Page 4 of Captive Mate
So objectively, maybe I did deserve this — from a certain point of view, that being that I’d had a real choice in my actions, rather than simply trying to survive. And also objectively, what they were doing to me wasn’t so bad. But I hated to be dirty, and I hated being cut off from my magic, and Ineeded to wash my hair before I lost my ever-loving shit. And I felt so sick. Why did I feel so sick? I hated being so weak.
How long were they going to leave me down here? They were supposed to be the good guys, right? The heroes. Where the fuck did they get off using tactics I might have used against someone else? The fucking nerve.
The creak at the top of the stairs turned into the door opening all the way, and then footsteps thumped their way down.
“Fuck, what’s that smell?” Nate’s voice.
“What do you think?” Ian replied. “He’s using a bucket. I told you I could handle this alone.”
“I’ll manage,” Nate grumbled.He’dmanage? He’d probably had a shower that morning.
Nate and Ian appeared at the bottom of the stairs and stood shoulder to shoulder, examining me. Like they’d get any joy out of that.
“Where’s my bread and water? Run out of budget for grocery shopping?” The Armitages were notorious for being one of the brokest-ass werewolf packs in the west. A lot of the pack worked low-paid blue-collar jobs — or had, before the paper mill in the area shut down. Now they were unemployed and living off of odd jobs as handymen or furniture movers, and I was pretty sure they owned a junkyard.
An unprofitable junkyard, even as junkyards went.
I expected a sneer, or a mocking retort, but it didn’t come. Ian was pale and exhausted-looking, and he frowned at me silently.
“He looks like shit too,” Nate said. “He’s white as a ghost. And he’s sweating.” Come to think of it, he wasn’t looking his best either.
And…too? Little alarm bells were starting to go off.
Ian’s frown deepened. “What kind of spell did you put on my brother?” he demanded at last.
“As I told you in our first charming conversation the day after your fluke of a victory, I don’t share my proprietary techniques.”
I slumped back against the end of the couch. That long of a sentence had really taken it out of me, not to mention the effort of sounding like I wasn’t about to start begging for a bottle of Tums. Fuck, there was really something wrong with me.
And given Ian’s question, I was starting to suspect what it was.
“No, not gonna fly,” Ian said grimly. “Not this time. Something’s wrong with Matt. He’s sick. Like you are, it looks like. So you’re going to tell me what you did, and you’re going to do it now, or I will start torturing you. For real. No fucking bread-and-water bullshit.”
“He’ll die if you kill —”
“I didn’t say one fucking word about killing you.” His blue eyes were cold, icy cold, and they made me shiver. I was starting to get the idea that being a generally decent person wasn’t enough to make him weak.
He’d have a strong enough stomach for whatever he needed to do to help his brother, and at this point — I didn’t. I wouldn’t hold out for long. My head whirled with sickness and frustration and anxiety. Keeping the spell in place was my only leverage. But if it was the spell I’d cast that was affecting me and Matthew…it shouldn’t have, that was the thing. It damn well shouldn’t have. I’d built in the failsafe that would kill Matthew if I died very much on purpose, and I’d been damn proud of it, too. I still was.
Only…the only way to do that had been to modify the love spell, deepening its usually more superficial effects. It didn’t just cause lust. That wouldn’t have been enough to anchor the I-die-you-die that I needed in there. It mimicked a mate bond — specifically a werewolf mate bond — to make it more effective on Matthew.
And mates…well, they didn’t do well when they were separated. Especially when I’d enhanced that effect too, in order to make Matthew crave my presence and keep coming back to the Kimball territory.
Except that it wasn’t supposed to make him sick.
And it wasn’t supposed to do anything at all to me.
But…I didn’t have access to my magic, which had been anchoring the spell, using me as the focal point because that was how mate bonds worked. And now the spell had been running amok for days, without any anchor at all.
Fuck.
Frantically, I ran through my options, which ranged from fuck-that to oh-hell-no on the desirability scale. I could remove the love spell. That would leave Ian free to rip me apart, although he’d need to take me out of the spelled chains for me to do the spellwork, which might give me an opportunity…no, surely he’d have Nate and possibly that other freakazoid mage right there breathing down my neck. Not to mention, he’d have something sharp directlyonmy neck. I’d die that way, almost certainly.
I could do nothing. Then, Matthew and I would both get sicker, and probably die. Not an option.
That left me with confessing my fuck-up — though I’d try to phrase it a little better than that, to preserve my pride if nothing else — and admitting that actually, it looked like Matthew and I would need to be in closer proximity for the near future.
Muchcloser proximity.
