Page 84 of Ruthlessly Mated
I eventually find myself curled up and relaxing in front of the fire as winter sets in. Has it been three weeks? Three months? Does it matter?
I’ve stayed out of trouble, at least in the sense of grand larceny and other crimes. I’ve stayed around the house. I’ve stayed well behaved and well… Fucking bored, actually.
I think about going home. To the place I came from. I think about what Alexander said about me, about who I came fromand what life I would have lived and whether or not I would be okay.
“What are you thinking about?”
Tailor always knows when I am thinking. Damon, too. Conroy isn’t home at the moment because he’s negotiating with the contractors and security people who are rebuilding the port. Everybody is very excited about it. Sometimes I get escorted down to the town, Coastwood. There’s a bar there, though I’m not allowed to drink because they want me pregnant and they keep telling me I might be pregnant, and maybe I am.
It all makes me think about family. About moms and dads. About my mom and dad, how they existed before Alexander made them not exist. It makes me think about what might happen if I had a baby and something happened to me, and Conroy, and Tailor, and Damon. There’s two more of us, more redundancy in case of random vampire murder, but still.
“Nothing,” I say when Tailor nudges me with his socked foot from the couch. He is getting far too comfortable. They all are. I might be too. It’s nice to be in one place, to rest, to sleep, to not be consumed with the all-important desire for brutal vengeance.
“I can feel the weight of your thoughts,” he says, his tone deep. “Share them.”
“I think I’d like to go home.”
“You are home.”
“No, I mean, where I came from. I’d like to see the old place, maybe visit my parents’ graves. Pay my respects.”
Nobody decent and in their right mind would deny me that.
“We’ll talk about it with Conroy when he gets back from the docks, but I think that is a good idea,” Tailor says. “I’d like to see where you came from.”
“No,” Conroy says the next day. He comes home from working on the port, walks in the door, and dashes my dreams as if they’re nothing.
“No? Why not?”
“No. It’s another ploy to get somewhere and do something,” he says firmly. “I want you here, with us, until you have our pups. And when you do that, you will realize that there are many more important things than revisiting the past.”
“Why are you being such a controlling asshole? Oh, wait. Why ask that. It’s because you are a controlling asshole.”
Conroy
Tailor pulls me aside after Kita has had her predictable tantrum at being told she can’t have what she wants. He keeps playing into her need to try to get in control, even though we’ve discussed plenty of times how bad that is for her.
“Whyareyou being such a controlling asshole?” He asks the question with a frown.
“Because I already looked into her home town. Nobody survived. It doesn’t exist. It was razed to the ground by the vampires when she was taken. There’s nothing for her to go and see. Nothing for her to return to. It’s a bunch of ruined houses rotting in long grass. I don’t want to take her back there and remind her of everything she had to endure all over again. I want her happy here. I want her to come to terms with this as her home, this as her family, this as her life. If I let her go all the way back to that wreck she’s going to be unsettled all over again. Why are you smiling?”
Tailor is giving me a look I cannot read. “You really love her, don’t you. But you go out of your way to make her feel like you’re a monster.”
“She doesn’t have to like me. She just has to do as I say. It’s simple. And don’t you tell her what I told you. It’s a secret. She doesn’t need to think about the past.”
“I don’t think you get to decide what she thinks about, Conroy. I think it’s time you started thinking about what she wants and why she wants it, instead of just trying to control everything all the time. If you want to keep her close, you have to start responding to her emotions.”
“Stop being ridiculous.”
“Does she know anything about you? Where you come from? What made you this way?”
“Does she need to know in order to do as she’s told?”
“Yes. Probably. Eventually. Yes.”
Kita
I hate this place. I hate my mates. I hate Conroy the most. He says no to everything. If he could say no to me seeing daylight, I bet he’d say that too. He’s obsessed with control. He doesn’t care about me, or what I want, or what I need. All he cares about is forcing me to do what he wants, and using my body to give him pleasure and make his babies.
