Page 64 of Ruthlessly Mated
Just as I open the front door, the light on the stairs turns on.
“What are you doing, Kita?” My father is standing at the bottom of the stairs.
“There’s a man. His car doesn’t work,” I say. “He needs to use the phone.”
“Shut the door, Kita,” he says, his voice sounding weird and strained. It’s the last thing he’ll ever say to me. I can’t remember what the last thing my mom said to me was. It was probably something about not putting my plate in the sink, or maybe something about not leaving the fridge door open. I tell myselfit was that she loved me, but I left the milk out way too often for that to be the thing she likely last said to me.
I’ve opened the door just a hair. I try to push it closed again, but it slams open, knocking me to the side. I hear my father make a noise like I think the people on the TV show would have made and then everything goes dark.
When I wake up, I’m not in my house. I’m tied up in the back seat of a car so fancy it doesn’t even seem real, and there’s a man next to me covered in blood, who smells of my parents, but is not my parents. It’s the first day of the rest of my life, and the beginning of my personal nightmare.
And now? It’s starting all over again.
“You forfeited your maker’s heart when you killed my parents and raised me as a feral orphan.”
“I may not have been a good adoptive father,” Alexander admits. “I did become distracted for some time…”
“You forgot I existed for a decade.”
“You were small and easily forgettable. You are still small, but I see you have found a way to make yourself harder to ignore. Does it please you, to have taken a powerful artifact?”
“I should have killed you when I had the chance.”
“The feeling is mutual, little one,” he leers through sharp teeth. “Get in the car.”
“I’m not going to get in the car. You’re asking me to kidnap myself.”
“You want me to kidnap you personally? Very well.”
He picks me up in one hand and throws me in the car where I crumple like trash, folding myself into the far corner in a tangle of all too human limbs. He is careless with me, but not entirely brutal, even though he is furious with me.
He wants something from me.
He thinks I’m going to be able to get the heart back. That’s why he hasn’t broken every limb in my body.
“Now,” he says. “What to do with you now I have you in my grasp and yet you remain non-compliant?”
“I don’t know, kill me?”
“I would not give you the satisfaction,” he says. “You are going to get my maker’s heart back, and then we are going to talk about your punishment.”
I stare sullenly at him.
“And if I don’t?”
“I’ll find and kill each and every one of your mates, slowly and in front of you. It won’t be like with your parents. I won’t glamor the memories out of your mind. I won’t spare you a single one of the excruciating details. It will be as if their deaths are happening to you.”
A cold spike rams itself through my heart. He’d do it. He’d do it, and he would enjoy each and every moment of it.
CHAPTER 12
Conroy
Damon and the doctor have been in the back room surgery for what feels like hours. I have paced. I have thought. I have regretted. I have made plans for what we will do once he is better. I tell myself that he will get better, because he has to get better, because there are no other options.
I want him to live. I desperately want all of us to live. We haven’t had the chance to fully enjoy our mate yet, and he is just beginning to overcome the damage of a lifetime. He spoke to Kita. He found his voice. And now he’s been fucking shot.
He will never complain about it. I already know that. He’ll probably never mention it. Even if he does start talking to us. This will just be another bit of damage he absorbs.
