Chapter 12
Rex
“I don’t know what the four of you were thinking,” I say, stalking back and forth in front of the line of young wolves who are standing before me in all their shambolic glory.
I’ve had them taken in and separated from my mate.
I need to speak with them directly. They need to understand that they answer to me now.
They look guiltily at each other, and then at the floor. I have not spent much time with any of these people individually. My attention has naturally gone almost entirely to my mate. That may have been a mistake.
“Stealing is forbidden on the reserve,” I say. “As, you may be familiar, everywhere else in the world.”
I don’t think any of these whelps has been raised properly. Every single one of them has the undeniable markings of having had to drag themselves up.
“Do any of you know what the penalties for theft are?”
They look at one another guiltily, and shake their heads.
“Typically, it is a lashing and imprisonment,” I say.
They blanch at me. The young men bristle and posture, but I can see that they are just as afraid as the young woman.
I am aware that threats of physical discipline can have unpredictable effects when dealing with those of uncertain backgrounds.
I actually have no desire to punish this small crew.
They submitted immediately, and even now seem to me to be closer to pups than people.
If they could roll over and show their bellies, I am sure they would.
“Of course, if it turns out that an action was undertaken on orders, then the punishment might be applied further up the chain,” Fescue adds.
“We’re not going to get Nicky in trouble!” the girl, Laura, practically explodes. “Do what you have to do, if you have to do it, but none of us are going to tell on her.”
There’s a commotion outside the room at that point. I can hear my mate cursing at one of my guards who does not deserve it.
“Let her in,” I tell Fescue. “I’ll deal with her separately, but she may as well be here.”
Fescue sweeps the door open with a long-suffering sigh that does not fit the situation given we have barely begun to deal with this lot. Nicky practically tumbles in, not having anticipated the door opening just as she was banging on it.
“It was me!” she declares loudly and bravely. “All of this was me. You know it. Leave them alone.”
Very sweet. A little alpha trying to defend her little pack. Unfortunately for all of them, nobody is getting out of this unscathed.
* * *
Nicky
The energy in the room is like ice. I almost don’t recognize Rex. I was afraid that he was going to be angry, but whatever this is, it’s worse. He’s so focused, so intense.
I thought I wanted to take the heat off my guys. I do. But I am also starting to regret that I did it right now.
He turns to me, his blue eyes locked on me so intently I feel as though I might be the only person in the world besides him. “Yes,” he says. “I suppose I do. The rest of you can leave.”
I watch my pack scuttle for cover, and I am glad to see them go.
We stay in his office. I guess that’s where we are. I don’t know. It’s a room with a desk and an alpha and not much else matters right now.
I hold my breath, waiting to receive the brunt of his fury. I expect him to hurl me over the desk and whip my ass with a cane or something.
But that’s not what he does.
“Why are you trying to leave?” Rex seems slightly hurt as he asks me the question.
His eyes are on mine with the intensity of desire and betrayal.
He doesn’t get it, and he never will. He thinks the problem with being what we are is just needing a private place to shift from time to time.
He doesn’t understand that there are bloodlines who can’t just run about and maybe chase some deer when they shift.
There are bloodlines whose hunger exceeds anything he seems familiar with.
“I can’t be what you need me to be. I can’t be a good mate for you. This pack needs a better alpha’s mate. You need a better mate.”
He looks more confused than before. “I thought you were becoming happy with me, here. You seemed to be.”
“I can seem all sorts of things,” I say. “But I’m not ever going to be a fit. You get it. It’s a culture thing.”
His eyes narrow at me a fraction, and then he is stalking toward me, capturing my chin in his hand as he wraps his other arm around me.
“What are you not telling me, Nicky? And don’t be glib.”
For a second, I almost feel like I am about to tell him. Seems like the truth is about to emerge. But right at the very last moment, I bite it back.
“Nothing,” I lie.
He lets out a low growl. I feel it reverberate through me, though I don’t really know what it means in the moment.
“Alright,” he says. “You do not have to tell me. But you won’t be leaving either. You are my mate. My fated mate. My knot bonded mate. So you are going to stay here, with me, until you find a way to explain to me what it is I need to know. Consider yourself grounded to the bed chamber.”
