19. Kato
KATO
The worst isn’t feeling my mates while they’re gone.
The worst isn’t feeling them much at all.
Because that first evening after both Nate and Cas are gone, my uncle corners me in my bedroom where I’ve already begun to go to pieces, his usual henchmen Harry and Graham at his back.
There’s a short scuffle before they overpower me and pin me to the bed, and my uncle rolls up my shirt sleeve.
He palpates a vein along my forearm with a practiced hand.
“What are you doing?” I snarl.
“A kindness,” he says. “Make a fist.”
“Fuck you.”
He backhands me so smoothly it’s almost casual, but his knuckles connect with my cheekbone and the pain immediately webs like fractured glass across my face. I bite my lip against a gasp. “Mind your mouth, dear nephew. You’re on thin ice already.”
“Fuck do I care?” I grit out. “What are you going to do if I don’t? Kill me?” I’m sure he’d love to. I’m surprised he hasn’t already. Kill three birds with one stone and all that. “Go ahead, do the whole fucking world a favor. Bet my dads would thank you.”
Declan ignores me, which is more infuriating than if he’d just retorted in his usual smarmy way.
He wraps something thin and rubbery around my bicep so tightly I feel like my circulation is being cut off.
From seemingly thin air he produces a filled syringe and the first icy fingers of fear grip my heart.
“What the fuck is that?” I demand.
“How you’re going to get through this.” He uncaps the syringe and flicks it with his finger. Air bubbles or something, I don’t fucking know. “Otherwise you’ll be even more unbearable than you already are.”
“It’s a new suppressant that’s all the rage nowadays,” Harry offers. He’s sitting on my legs; his weight’s turned them to pins and needles. “Especially in the States. It dulls the mate bond till you can hardly feel a thing.”
My mouth goes dry. “That exists?”
“How have you not seen the commercials?” Graham sneers. He’s got my shoulders in a vice grip. “You’re American. Don’t they play drug ads on repeat over there?”
“Who watches cable TV anymore?”
“Well, they’ve all gone viral on YouTube, too. Even I’ve seen them.” He hums a couple bars. “Bond-B-Gone, move on strong! Because forever is way too long! That one omega influencer has been pushing it a lot.”
“Oh, yeah,” Harry recalls. “The one who mated his situationship?”
“Holy hell,” I say. “That can’t be real. Right? Sounds like fucking snake oil.”
Graham laughs. “Oh, it works. How do you think Alpha deals with his needy-ass mate?”
Eden. My heart clenches for him, the isolated omega with the sad face. “You what, just ignore him?”
Dec’s not listening to me anymore. “Take a deep breath,” he advises me, and before I can argue he sticks me.
The needle bites, sure. Its actual contents hurt even worse.
Oh, it hurts like a fucking bitch. Like being plunged into ice water, so brutal it takes my breath away.
I gasp, long and ragged, as the tiny syringe somehow turns the entire network of my veins into liquid fucking nitrogen.
I can’t breathe past it, not even enough to scream, though screaming is what I try so desperately to do.
I struggle and gag and the two alphas hold me down with all they have while my uncle continues to relentlessly push whatever poison’s in that needle inside me, flooding my body with it, and it seems endless. Endless.
When I do manage to fill my lungs enough to breathe, I don’t have the energy. I collapse into Graham’s lap and pant like I’ve run a 10k. I’m drenched in sweat, trembling, the ache settling deep into my bones.
“You didn’t react like this,” Harry says uncertainly. “The first time.”
“Double the mates, double the dose,” Graham says. “Right, Alpha?”
“Leave him,” my uncle says, and the other two alphas slide off me. “He’ll be fine by the morning. First time’s the worst.”
Between clenched teeth, I manage this: “Fuck. You.”
“You’ll be thanking me soon,” he says, not unkindly. “It’s for the best, nephew. It really is. You’ll be better off once you forget them.”
By morning, the worst of the pain and shaking has subsided.
