Page 37 of Bred Mate
“Your mother.”
Yes. Humiliated and betrayed. That’s what they want for me. They want me broken in a way I won’t ever recover from.
I won’t have it.
But he obviously knows the ways to control me. She’s told him something. Maybe not the truth, but something. They’re going to keep me silvered. They’re going to keep me uncomfortable and weak. They’re going to drain the life out of me until one day I’m like her, not remembering how wild I am. If this goes on long enough, I’ll be the spitting image of my mother.
“You always do what my mother says? You want your trophy wife in a cheap soft metal?”
I try to manipulate him through shame. He seems like the type to respond to it.
“You need to put a longer dress on,” he says. “You look like a whore.”
I have a brief flash of a vision of his arterial blood arcing across the room.
“This one is below the knee,” I say.
“I can see your tits, whore.”
For a moment, I almost want to laugh, because he’s so deeply unpleasant. Most men would be happy to see a woman’s breasts. The fact that he looks so viscerally disgusted makes me think there’s a reason his father is trying to marry him off.
“Get changed,” he says flatly, turning and walking out of the room.
Get changed into fucking what? Does he think I live here? Does he think I have a wardrobe? Or does he just live in some kind of magical male world where women can pull magic clothing out of the ether? All the women he knows always look like whatever he thinks they should look like.
I wonder what to do. Go ask my mother for an even more subtle and demure dress? Roll myself in the rug and call it a day? Smash my way through the window?
Honestly, I should smash my way through the window.
I pick up a heavy statue that feels like it was bought from an artist who probably really cared about what they were doing, but whoever put it here chose it because it matches the rug and the throw pillows. I should be more impressed with being in a nice house with plenty of comfortable things, but I just want the wilds.
Before I can smash the window, the door to the lounge opens. It’s my mother. God, it is still so weird seeing her. I have good memories of her from when I was small, before she left. It’sprogrammed into me to love her, and that is a betrayal of the wiring that knit us together before I had a choice in any of it.
She smiles at me pleasantly, and speaks to me in a bright tone.
“If you throw that, I will have you hunted down, and next time it won’t be Rainer’s son I give you to. It will be to a set of divorced dock workers who don’t mind keeping a woman in a storage container.”
“What the fuck, Mom?”
“I know you want to do something crazy,” she says. “But you have to work out how to be normal, honey. You have to learn how to make a husband happy and how to live a life that is productive and healthy and good. You need to find out what your favorite cereal is. I bet you don’t know what that is. If you settle down with Patrick, you’ll have a house just like this one. You’ll start to live.”
She is absolutely demented. Her instinct to love is so fucking twisted. I have to wonder how I turned out so normal.
With no real options, and no real help, I make the best of the situation.
A few minutes later, I present myself to the bizarre family I’ve been kidnapped by. They’re back in the breakfast room, Patrick and my mother. I don’t know where Rainer went. Probably off ruining a delicate and irreplaceable ecosystem.
Patrick looks me up and down.
“What the hell are you wearing?”
“It’s a longer dress?”
“No, what the hell…”
I give myself a little pleated twirl. It’s awkward because the dress is held on with a thick cord taken from the original incarnation of my attire.
“You’re wearing the curtains?”
