Page 12 of Bred Mate
I need to appeal to the better part of him, or at least the part who knows how to call a forestry company and buy out a contract.
“They’ll come back. You know they will.”
“They’ll come back, and I’ll deal with them again.”
Frustration starts to spark inside me. “The fuck is wrong with you? You could make one call…”
He responds with a casual indifference that makes me wild. “I don’t like making calls. You didn’t call on a man who liked making calls. You could have gone to…”
“To who?”
“My brother is the one who handles things respectably.”
“Your brother’s not the alpha,” I remind him. “You are.”
He looks a little surprised to hear me say that, almost as if he forgot about it.
“I am,” he says. “And that means I get to handle things the way I want to handle them.”
“You want to beat up every blue collar worker the company sends out here, until they start sending cops and then you want to be shot like a dog and die in the dirt for no reason?”
He shrugs. “Doesn’t worry me.”
“Why are you trying to have a baby if you don’t even want to be alive?”
He shrugs again. “Just doing what nature wants in all things. She wanted me to live, she wants me to breed, and then she wants me to die. Simple as that.”
I’ve never heard anybody put things so bluntly in the context of their own lives before. There’s something wrong with this big, scarred alpha who doesn’t remember he’s in charge. I invited him to do violence, and that’s what he did because that’s what he thinks he’s made for. He doesn’t have any sense of a future. The most planning he’s ever done was coming inside me and figuring it would make a baby.
“Don’t you dare feel sorry for me,” he growls suddenly, almost like he caught my thoughts, though more likely he saw a flicker of an expression. He’s a hunter. Hunters read their prey.
“You think I feel sorry for you after you basically fucked me into oblivion?”
He laughs, a harsh, but amused sound. “Just telling you. Don’t feel sorry for me. That’d be a mistake.”
I take a deep breath. Fuck this. He’s given me no choice. I compose my features into a softer smile, like I wouldn’t ever dare feel pity for him even though he’s the most pitiful fucking creature I’ve encountered in a long time. The reason we can’t save this forest is we don’t have anything. We don’t have leverage. Or didn’t. Until now.
“You want to come back home with me? Have something to eat?”
“Sure,” he says. He’s worked up an appetite on a long drive and after a good fight. The prospect of food is enough to make him stupid.
CHAPTER 4
Karl
We go to her house on foot after I stash my car in some bushes far enough away from the scene of chaos to ensure it hopefully isn’t easily found. We start walking through the forest she’s trying so hard to save. It’s not as small as she made out. Even at a decent pace, it takes a couple of hours to get there, and by the time we get there, I’m ready to eat pretty much anything.
“Here we are,” she says, a note of pride in her voice.
I don’t know what I was expecting, exactly. A big house of some kind. Some version of my father’s house, but in a more rural setting. Or a smaller house, but cozy. That’s not what I find.
A series of shacks run along the river. It’s less swampy here than it is in a lot of the state, but it’s still wet and there’s a thin sheen of green on everything. The buildings are old and have obviously been flooded several times. Over and over. Now they’re rotting out where they stand. I can see mold on the curtains from here. I can smell it, and I’m nowhere near it.
This is a poor place.
Areallypoor place.
This is the place where people who have nothing live with nothing. I’m guessing they hunt for their food, and I don’t mean with guns. This is a pack that wears fur more than it wears clothes. I find myself excited and horrified in equal measure.
