Page 19 of Bred Mate
“Where are my brothers? Did you kill my brothers? That’s what you do, right? You kill?”
“They’re not dead. I tied ‘em up and put them in one of the outhouses.”
“I thought captive shit was for idiots.”
I am about to tell her she needs to be more appreciative for the mercy I am offering her, but I don’t get to say that, because that is when I get shot.
The bullet enters through the back of my shoulder and passes clean through in a spray of blood. I guess I’m not the only one who can get out of a captive situation.
“Tim! No!”
“Son of a bitch thought he could tie us up and take our fucking sister?”
Tim slams the butt of the gun into my face. There’s stupid fury in his eyes, the kind of anger that makes a man dumb. Most times, shooting someone and hitting them with a gun is a pretty decent way to disable them, but I am not someone. I am a wolf alpha, and I am not silvered.
I shift.
He shifts.
In an instant, the room is full of wolves. His brothers come through the same window, both in their wolf forms. Three wolves on one is a rough ratio at the best of times, but it’s harder when you can’t just cut loose and go absolutely feral because there are some creatures here I do not want to harm.
Ellie is somewhere in the mix. I can’t see her because there’s one set of jaws on my throat trying to rip it out, and another set of jaws at my belly.
They’re trying to kill me.
I’m trying to kill them—well, some of them. Not the baby. He’s in the mix, though, and his teeth still have some of that needle sharpness to them.
Ellie
What an absolute fucking mess. I knew my brothers might get a little rough with him, but I thought that would be an advantage. I thought he’d be outnumbered and do what we said. In under a minute, the entire interior of the cabin has been smashed topieces by their fighting. We don’t have much, and what we do have, we need to preserve.
They are fighting viciously, their snarls and growls almost deafening me along with the sounds of furniture being splintered.
This fucking guy.
All he needs to do is make a fucking call.
Why can’t he just make a fucking call?
I know how to stop this fight. It’s not going to be pleasant, but they’ve brought it on themselves. I grab a bucket, dip it into the nearby river, and then I dump the full contents of a bottle of colloidal silver into the bucket of water and throw it at them.
It splashes across all four, which isn’t difficult because they’re in a vicious roiling dog pile. As the silver hits, it splashes across their fur and knocks them out of their transformation. Four wolves turn into four human males. Tate is still latched onto Karl’s neck. The other two are writhing around on the floor in something like pain. Silver burns deep, but the transformation saved them from the worst of it. It hit their wolf hides and as they shifted back to human, they were spared the pain.
Karl’s not as wounded as he was before. Transformation took care of that, too. There’s a bit of blood where the bullet ripped through his body, and some surface scarring that will heal up over time, but for the most part he is healed.
“Get up!” I yell at them. “This is pathetic.”
My brothers look shocked. “Get into the other house. Get dressed. Leave us alone. I am going to deal with this one the way he deserves to be dealt with.”
They slink away, shamed and warned by the intensity of my tone. I understand that they were trying to protect me, but they’ve achieved absolutely nothing besides breaking the last of what we had. This is the problem with men when they lose their tempers. They don’t think about the bigger picture. All they care about is killing the thing they’re angry at.
Karl is left behind, panting, naked, exhausted, slightly bloodied, and scarred. He looks hot, but I’m not going to allow myself to be distracted right now.
“If you’re going to be useless to us, you can run back to New Orleans, back to your big empty house and the humans you kill because you’re too weak to run a pack,” I snap. “You can leave us here, and we’ll defend ourselves.”
“I’m not leaving you. You could be carrying my child.”
“If I am, I won’t be for long.”
