Page 42 of Mated

I do not want to commit crimes. I want a normal life. I want to go back to the city and disappear back into the mass of people, none of whom have any idea who or what I am. I want to go back to Cain, but I know he won’t want me now, not once he realizes what kind of trash I am. He will find someone else. I know he will. His pack is full of females who worship the ground he walks on.

A little voice in the back of my mind tells me that if he wanted them, he could have had them at any time, that he chose me and told me that I’d be his mate for life. But I am not good enough for him. I look around myself, I see the family I came from, and I see the place I came from. I see how poor and stupid and unworthy we all are, how we keep choosing that poorness and stupidity and unworthiness. My uncle drank himself stupid. My aunt has wiles. She didn’t need to live like this. Even Colton had potential before he started getting picked up by the cops in his early teens.

I thought I was going to be the one who was going to escape. But there’s no escaping what’s inside you. I am made of polluted land and a neglected home. I am made of poverty and cruelty, and going to college and getting a job at a big shiny corporation and getting fucked by my boss isn’t going to change that.

These are the things my aunt would say, but she doesn’t need to say them. Now I say them to myself.

“Show me that wolf form,” she says.

I’m not even sure I can assume it on command.

“I haven’t been in it much,” I stammer. “I don’t know.”

“I can force it out of you if I have to,” she says.

I catch a scent from her that I don’t think I have ever smelled before. It is one of pure female dominant threat. She will hurt me if she needs to.

“I just need a minute,” I say.

I go to the bathroom, because it’s the only place in the house that has a lock on the door. I take off my clothes, and I look at myself in the mirror. Deep dark eyes look back at me. There’s a stranger in the glass, someone who used to think better of me and now thinks nothing of me at all.

It might be a relief to turn myself into the beast now. I think less in that form. Things hurt less. Life is much more simple.

I take a deep breath in, and I let it out, and I embrace the pain and sink into myself as a simpler, better thing.

Shifting hurts. But it hurts less when you’re already in so much pain. The physical ache of shifting flesh and bone is preferable to the agony of circling thoughts of regret and shame. I shrink in some ways, and I grow in others, and instead of being naked, I am covered in fur and a thick pelt which protects me in a way my thin human skin never could.

I also realize that I just shifted in the bathroom after locking the door, and my wolf body doesn’t have opposable thumbs. I’ve locked myself in here.

It takes me a moment to even understand. My mind is so different in this state. All I have to do is knock a latch over, which I can do with nose and paws. My claws scrabble inefficiently at the door, chipping old paint. It takes a moment to pull the latch open, but I manage it.

The smell of the place is intense. It should repulse me, but this is where I was raised. This is home. I smell my family. I smell their similarity to me. It is a comfort. But there is something else going on too. An absence of scent. An absence of my mate. I miss Cain. I miss him like I am missing something fundamental to my survival. I missed him in my usual human form too, but being an animal makes it so much more intense. There are no other thoughts to distract me from what I am experiencing. There is just the experience itself. The longing. The need.

“What’s taking so long?” My aunt’s voice rings out, disrupting my misery. I have to do what she wants. I’ve always had to do what she wants. For as long as I’ve been alive, I’ve done what she wanted. That’s how life works.

I pad out through the hall and present myself to my aunt, and by default, Dale and Colton.

There’s a brief gasp, which is quite astonishing from a woman who never seems surprised by anything.

“Look at you!”

I didn’t think they’d be surprised. I thought for sure I would look just like them. I thought she’d make some scathing comment about me, but I didn’t think she would be surprised.

“Look at this!” She points at me, laughing. Colton joins in with a snickering nastiness. He doesn’t care what I look like. He doesn’t see me at all. I’m like wallpaper to these people. Wallpaperthat occasionally gets them a beer. Even Uncle Dale manages a chuckle.

“What the… I said retriever. I didn’t think you’d actually look like a dog!”

I run back to the bathroom and shift immediately. It hurts like hell. The ache goes right into my bones. Tears run down my face as I take deep, gasping breaths. I don’t know if I’m crying because of the physical pain, the emotional pain, or if this is because taking my wolf form, if only for a few minutes, made me crave Cain so deeply, I think I might be going mad.

I get my clothes back on, planning to limp out to the fields behind the house. I just want to be alone. There’s something so wrong with me that even the worst people in the world are laughing at me for how deficient I am on the inside. Being laughed at for my wolf form is humiliating. It’s like having the very core of myself on show, and having it be mocked.

Before I can slink outside, my aunt comes and grabs me, dragging me from the bathroom by the arm. I wish I had the will or strength to resist her, but I never did have that, and I think I never will.

“This is perfect,” she says. “I always thought your slut mother ran off in heat and got herself mated by a wolf who discarded her like the trash she was, but she didn’t even wait for a wolf. She mated with some white trash waste of DNA and this is what she made.”

This is now the second time I have been mocked for my appearance.

“You’re perfect,” my aunt says unexpectedly. “Colton looks like a wild creature, but you pass as a domestic stray. You’re going tobe able to get into all sorts of places he never could without being shot. We’re going to make so much money.”

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