Page 69 of Savagely Mated

The scream is due to the fact that as soon as my D2G livery is no longer in danger, I snapped into my wolf form and began destroying them. Limbs snap between my jaws. Blood flows into my mouth. One by one, I tear them apart without mercy, and with great enjoyment. My animal self has no compunction about killing. It’s not like when I hit a man with my sword and a bit of him fell off and I panicked. Wolves don’t feel guilt.

Later, I might feel bad, but for now, all I feel is right.

Six men on one woman is an unfair fight, but six men against a wolf are mere appetizers.

When the threats are dealt with, and the concrete runs red with the blood of those who dared accost a delivery rider, I slide back into my human form.

Their blood feels disgusting on my feet. Sticky, warm, and all too biological. I try to avoid looking at what’s left of their faces, but the human eye is always drawn to expressions, and right now I see six very dead expressions.

A woman starts screaming.

This time it’s not me. I think she’s the girlfriend of one of the men who used to be intact and alive, and is now neither one of those things. The sounds she makes are wild, incoherent, and terrified.

I let her scream as I pull on my uniform. I have more deliveries to make.

CHAPTER 19

Einar

“Where is she?” I ask Rafe the question. He promised he wasn’t going to take his eye off her for even a moment, but somehow she has managed to give him the slip. I’m not surprised. Running is what she does. She’s very good at it. She’s clearly read the chapter on evasion in my book a hundred times or more. At this point, she may as well write her own.

“She went to work,” he says. “I’m sorry. She talked me into it. I realized that we don’t actually have any right to treat her like a prisoner. If she wants to be a delivery driver, there’s no reason to stop her.”

“Why do we keep having to have this discussion?” I sigh. It seems to me that the three of us should be able to keep tabs on one little girl.

“Maybe we could respect her as an autonomous adult woman who can make her own choices and doesn’t see herself as a pawn in our plot?” Kirin makes the comment snidely.

Rafe and I look at him with dour expressions that eventually make him shrug. “Or not,” he says, now dipping into sarcasm. “Oh, no, I can’t believe she did the one thing she literally always does. Shocking.”

“Our plan isn’t just for us,” I remind the others. “It’s for everyone. It’s for Eclipse City. We’re not just trying to get a throne back. We’re trying to liberate the downtrodden. We’re trying to right a wrong. And sometimes that means people who don’t want to play a part still have to.”

“The two of you need to argue,” Rafe says. “She was very convincing, and now you are.”

“Of all the people who stand to gain from this, Rafe…” I trail off. I can’t lecture my pack mates. I can’t be the only person who cares about the mission we embarked upon.

“We could chain her,” Rafe says. “Cage her.”

“Can’t get her into the king’s harem selection if she’s caged with us. We have to get her on our side. She needs to be made obedient.”

“Good luck with that,” Kirin says. “She’s not going to do anything she doesn’t want to do.”

“Then we need to make her want it, somehow.”

“I don’t think she really cares about the king, one way or another,” Rafe says. “To her, the king is just some guy she’s never met, and we’re saying actually it should be some other guy she’s never met. There are no stakes for her. She identifies more with people in the city than people at the academy. She chooses to go work as a delivery driver…”

“That’s because delivery drivers get to ride like assholes with death wishes and get rewarded for it,” Kirin grins.

“Whatever Delivery 2 Go is doing, we need to do as well,” Rafe says.

“Oh, you’ve gone insane. You think we should devise strategy from a shit-tier delivery company that kills a third of its drivers every year?” Kirin says.

“I think we should do what works,” I say.

“Uh. Guys?” Kirin turns his tablet toward the pair of us and slides the volume up. It’s a news broadcast on a social media feed, so there’s a cartoon bear dancing in the corner of the screen as a reporter does a serious voiceover.

“Drone and personal streaming footage today caught sight of a disturbing crime in the very heart of Eclipse’s industrial district. In the aftermath of a hijacked delivery, a delivery rider turns into a wolf and kills six gang members. We speak to personnel manager and branch owner, Clint Legend.”

The image of a pasty white man appears on the other half of the screen. He’s in the D2G office. We’ve seen it before. There’s a coffee stain on his shirt, which I am almost certain he does not give anything even faintly resembling a damn about. Clint has transcended many of the concerns that plague other mortals.

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