Page 44 of Mated

I sit in the cell, my butt back against the wall, my feet kicking off the edge of the bed. I think about all of the terrible things that will no doubt befall me once I get into the system. I wonder how many wolves end up incarcerated. I wonder how many have been shot like dogs, like I almost was.

The creaking sound of the door to the cell block heralds bad news. I hear footsteps. I don’t even bother to look up as they stop.

“Hello, little one,” Cain Lupin drawls.

Piercing blue eyes nail me through the bars as I let out a whine of excitement and guilt. He found me! He found me, and he came for me! My inner animal is leaping up and down, bouncing with glee. My human body is trembling with shock. I never imagined he’d come for me. I thought for sure he would wipe his hands of me.

“Mighty nice of you to come pay this young lady’s bail,” the officer drawls as he unlocks the door.

“Yes,” Cain agrees. “Yes. It is.”

The next ten minutes are an absolute blur. I get processed out of jail in Cain’s custody. Every breath I take is one dragged deeply into my lungs as I desperately inhale his scent. I didn’t smell him at first. The stench of the cells was too much, and misery was choking up my senses.

“I am so sorry,” I whimper as we step out of the jail together. “I didn’t want to go. I had to…”

“It’s okay,” he says. “We’re going to have a lot of very long talks, you and I. You don’t need to explain yourself now.”

“But I do. I was in jail…”

“And I’m not surprised,” he says. “But save it until we are home.”

“Home?”

“Denholm,” he says. “Don’t worry. The conclave is over.”

“Oh. Did it go well?”

He gives me a dark look. “It did not. The conclave is supposed to be the lead up to a wedding between an alpha and his mate. Suffice to say, that did not take place.”

“Ah.” I feel indescribably guilty. “You wouldn’t want to marry me. Look who I am.”

Cain stops and gives me a stern glower. We are standing in the middle of a dusty, dried-up town that hasn’t seen any infrastructure or building upgrades since the seventies. St. Infernus is one of hundreds of towns just like it dotted throughout the US, places that outlived their usefulness years ago. People born here are born obsolete, and they know it in their bones. Some of us try to run away, but places like these get into your marrow. You might leave them, but they never really leave you.

“You are my mate,” he says, as though that simple statement encapsulates me and excuses everything I am not. “It is as simple as that. I will never abandon you. I will never let you go. And I will marry you.”

“But I ran away to do crime.”

“Yes,” he says grimly. “We will deal with that.”

That sentence makes me incredibly nervous. “I’m sorry,” I stammer. “I had to come because of my aunt, and then my aunt wanted me to help, so I…”

“Am I your aunt?”

There’s a moment in which I consider giggling because of the mental image that question conjures up, but I can tell he doesn’t mean it in a funny way at all.

“No.”

“I think I’ve been very clear with you from the beginning, Kira,” he says. “You are my mate. You are mine. Nobody else has any claim to you whatsoever. I don’t know what your aunt has meant to you in the past, but…”

“She raised me after my mother died giving birth to me. She’s as close as I have to a mother. I owe her my life.”

He frowns slightly. “I think I need to meet this aunt of yours.”

I would do anything to not have these two worlds collide. He will see where I come from, and he will see what trash I am.

Cain

“Kira. Take me to your aunt.”

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