Page 125 of The Enforcer's Rejected Mate
Oh my gods. Cassidy. “Fuck.” This is bad. She sold me out to get me out of the way. There’s no doubt in my mind that was her play working with Keiran. Does she even know what she’s done? She’s hurting everyone for what? Frostclaw is going to attack Red River and she handed them the keys to do it.
“Oh so you cuss now? Real classy, Cordy.”
I bare my teeth at him. “Don’t you call me that.” I sit up on the bed. “You better let me go, Keiran.”
“I’d ask or what but I don’t give a shit. You’re not going anywhere until I’m healed.”
I throw myself off the bed and there’s enough slack in the chains to end up on the floor beside it. My right arm is stretched painfully across the bed but I don’t care. I’ll do anything to have space between us. I know what Keiran wants from me.
There’s only one way to heal him.
“You don’t even know if this is bondrot.”
“The fuck I don’t. Look at me. This is fucking bondrot and you wanna know how I know that?”
I don’t answer him, just crouch lower while he stands from his chair and starts to pace the room I’m in. I look around and see it’s a cell. Bars line the left side of the room and I can see a hallway through them but nothing beyond it. The room is all cinder block walls and concrete floors. There’s a window high up but it’s too high for me to reach unless I break the silver cuffs I’m wearing. I pull on them, but I’m still too weak.
“I said do you wanna know how I know?” Keiran thunders at me.
I flinch and look at him. He looks…so, so wrong. There’s no trace of the alpha I fell in love with, the man that I dreamed of forever with. That Keiran is gone, it’s like someone turned him inside out, the dark inside of him on display and now I’m finally seeing the real him.
“How, Keiran?” I whisper.
“Because I’m losing my mind,” he says and jabs a finger into his temple with an angry laugh. “I’m going crazy. Fucking losing it since you’ve been gone.” He pulls at his hair, a chunk falls out and I muffle my shocked scream in my hands. “You’re the only thing I think about, the only thing I want, I can’t-I can’t fucking breathe without you. I don’t exist without you. You’re everywhere I look. When I wake up you’re there mocking me, when I sleep you’re in my dreams running from me.” He turns to me, eyes wild and I see his canines have elongated. His lips pull back and his face ripples before he starts to shift but it doesn’t take all the way. He walks towards me, a twisted nightmare of human and animal.
“You are the only thing I can think about. There’s nothing else but you. Everything comes back to you,Cordy.” My name comes out as a garbled snarl. I hunch down low, try to make myself as small as I can but there’s no getting away from Keiran when he comes to me and squats down in front of me.
“So I’m thinking, I'll bond you and fix my shit. Once I’m healed, things will go back to normal.” He touches me, cups my face in his hand and I gag. My skin feels dirty where he touches me but Keiran doesn’t seem to notice.
“Where’s Bella? You have a mate. There’s no way bondrot should be hitting you.”
He jerks his hand away from me and stands with a snarl. “Don’t you bring that bitch up. She’s worse than you. Fucking lying whore!” He starts to pace again, his words coming faster as he keeps talking. “She had a mate this whole time. Can you fucking believe that? How is that for irony? She sold her ass to me and she had a mate the entire time. Two-timing fucking Moonshadow but a deal is a deal. They’re locked in with us if they want to survive.” Keiran crosses his arms and looks out into the hallway like he sees something. I look with him but there’s nothing there. Hells, he really is going nuts.
“She thought she could trick me?” he asks the empty hallway and laughs. “Fuck that. Made sure her pack paid their debts to us.”
“She had a mate?”
“Are you fucking dumb? That’s what I just said.”
I flip him off. “Fuck you, you zombie.”
Keiran spits at me. “That Enforcer you’re fucking is a bad influence on you. I’m going to break you of that shit when we get home.”
My hands start to shake at the mention of home. He doesn’t mean the cottage that I’ve decorated as mine. He means the hell that I escaped. The hell that he never lifted a finger to save me from. Even with what happened tonight and losing Thorne the way I did, I’d prefer it to Frostclaw. I’d figure out how to live peacefully enough even if I had to look at Thorne everyday. Cassidy. That awful woman. She might have stolen my mate’s heart and wears his ring but she’s not hurting my home.
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” I tell Keiran.
He narrows his eyes in a glare and charges at me. I jerk back up against the wall but there’s nowhere for me to go. He grabs me and lifts me off the ground like I weigh nothing. Even if Keiran has bondrot, he’s still stronger, more than capable of hurting me.
“Mine,” he growls. I can feel his hot breath on my neck. His scent is all around us, cloying, rotted fruit that makes me gag. He presses close to me, the graze of his teeth on my skin tells me what I already know. He’s going to bond me. I can’t let that happen. I refuse to be bonded to this monster for the rest of my life.
“Get off me! Let go!” I push him and he actually falls back a step with a snarl. I don’t understand how I did it until I see the silver chain binding me burned him. Perfect. I turn my arm and whip the chain at him and he drops me.
“You fucking bitch!” Keiran yells.
“Fuck you!” I yell back.
The door at the end of the hallway opens with a slam and we both go still. I hear footsteps coming down the hallway towards us, high heels and boots. It’s a group. Irrational hope blooms in me that it might be someone to save me. I hold my breath until they walk into sight.