I do not thank him, though.
The drug did the trick, not snake oil after all. I can’t feel them. At least, not really. There’s a dull knowledge that I have mates, sort of knocking against my skull. That they’re out there somewhere. That they exist.
But that’s the only feedback I get.
I can’t reach down those cords that entwine us.
Can’t determine with any precision where they are.
Or what they’re feeling. If they’re still as devastated about our separation as I am, or if they’re over it by now.
(Are they over it by now?) I don’t know if it works both ways; if they can’t feel me either.
If I’ll just fade away. Stop existing to them at all.
That first day, I don’t leave my bed. I stay in my sweat-stained sheets all day and night.
I don’t eat the food Eden brings me. The most I do is get up to piss in the hallway bathroom.
I step over the tray of food and slam the door shut each time I come and go, making sure to do it hard enough that the pictures on the walls rattle.
One falls off with a satisfying crash. It’s a spike of dopamine in a desert, all too brief.
When I sleep, I don’t dream.
The second day is more of the same, except this time when Eden tries to bring me breakfast, I grab the tray and hurl it down the hallway. It smacks the far wall, crushing eggs and toast and fruit into a glorious technicolor splatter.
“I don’t want food,” I snap at the omega. “I want my fucking mates.”
“I-I’m sorry, Kato.” That characteristic stutter of his, punctuated by his wide, terrified eyes. “I-I was j-just—”
I slam the door in his face. And I immediately feel bad about it because he didn’t do anything wrong, other than marry my uncle. And that wasn’t his fault either. I almost open the door and apologize, but he’s already long gone.
He doesn’t come back after that, which means the third day is blessedly devoid of interruptions.
Me, myself, and my misery are now my mates.
The only thing that could improve my pity party is a cigarette or a drink, neither of which I could coerce Eden to bring me now, I suppose.
Should’ve thought about that before I lost my shit at him.
If I died right now, no one would care. Not my parents, not my brother, not anyone in my old pack. I’ve burnt up any goodwill there. Just a black sheep, just a fuck-up. Just a nobody. No one fucking wants me around. Declan should’ve just killed us all.
No. Can’t think that. Cas and Nate don’t deserve to get dragged down with me.
God. Wish they’d come get me. Wish they could. I know they can’t, though. One misstep and it’s game over for all three of us. It couldn’t have gone more perfectly if Declan had planned it himself.
I’m going to fucking die here, aren’t I?
On the fourth day Declan gets tired of my malingering and invades my room. “Enough of this,” he says. “You’re fine. Get up.”
“Fuck you,” I say. It’s all I have to say to him.
He drags me bodily from the bed, down the hallway and out the front door, into the warm sunshine.
It’s absolutely fucked that the sun would dare to be so bright and happy and the sky so impossibly blue when I’m so fucking miserable and everything is so awful.
I hate the way it feels on my shoulders, the back of my neck. I hate it.
He shoves me off the front steps and I stumble to my knees. I catch myself, skinning my palms on the brick walk. “We have just days until the horse fair,” he says. “The least you could do is make yourself useful.”
“What if I run?” I say. “You gonna stop me?”
“I’ve got alphas coming out of my ears,” he snaps. “Trust me when I say you’re being watched very closely.”
And of course he locks the door behind him, so I can’t even go back inside.
I wander around the village for an hour.
It’s busy all right, everyone preparing for the stupid fair-slash-pack showcase.
Cobblestones being power-washed and barn windows being wiped clean of dust and cobwebs, horses being bathed and groomed until they gleam metallic in the sun.
There’s an air of cheery determination, like this is It, this is going to be the thing that puts us on the upswing at last.
Well, not us. Them. There’s no us or me here. I don’t matter or factor into any of this.
And fuck if I’m gonna make myself useful.
Besides, the horses make me sad. They just remind me of Cas and how much he loved them, the way his eyes lit up when we went to see them.
