, where it is confirmed that she went drinking.

“Two of her friends took her home,” the bartender says.

“Friends?”

“Local boys,” he says.

“She does not have any local friends,” I growl. The bartender swallows deeply and takes a step back. He does not know who I am. He does not know who she is. He does not understand, logically, the events that have taken place beneath his nose. But he knows that he has made a terrible mistake.

I leave the bar vowing that she will never be out of my sight again. I will cuff her to me. I will make her mine so deeply, punish her so severely that she will never think of leaving my side. My mate has run away, and I am worried. This level of concern and fear has rarely, if ever, been present in my body. I thought I was worried about her before I claimed her, but the bonding we experienced at our first mating has intensified my concern. I would burn the world to find her. I would tear down each and every one of these pretty historic buildings.

Everybody who came with me, including the local pack, is searching. Minutes tick by, feeling like hours. Something terrible has happened, I just know it. I was too happy. I took things too casually. I trusted that fate would keep my mate safe, and that my mate would behave in a sensible fashion.

I forgot how young she really is, and how impulsive she really is. I don’t know why she decided to run off. Maybe she was following a scent. Or maybe she was just following one of the many bad ideas that apparently still inhabit her mind. I remember Elena trying to tell me on the plane that Anya would need to be disciplined. I have done nothing but spoil her. Everybody has.

“Alexei!” One of my pack rushes up to me.

“We’ve found her, boss, but the scene…”

His expression is so fraught, I know something terrible has happened. I feel as though the wind has been taken out of me. If she has been hurt, or worse, I will never forgive myself, or anybody else.

I always thought the problem in getting a mate would be finding her. I never thought it would be a matter of trying to keep her.

He leads me to an inner city residential building in a shady part of the town.

“Here,” he says. “She’s inside. But she’s…”

I push past him and into the house. There are no lights on inside, and flicking the switch does nothing. There’s no power. That’s a bad sign. It smells too, mostly of blood. I smell that before I smell Anya at all.

I can barely pick her up among the general olfactory grossness. So it’s the blood I follow, into a room with peeling wallpaper and the remnants of a bed. Well, a mattress on the floor.

I cannot believe my eyes. The entire place is absolutely covered in pieces of people. Hairy limbs torn from torsos, bones gnawed on and then discarded. The mattress is soaked in blood and there are spilled innards draping the floor like decorations.

I am looking at a vampire kill tableau—it has to be. Perhaps Elena was right. Perhaps they are becoming bolder and tracking us. Maybe my failure to listen to my advisor has led to the death of my mate.

Anya is in the middle of it all, stark naked in her human form. For a brief moment, I feel a pang of fear at the notion she might have been killed, but then she takes a deep breath and stretches in the middle of it all, languid as a well-fed cat in a sunbeam. She is a picture of contentment, unconcerned by the fact that her beautiful bare body is being increasingly covered in sanguine essence.

“Anya!” I snap her name as I rush for her, scooping her up from the bed. We are now both absolutely covered in crime scene. I don’t care. The relief at finding her alive is so intense, she could be covered in anything.

“Bring the car around,” I say. “We are leaving this city now.”

I get Anya out of Prague while she is still dozing in her post-shift state. She is not entirely awake yet, because she has fed so aggressively. The car is a mess. I’ve tried to clean her up with towels and wet wipes, but she needs a shower. She needs a full decontamination.

“Hello,” she smiles at me as she wakes up a little more. “What are we doing?”

She’s forgotten how she came to be so full. That’s not uncommon either. Shifters can have quite a bit of brain fog to begin with when they go from one state to another. It’s not just the bones and flesh that shift. It’s the brain, too. There aren’t many studies into shifter anatomy, but I think the brain itself undergoes changes. I think there are memories that can be left behind from time to time.

“We are going home,” I tell her. “You’ve been a bad girl.”

“I have?” She smiles. I don’t like that smile. It’s dangerous. She looks far too happy.

“I mean it, Anya. You were very bad, and you are going to pay for it.”

“What did I do?”

“Sneaked away at lunch, for one thing,” I tell her.

“Oh? Good for me,” she says, unrepentant. “Those things are so boring. I have to sit there for hours sometimes, just listening to the talk. Did I do anything fun?”

I grit my teeth and try not to respond either too harshly, or with amusement. She has a certain streak of rebellion in her that I find quite appealing from time to time, but it cannot be encouraged.

“You almost got yourself killed.”

“Oh, you must be so angry,” she says. “You must be absolutely furious.”

“Yes.”

She covers her face with her hands, then peeks through those still bloody digits. “I’m sorry,” she squeaks. “Some of it is starting to come back to me. I must be in so much trouble.”

“You are,” I say, already feeling my resolve crumbling a little. She’s so adorable, and as for the disobedience and the danger, that’s a part of the nature of being a new shifter. She has instincts and desires. She has impulses she needs to learn to tame. I will help her tame them. I will teach her all the lessons she needs to learn. And I will bury my cock deep inside her because right now there is nothing I want more than that.

She curls up next to me and falls asleep again, entirely contented, and apparently feeling very safe indeed. She trusts me, even when she knows she is in trouble. I suppose that means I am doing a good job as a mate, though I do not know if I am doing anywhere near good enough of a job as an alpha.

Elena meets me on our way in. Anya is still asleep, indulging in the slumber of the righteous. I intend to bathe her and then let her sleep a little more, and then I intend to deal with her.

“Is it true? Did she eat human flesh?” Elena is straight to the point, following us into the castle.

“Not now, Elena.”

“We shouldn’t really be able to stomach humans,” she says, failing to heed my warning. “If she has eaten…”

“Not. Now. Elena.”

She gets the hint and leaves. I am well aware of the fact that eating people is aberrant behavior for a shifter. It is essentially quasi-cannibalism. There can be issues with diseases and some say it can make shifters more like animals. It’s not good to eat people, essentially.

“Bet she got it from her father,” she says, just as she leaves.

“Elena!” I snap her name, thoroughly irritated.

I hear heels click-clacking away at a faster rate. Good. She should stay clear. The last thing I need is someone telling me how to handle my mate. I know what Anya needs.