Brutally Mated (Shared Mates #3)

Chapter 1

Tabby

“She’s a bit young for this, isn’t she?”

My head is tugged roughly to the side as a comb is pulled through wet tangles. I’ve been forced to take a bath, and I am not happy about it. The water was cold and the herbs they insisted on using made me feel like I was being marinated for the fire.

My father’s wives are arguing over my head. Talisa and Maidi are favored by my father at the moment, hence why he would have ordered them to hunt me down and drag me back to the den for this forced pampering.

“Who else are we going to give them?” Talisa asks. “There’s no other maidens. They’ll want a virgin. They always want a virgin.”

“She’s not even a proper hunter. Wraiths don’t count. What kind of wolf wants a mate who can’t hunt? She hasn’t taken her first true blood yet,” Maidi replies.

“Sure, but she’ll bleed tonight,” she says. They both laugh.

I don’t smile. I sit and I wait for the preparations to be done. There’s a cool wind whistling up through the mountains. The moon is waxing, but far from full. She’ll be a sliver of a guide in the dark tonight.

I’ll do my duty, like all my father’s daughters must. I hope it is not too painful, or too humiliating. I hope it is over quickly.

The wolf-women readying me for a night of breeding have pulled out the nicest things they can find for me.

For the first time in quite some time, I am wearing a very nice dress.

It might have been my mother’s once. Hard to say.

When she died, everything pretty she had was taken by the other wives.

They left her books to me, seeing little use for them.

This is the first time this much attention has been paid to me. I am the daughter of the alpha, but not eldest. Or youngest. I am the thirteenth daughter, and I have spent all my life in the wildest and most haunted land in the world.

Tonight I am to be given as a breeding sacrifice to a warrior from another pack who has come to do battle with the vampire threat in return for a mate.

That’s what he believes, anyway. That is what my father will tell him when he arrives and is decorated and fed and given my body to use as he pleases.

He will believe himself to be the savior of us all.

Once the ceremony is over, he and I will go out into the night, set up camp, and there I will be bred. He will be killed by what stalks the dark mountains, and I will return to the pack with a belly full of seed and fresh blood for our bloodline.

This is how my father chooses to maintain his territory.

Other males are not allowed to live with us.

He tells them that we are at war with a dark horde, and that he will give them his daughters in return for their expertise.

The wolf-men who come here are not good.

They are rough, brutal creatures excited by the prospect of dealing death to new creatures.

They hear the chance to mate a female who has no choice but to allow them to knot inside her, and they accept it eagerly.

They do not understand the danger they are in.

They come decorated from other battles, bloodied from previous fights.

They think they know what they are to face, but they never survive long.

The mountain is full of monsters. This is a place of predators.

There is nothing here that is not at risk of being consumed.

“How are we supposed to make her look presentable with her skin so speckled and her hair so ruddy?” Talisa frowns at my hair and tries to curl it up against my head, as if that might stop it from being a bright red beacon.

My hair has always been a standout among the pack.

Most of us have bright blonde hair and blue eyes.

My mother came from a pack of cream-skinned, red-haired wolves.

I inherited her coloring, but not her gentle temperament.

I can thank my father for my strength, but I have her to thank for my curiosity.

She made her way to the mountain on her own, seeking adventure.

She met my father, the alpha of our pack, and the rest is history.

Quite literally.

There are legends about our pack that go back hundreds of years. We’re one of the original bloodlines. My father can trace his lineage all the way back to Wepwawet himself. We are the wolves of the gods. To claim a bride born of my father’s seed is an honor all shifters aspire to, so we are told.

I know that the world outside these mountains is very different from the one we inhabit.

I have heard stories of cities of machines, where a wolf shifter declares himself king while living among simple humans for the most part.

I shudder at the idea of being among so much humanity.

I’ve never seen a human, but my mother’s books and diaries describe them.

They are sort of half-creatures. They look like us in many respects, but they are unable to take any animal form.

They live their entire lives in a sort of hairless, juvenile, helpless state. I shudder at the thought of them.