Just the opportunity to give one a piece of candy seemed to mean the whole world to him.
Felt nice to be able to give him that much, if nothing else.
And then I ruined that too. Pummeling that beta’s face to meat.
No, I don’t want anything to do with the horses. Or this pack. Or anything at all.
I wanna disappear.
I go down to see Magda, aware of the two alphas tailing me at an indiscreet distance.
I’m a disgusting mess, unshowered and unkempt, looking as awful as I feel, but she doesn’t judge.
She offers me a hand-rolled cigarette, and we sit smoking together in her tiny kitchen while she prattles on about her grandkids coming to visit this week.
“You look so pale,” she says, abruptly switching tack mid-ramble. “You need a drink, I think. Put some color back in your cheeks.”
“A drink,” I echo dully.
“Aye, something hearty. I’ve got some vodka here…oh, it’s a bit old but that’s alright. It doesn’t ever really go bad, does it?” She’s up and fiddling around in her dusty liquor cabinet.
This is the part where I’m supposed to say no.
I’m supposed to get up and leave. Tell her it’s been real but there’s stuff I have to do (not that I know what that stuff is).
Instead I simply watch as she pours me a shot and passes it across the table.
In the tiny glass, it looks as harmless as water.
I pick it up. I say, “Thanks, Magda.” I throw it back.
And after a whole month without a single drop of alcohol, it’s like every nerve center in my brain lights up at once.
I have a second shot and then a third. I’m fucking wasted by the fourth.
And nothing she’s saying—Magda—is making sense anymore.
And I need to piss but I don’t want to ask her where the bathroom is, and I don’t want to piss in the sink ’cause I feel like she won’t like it, so I do the next most sensible thing, which is shift.
“Oh!” she says, upon the appearance of a giant black wolf in her kitchen. “Not in the house, dear!”
I manage to scrabble at the knob of her front door until it catches, nose it open, and then stagger outside.
I hear a gasp from one of her neighbors and the twinned growls from my babysitters as I begin to lope down the street, zigzagging this way and that.
Hey hi, I want to say to the startled faces above the fence lines, ever seen a drunk wolf before?
I piss on a tree and then knock over a potted plant while cutting through someone’s garden, and at the sound of angry cries I really start to run.
Up, over the long, low hills that seem to stretch into forever, through the fields of heather, over crumbled walls and under fences, fur catching in barbed wire and not even feeling it but yelping all the same.
Smelling the faint rust of blood—mine?—as the barn comes into view, and I stagger through.
There’s several horses cross-tied in the aisle who spook violently at the arrival of a large wolf, eyes rolling and snorting like dragons, shod hooves striking sparks off the concrete as I pass them by. Betas sling curses at me and someone goes “That’s Kato!” and I want to say yep, that’s me.
I bark instead. I think. Make some godawful yowling noise.
I overturn buckets, knock over stacked feed bags.
I yank a hose running full blast out of someone’s hand.
I swipe a stepladder out from under a beta hanging streamers from the rafters.
I feel fingers dig in my ruff, try to grab, but even wasted I’m faster, stronger, with teeth too sharp for any beta to bother much with.
I smell omega—catch sight of Eden and Adrian staring at me—and disregard, ’cause they’re gonna do fuck all.
Well, Eden will tell Dec. Of course he will. He has to.
Fuckin’ traitor.
I deviate. I run off into the fields again, leaving chaos in my wake.
Flocks of sheep part before me like the Red Sea and poor things, I’m the most fucked-up demon shepherd dog they’ve ever seen.
There’s yelling, there’s howling—oops, the alphas have caught on at last—but it’s too late.
I’m fucking out of here. I’m never, ever coming back to this hellhole my parents exiled me to and I don’t even care anymore.
If my uncle wants to hunt me down and execute me, let him.
I’ve run out of shits to give. It’d be a mercy killing.
But he’ll have to catch me first.
Which he does. Almost immediately.