Page 31 of Bred Mate
Gray grabs me by the collar and pulls me out of the station before I can kill the cop with my bare hands.
“They’ve done something to her,” I growl.
“I know,” he says. “I know. But we’ve got you out, and we got the boys out, and now we find her.”
The boys. I almost forgot about the boys. Ellie’s brothers are out by Gray’s car, standing in a little rudderless half circle.
“I can’t find her,” I tell them immediately. “She either didn’t come to the jail with us, or they’re not letting her out. They’ve either moved her, taken her somewhere else… I don’t know.”
“Rainer,” Tim says. “It must have been Rainer. He sent the cops after us and he took Ellie. I bet she’s at his house. We should go there.”
“We can’t just go to that man’s house if he’s behind any of this. It will only get us all arrested again,” Gray says. “We’re going to locate her using some level of care and stealth. Right now, we collect information.”
He turns to the boys. “How did Ellie become the leader of your little pack?”
Tim answers. “It’s not a pack. Not really. It’s just what’s left of our family, and there’s fuck all left now.” The brothers look at one another as if they’re on the verge of spilling a truly shameful secret. Then their lips tighten and they stop talking.
“The more you tell us, the better chance we have of working out what’s going on,” Gray prompts. I let him talk, because my patience is on the verge of boiling over.
“Our mother died when Connor was born,” Tim says. “And our father. Well. We don’t have the same father. We have a few fathers. None of them ever stayed around much longer than it took to make us. I think that’s why Ellie was so obsessed with keeping the forest. It was the one thing that stayed the same. We’ve tried to stay with her, tried to look after her, but…”
I understand. They have their own lives that they want to live somewhere outside a fucking swamp. Ellie has been holding them back with the fervor of her need.
“You boys should go on with your lives.”
“We ain’t got lives outside the forest and the river,” Connor says. “We’re no good for anything.”
I look at them. All young, one of them way too fucking young to be messed up in this. And I make a decision.
“I’m sending all of you to New Orleans, and you’re going to stay in my father’s house, and you’re going to get jobs or go to school. Whatever you want to do. I’m going to find your sister, and I’m going to civilize her. No more of this fucking about in rotting woods.”
They look excited. They wouldn’t dare look this happy if Ellie were here to remind them of their place, but I reckon it’s not her job to do that. It’s about time someone told her hers, I think. Once she’s pregnant and looking after babies, she’ll understand what’s really important. She’ll have a real family, and a real place to live.
I’ve just got to find her, and, strangely enough for me, fucking civilize her.
CHAPTER 8
Ellie
I wake up in a bedroom with wallpaper of blue cornflowers and a matching bedspread. The room smells like dried flowers and the aftermath of a vacuum. It smells clean and sterile, the only nature here having been killed before it was allowed in. When I look to the upper corners of the room, there’s not a hint of a spider, not a little thread of a web.
I’m wearing a clean white shift dress.
Someone bathed me after I was drugged. Someone gave me a fucking pedicure. My toes are a light teal. I match the fucking bedspread.
“The fuck, Mom,” I curse.
I thought we’d never see her again after she had Connor. She was dead to us. She was supposed to stay dead.
Waking up in this full-size doll house is an insult to everything I’ve gone through to this point.
I look at the disgustingly clean ceiling, and I try not to remember, but the thoughts keep forcing their way through my mind. Over and over again they come. I try to think of something else. Anything else. But it’s impossible, because there is no sound like a baby crying. It pierces your mind. Makes it impossible to think about anything else.
Ten years ago…
There’s a three-month-old baby in my arms. I’m twelve years old. I don’t know what I’m doing, because he won’t stop crying. My other brothers are small and they’re hungry, and there’s no food in the house.
The Doyles next door moved out three days ago. They offered to take us, but I said we’d stay here. I told them our father was coming back soon. I didn’t want to leave.