“You can’t send me to my room,” I laugh.
“You’re right,” he says with a dark smile. “I’m sending you to mine.”
He takes me to the door, hands me off to the guard, and tells them to take me to his room. I find myself escorted there like a prisoner, feeling very, very odd and quite guilty. Did I do something wrong?
* * *
Rex
Something is clearly going on with my mate. The refusal to shift, the desire to run, the insolence and the testing, and the sending her little pack mates to steal a car… all of it points to a secret.
“Fescue, I’d like you to look into her background more deeply,” I tell him. “Put the investigative division on it. I want to know everything there is to know about her.”
Fescue inclines his head in a nod and goes about executing my orders.
I should have done this in the first place, but we were investigating their pack and business as a corporate concern, not a personal one. The moment I laid eyes on Nicky, some part of me felt as though I knew her. That’s the fated bond.
Actually knowing her is a different matter.
While I wait for him to get back to me, I do some work. Nicky will be contained in my room until I am ready to deal with her. Another spanking won’t do anything. Talking to her won’t do it either. I have to get to the bottom of this.
I should have done this already, but I didn’t take her seriously enough. I thought I’d met a cute little runaway and she’d be easy enough to dominate, but I was wrong.
It takes less than an hour for Fescue to return. Three minutes for him to locate the file he no doubt already compiled and another fifty-seven for him to pretend he’s putting it together.
He comes back to me when I am calmer, which does help. What he has to say does not calm me at all.
“Sir,” Fescue says. “I regret to inform you that there is no Nicky Love.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean her identity goes back as far as an inmate in a girl’s home,” he says. “She was found at the site of a massacre in a rural location, with no memories of who she was or how she’d gotten there. She was kept in the home until she turned eighteen, at which time she aged out of the system.”
I listen to him and I imagine Nicky as she is, and then younger, alone and in a massacre.
She never mentioned anything about it to me. She’s never told me anything about anything. I feel my gut twist as I realize that might be because I have been so focused on how good and hot our present is, and I’ve assumed her past rather than asked her about it.
I have been a spectacularly myopic asshole.
“So we don’t know who she really is?”
“I’d suggest we run DNA, sir. Pack lineages are important. And it may give us some sense of who she is beyond a missing girl.”
* * *
Nicky
He didn’t spank me.
He didn’t even fuck me.
He just tried to talk to me, and it was awful. He was trying to get me to tell him about myself, but if there’s one thing I don’t want to talk about, it’s myself. He tried some casual conversation that I rejected, and then he sort of gave up and I thought that it was over.
Next day, he pretended like it was okay, but we both know it’s not okay. Everybody is in trouble, everything is weird, and I am not allowed to escape.
Now I’ve been in this fucking room for three days, and I think I am going to go crazy. The doors are alarmed and there are guards in the hall, and if I try to go out the windows, I know they will be waiting for me there too.
I’m working on a way out. I suspect that if I climb up onto the bathroom counter, I can maybe cut a hole in the ceiling if Rex is gone long enough, and then…
“Nicky?”
I hear him enter the room. Fortunately I am lying on the bed and not executing my crimes against drywall.
“What do you want?”
“We need to talk,” he says.
“We really don’t.”
The bed sinks as he sits down anyway. Whatever.
It’s his bed. He can do what he likes. Suffice to say, I am angry with him.
It’s fundamental to animal nature that a trapped creature is going to try to escape.
So I tried to get my pack to steal me a car.
So what. Anybody in my position would do the same.
“I want you to tell me what happened when you were fourteen,” he says.
Every single hair on my body stands on end, as a fear so intense and so nameless I can barely contemplate it runs through me.
“You’ve been stalking me,” I say.
“I’ve been trying to understand why you’re so scared, so angry, and so afraid. Now I know something happened when you were younger. You don’t have to tell me about it, but I’d like you to. I want to know you. I haven’t been doing a good job of that.”
“Really? Pinning me down, fucking me, and keeping me captive isn’t a good way to get to know me?”
He leans over me, putting one long, strong arm by one side of my head, boxing me in with his body as he looks down at me with a gaze so piercing it makes me want to cover my eyes.
“I know I’ve made mistakes with you,” he says. “I’m going to try to not do that as much.”