Page 3 of Bred Mate
I figure wrong.
A motorcycle comes weaving through the traffic and roars up beside me. I’m still hoping that’s a coincidence, and then the passenger side window bursts into a million pieces. A bullet makes the stuffing of the seat next to me turn to airborne foam.
Shooting his own car. Interesting move. Crazy move.
I know it’s him. Can’t see his face under the helmet, don’t know his license plates, but I know in my gut that he’s following me. I’m in his car too, so odds are he’s going to know how to track it. It’s probably got a tag on it.
I thought I was being smart, but I was actually being stupid as hell. I’m now trapped inside a metal box that I can’t really get out of in this evening traffic. The roads aren’t super busy, but they’re far from empty and I can only imagine how many hundreds of eyes are on this crime.
A sane person wouldn’t want to draw police attention, though judging by what I just saw in that bar, I don’t think this man much cares about the cops, or being sane.
I press the accelerator toward the floor and the whole beast leaps forward, throwing me back into my seat and leaving him in the dust.
I drive like my life depends on it, my animal instincts taking over. I want to get out of this built-up area. Ideally, I want to get onto an open rural road where I can really make this beast of a car do everything it is capable of in order to help me escape.
I manage to find LA-23 out of town and then head out into what turns out to be a series of dead ends that terminate in a lot of water that I definitely can’t drive in. I try my best to turn and reverse, but in the end I find myself cut off with a gun trained on me through the windshield.
These could be the last seconds of my life, and that pisses me off.
“Fucking kill me then!”
I gun the car straight at my stalker. He jumps off his bike at the very last minute and both the bike, and the car with it, head straight into the water at high speed. I wasn’t thinking. I was panicking, and as the water starts to rise up the sides of the car and I realize I can’t open the fucking door, I start to panic even worse.
I don’t want to fucking die here. I have to survive. I am far too busy to die.
That’s not stopping the water bubbling up to my windows though, as the car swiftly heads to the depths of what have to be reptile- and snake-infested waters. There is danger all around me, and I find myself hopelessly paralyzed in the midst of it all.
My killer comes in through the window, holding a knife. He cuts my seatbelt and drags me out of the vehicle, pulling me to the shore as I struggle against the water, and against him.
He drops me on the ground and stands over me. We are both panting. Me more than him.
I can’t believe I’m alive. I can’t believe he didn’t just leave me to die. That’s what he was trying to do, right? He wanted me dead. What the hell is happening?
I roll over onto my back and look up at him. He’s staring down at me with piercing eyes, his jaw muscles flexing as he clenches and unclenches. He looks furious.
“Why?” I rasp the word out. I got some water in me on the way up from trying to scream while I was being rescued or murdered. I don’t know which was happening. I still don’t.
“I could ask the same fucking question,” he says. “Try to take me out, end up totaling my bike and my car?”
“You were going to kill me.”
He shakes his head swiftly, but not really in a way that implies he’s denying it. More in aI cannot believe this shitsort of way.
“I was just going to kill you,” he says. “But now I think I need to teach you a lesson first.”
He whips his belt off, and I ready myself to fight for my life again.
He grabs me up by my sodden jacket and throws me face down over a barrel. One of his palms presses firmly against my lower back, keeping me in place as he lashes the leather of his thick belt across my wet ass.
The snap of the belt is loud and the sensation stings immediately, bursting across my skin in a wash of tingles that don’t stop in my ass, but find the pathways of my nerves and run all the way down to my toes, and out to my fingertips. I buck upward, but his hand moves from my back to the back of my neck.
“Stay fucking still,” he growls at me, lashing the belt against my ass over and over again. “You think there’re no consequences to fighting back? You’re wrong.”
“I should have lay down and died for you? That would have been more convenient?”
“That’s what happens to prey, sweetheart,” he snaps.
I knew the new alpha of New Orleans was a piece of work. There have been tremors of fear passing through the night for awhile now. Usually when an old alpha dies or retires, there are ceremonies. There’s a chance for the packs to meet them and to come to terms with the new alpha. That hasn’t happened. The man currently beating the shit out of my ass isn’t cut out for the job. He’s not an alpha. He’s a thug. Worse than a thug. He’s more like an executioner.
