Page 35 of Bred Mate
“You’re being unpleasant,” my mother says. “You’re hungry. You need to eat something and improve your mood.”
“I’ve been hungry since you left me in the forest a decade ago.”
My mother rolls her eyes, as if I am being oversensitive and a little annoying. Her ability to downplay her criminal negligence is politician worthy.
Patrick is looking at me with the eyes of a dead fish that somehow move. There’s something about his face that’s just very flat and expressionless. It’s like he was alive at some point, and it was sucked out of him.
I sit down at the table, then I stand up again, because why am I making any effort to be polite?
Rainer is entirely indifferent to my discomfort. He is too busy trying to fit as much cheese inside a croissant as humanly possible. Ironically, my sworn nemesis is the least irritating person in this room right now.
“This is not going to work,” I say. “I am going to defend the forest no matter what.”
“It’s already been bulldozed,” Rainer grunts.
“Not the whole thing. I’m going to put it back. I’m going to tear apart anything you put there. I’m going to blow it up. I’m going to…”
Suddenly my head is spinning and ringing at the same time. It takes me a moment to realize that I’ve been hit. I don’t even know who did it. Someone behind me? The illusion of gentility is absolutely shattered as I collapse to the floor.
“Get up.”
I don’t know the voice. Turns out it’s Patrick, and when I don’t get up, he grabs me by the arm and just drags me out of the dining room like a sack of potatoes. I hate this. I could kill him so easily. I could kill them all so fucking easily. The notion of being captive to humans is ridiculous—until I think of all the creatures humans make their captives. There is no corner of the wild world they do not seek to tame. Why would I be an exception?
He takes me into a lounge, where he lets me go before shutting the door so we have some privacy in a room where there’s a big stuffed couch and an even bigger stuffed deer head mounted on the wall. Of course Rainer likes hunting and displaying his kills. Douchebag.
I look up at his son for a split second before scrambling up to my feet.
“You’re not my type,” he says. “So don’t worry.”
“So you’ll let me go?”
He shakes his head. “I’m going to put you somewhere safe. Don’t worry.”
I look at him and I see absolutely nothing to trust. I am very much worried.
“Are you being bribed into this or something? You don’t have to do it. You can just pretend to take me somewhere and let me go. They won’t be surprised. I’m really hard to keep anywhere. I don’t have a problem with you.”
He keeps giving me that dead fucking fish look, like he’s not invested in this situation at all, but he’s not going to let the whole thing go. I hate it when people have absolutely no discernible motive for doing anything and yet seem to be absolutely intent on doing it. It’s the worst. Most people are lazy. They get blamed for that and shamed for it, but I’d take a lazy person who will leave me alone over this bland walking wallpaper creature who has been given his orders and will carry them out no matter what.
“Just do as you’re told,” he says, as if that’s an option I have. As if that’s an option any captive creature has.
“What do you do?” I ask him.
“I manage a fund.”
Of course he fucking does. Breaks the world down to units of money and trades away every bit of feeling in the process.
“Okay, so you know about good investments,” I say, forcing myself to try to speak his language. “That means you should understand when someone is warning you off a bad one. You don’t want to be involved with me. Not even as the wife youpark in a house somewhere while you go fuck a line of coked-up secretaries.”
There’s a flicker of light in his eyes for a second, at the mention of the word coke. Of course. He looks dead because his brain is fried. At a resting state, there’s nothing going on. He needs a stimulant to feel anything. He probably needs to do a line just to get his brain to work in the morning, but he hasn’t been able to do one here because my mother is controlling everything that happens in this house and he’s a little afraid of her for reasons he can’t quite understand. There’s a part of his mind that already knows exactly who and what she is.
“You’re rude,” he says.
Fuck me. He’s just not going to understand. He’s going to willfully refuse to get it because he’s more invested in doing Daddy’s bidding than making a good choice for himself.
“You’re a liability. We have a very big development going into the forest and your insistence on sabotaging it is unacceptable. You should be in jail, but you can have some babies instead. I don’t like you, but I will fuck a baby into you.”
“Good luck with that,” I mutter under my breath. I think I might already be pregnant. I hope I am. I hope I still have that bit of Karl with me. Thinking about it makes me feel safe and connected to him, though if I was it would probably only be a collection of cells with gills or whatever at this point.
