Page 1 of Bred Mate
CHAPTER 1
Karl
Argh!
There’s a scream, a big shadow, and a crash as someone is thrown over my head and into a stack of top shelf liquor bottles on display for the patrons of this once fine establishment. I sip my drink and let the mayhem unfold around me.
I used to get into this part of things, but I’m getting older. Maturing. I have more responsibilities, and less interest in the kind of rough bickering that’s happening now. Don’t want to pull a muscle, not while I’m enjoying this particularly fine whiskey they had stashed behind the bar.
A gang tried to move into our territory. Thought they’d show up with wolf patches of all fucking things.
A bullet sings past my ear. I don’t bother to move. Danger has already passed.
When my father was in charge of things around here, this would never have happened. Nobody else would ever have dared move in on our territory. They would have come with their heads lowered and they would have asked nicely if they could live in our city.
Since word got out that he moved to Hawaii to retire, every shitty little pack with ideas of grandeur has been testing my patience.
The world has gone to hell, and I am Cerberus.
The whiskey burns on the way down, tempering the rage I’ve been trying to stuff down for the past several weeks. It was never supposed to be this way. I knew I’d lead the pack one day, but I didn’t expect it to be because my father made a series of fucking stupid decisions and then fucked off to leave me to deal with the aftermath.
Some little upstart wearing a wolf vest has the nerve to step up beside me. I’m guessing this is the gang’s alpha, trying his own little power play in the midst of madness.
“I heard there’s a real werewolf now,” he says. “Not a shifter, an actual walks on two legs fucking…”
“You heard wrong,” I say, my voice a low, dominant growl.
“I heard Orion’s lab made a freak of nature and now your brother is fucking it.”
I punch in the direction of the voice and it stops. My knuckles ache a bit, but the whiskey takes the edge off. I don’t have time for this shit. My phone vibrates in my pocket, picking the wrong fucking time to get my attention. I snatch it out of my pants, throw it on the floor, and stamp it with the heel of my boot.
I hate technology.
My father’s obsession with it to engineer an army of shifter pure bloods was doomed to fail from the beginning. If nature wanted a lot of wolves roaming the planet, she’d have put them here. Truth is there’s only so much room for so many apex predators.
I turn around and survey the bar. When we walked in here, it was full of about thirty little fucking upstarts from Arkansas thinking they had a chance to move south and take some territory. I don’t have the reputation my father did, because I was always the enforcer. Not exactly a public facing role.
Now I’m the alpha of New Orleans, and hell, in my mind, Louisiana. I am not my father. I am something much worse. They’re going to learn that. Every single wolf in this state is going to bow to me, or I am going to make them regret the day they were whelped. That’s a promise.
The bar is trashed. Bodies everywhere. I can smell a little death in the air, but most of them are still alive, just beat to hell. My men, the ones who stayed with me when the political shit show went down, are the roughest and toughest the pack ever boasted. Now that we’re effectively all that’s left, we’re making our mark, one mass beating at a time.
“Get them into a warehouse and lock them behind silver,” I order my men. “Let’s make a fucking example of them. I want every wolf from Los Angeles to New York to know how we run things here, understand?”
There’s a rumble of assent, and the boys start picking up bodies. There are vans outside that can carry more than this number of people if needed, especially if they’re stacked neatly.
I turn back to my whiskey. Job well done. Wish it felt more satisfying, but I guess you can’t really decide how you feel aboutthings. You’ve just got to do what has to be done. That’s what being an alpha is. Taking care of problems forever.
“Boss?”
My friend Raglan gives me a quick nudge. “We’ve got a human problem. When the shit kicked off in here, not everyone was human. Girl saw some of the boys shifting. Freaked out. Tried to record it. We think we stopped her, but so much of this shit goes straight to the cloud.”
The cloud. We’re worried about remote fucking computer servers. I hate it. I hate everything I have to concern myself with that feels like a sneaky little trick by a weak little fucker who couldn’t stand up in a fight.
“Why haven’t they taken care of her?” I don’t even bother to turn my head as I ask the question.
“She’s pretty.”
I sigh inwardly and finish my drink. Humans who see wolf shifters have to be killed. Period.
