Page 10 of Free Beast Mate

Chapter Five

Emma

My heart wasgonna beat out of my chest. I swore it would come out and splatter all over the floor, so I leaned against the door and hugged the loaf of bread I’d swiped from the trash on my way out. As if the bread would keep my heart inside my chest.

I’d done it! I nearly squealed. I saw Lord Amoris. All six feet and some of him. Massive and with dark gray hair with natural white highlights. I’d never seen such hair. It looked magical and long and straight. He had a masculine jaw and a trail of ridges on his cheekbones all the way to his temples. Those red eyes burned my skin. If I weren’t naked, they’d burn my clothes. Oh boy, that was intense.

Now that I knew I wasn’t his mate, I could move on with my life, not wonder if there was a way I could save us from hunger. But he’d asked me why. What a strange question, and, ironically, one I’d never bothered to ask myself. Why would I think I would be his mate? I didn’t know, but it was worth trying. Why would I question Tom, though? He’d told me I wasn’t, and his visions had never been wrong before. He’d envisioned a perfect mate for the lord, and I was not it. So why would I even bother?

It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. Adam had caught a horrible bug and couldn’t make it through the workday today, so John, the warrior I’d met during supper, had replaced him. New on the job, John probably didn’t even know he shouldn’t leave the beast quarters unattended even if the beast entered the holding box.

I took advantage of his absence, and with Lord Amoris still in the holding box, I figured it would be a good time to appear before him. I needed to know for me, for my own peace of mind, but that didn’t mean I’d questioned Tom’s visions. It meant I just had to be sure. And frankly, I was curious to see the beast in our community. Breeders who’d seen him and gotten rejected like me whispered about him. They described him as an ogre with disproportionately large red eyes, ugly ridges on his face, claws on large hands, and thighs the size of their waists. I thought he was impossibly handsome. God, I must be weird. No wonder I had no friends.

I sighed, thinking I better get going. I hurried to Adam’s station, a small desk with a wide hologram screen displaying the lord’s quarters. The lord was still inside the bathroom. I opened the drawer and slid Tom’s card back inside. The retinal scans opened the doors for Adam, but Tom had continued using the old card slot even after the retinal scans got installed.

Now for the bread. Good thing I’d left my cleaning supplies and a bag of the lord’s dirty laundry on the desk. I wrapped the bread in the lord’s old towel and tucked it inside the bag, then took my stuff into the canoe. With a big smile on my face, I paddled my way to Sector Four, my home since my dad had passed.

Sectors were basically large, sectioned-off spaces breaking from a tree trunk that made Community X’s core. Sector One sat on top of the community. It housed various supplies like water purifiers, gasoline, and other things we needed. It was a storage space closest to the surface for easier refilling of supplies. The living quarters were Sectors Two through Twelve, some smaller than the others, but most housed at least two hundred people in shacks or huts carved out of the earth.

I parked Tom’s canoe and leapt onto the path, then grabbed my stuff. Cole found me again. “Hey,” he said, and extended his hands, wanting to help me out.

I threw Amoris’s laundry bag over my shoulder and kept walking. “Adam’ll have a cow if he sees you with me again.”

“He’s having a cow already. Shitting out a cow, I hear.”

“Gross.”

“He and most everyone else. The whole community smells like ass.”

I laughed.

Cole continued, “John sent me to ask about Tom.”

“Tom asked not to be disturbed today. He’s connecting with God.” Though, come to think of it, Tom hadn’t used the sanctuary this morning. I went down to see him and found him in bed. I hoped he hadn’t caught Adam’s bug.

Cole followed me inside the sector, where huts were stacked on top of one another along the walls with a large space in the middle where kids played and people socialized. The kitchens were in the front, opposite the entry. I climbed the steps on my right, Cole on my heels. “Which sector are you?” I asked.

“Ten.”

“Lots of boys your age there.”

“They bore me.”

“And I don’t?”

“No. You remind me of my ex-girlfriend.”

I paused and turned around. Cole was nine and already had an ex. I was over nineteen and had never even been kissed. “Your girlfriend?”

“Mm-hm. Sienna. She was blonde. You’re a redhead. Never seen a redhead before, but I like it.”

I chuckled, though feeling a bit uncomfortable. “This is exactly what Adam doesn’t want. You crushing on me.”

“His problem.”

I continued up the stairs, then stepped away and followed a narrow path to my hut. When Cole didn’t come along, I turned. “See you later.” Cole kept staring at the path. It was probably only two feet wide, with a fall about five stories down. There was no fence around the path, so I understood his reluctance to follow me. I left him to it, thinking he’d go back down the stairs.

My hut contained a bed and a desk. I didn’t need much else. Family huts were bigger, some of them even made as two rooms, kind of like Lord Amoris’s quarters with a bedroom and a living space, though nobody else had a private bathroom like him. Not a bad setup, though I’d heard Adam tell stories how Amoris constantly complained about everything. The room was too small, the food overcooked, the bread stale, blah, blah, blah.

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