“Is she ready?” Ansya bustles in, interrupting my thoughts and the last of the preparations.

She is the head of my father’s household in terms of cleaning, cooking, ordering everything, and she is perpetually irritated.

She has two deep lines between her brows but an otherwise very pretty face.

I think he loves her the best, now that my mother is gone.

“She’s ready. We tried to make her look a little older, a little sexier, but she never grew a very big bosom,” Talisa says. She has three boys and each of her breasts is bigger than my head. She is my father’s seventeenth bride, and she is only five or so years older than me.

“The warriors are waiting,” Ansya says, sounding aggravated. “The alpha is impatient for the feast to begin.”

We will all eat well tonight. A wild boar is turning on the spit, and the smell of roast meat is filling the air. It will attract scavengers, but they will be dealt with by our guests.

“Come, Tabby,” Ansya says, chivvying me up and out of the chair. “Everyone is waiting for you.”

I have to lift the hem of the dress to stop from tripping over it.

Because this is a big occasion, I will be presented on the stone dais where my father usually sits.

He is in his big chair as usual. I can see him from the side, a massive older man with all manner of tattoos and scars.

What my father has not done cannot be imagined.

He rules the pack with an iron fist and an even more brutal set of fangs.

My stomach begins to churn as I realize that these are some of the last virginal steps I will ever take in this life. My feet slow, a fact that immediately annoys my chaperone.

“Go on. Go up,” Ansya pushes me, poking me harshly in the midsection. “There is no time to waste. The boar will burn and the food will be as ash in our mouths if you tarry any longer.”

I am nervous, but that does not matter. My feelings are of no concern whatsoever. This is my destiny, and I must rise to meet it. Tonight I will be bred, and the man who breeds me will be killed by the beasts that inhabit this land, roaming with a hunger that can never be satisfied.

I am pushed up onto the dais, and there is a moment in which I still haven’t seen him. I keep my eyes down on the stone, looking at all the cracks, hoping that somehow this isn’t actually happening.

I wonder what he’ll look like. I wonder how old he will be. I wonder if he will seed me and leave me with pups, or if he will prove to be unseeded, and then I will have to undergo this process again and again.

When I lift my eyes, it is first to my father.

He is a massive man sitting in an even larger chair.

His gray hair is plaited in several thick cords and he is wearing a crown of golden thorns.

His chest is covered in a cuirass for a battle that will never come to the den because men like these come to give their lives.

He has one shoulder clad in a pauldron with the insignia of the wolf.

This is ancient armor, handed down from father to son for generations.

I will never wear anything like it, because I do not have the prized male gene. I was made to be given away.

I have not been this close to my father for years. I have seen him from time to time, in the distance, being tended to by his wives. But the daughters of the ancient alpha are not of much interest to him. We are like cattle to be traded, nothing more.

“This is my daughter,” my father says, rising from his chair to cast an expansive arm in my direction. “My very flesh and my blood given to you.”

I turn slowly and hope the warrior who has come to claim me is handsome and kind. It seems unlikely that he would be both. The state some of my sisters have been left in after their night of breeding has made me glad that the men who did it were consumed by the hungry things.

But… wait… why so many strangers?

I feel a moment of intense confusion as I realize that there’s not one male standing in front of my father’s dais. There are three.

Three massive Karis warriors, each with long raven-black hair to their shoulders, bare chests showing rippling human physiques, and traditional black tartan kilts that can easily be shed for a transformation without being destroyed. They are wearing long black boots that come up past the knee.

My mother’s books taught me that they’re from wetter isles than these mountains, which tend to be dry and hot during the day, and dry and cold at night.

Their skin is pale and their eyes are bright blue, a striking contrast with their dark hair.

Their jaws are broad and well formed. They are handsome, and very similar in appearance.

Related, perhaps? Small packs tend to breed similar traits.

One is probably a few years older than I am. Perhaps mid-twenties. Another seems older than him. The third one is graying at the temples and must be at least twice my age.