Page 16 of Mate

He looked at me, his body looking tired.

I looked at him wearily.

“You’re going to ask me to call Samael, aren’t you?” he accused distastefully.

“Fuck no,” I said, decisively, although it certainly had gone through my mind. Samael was a demon—an old school one—who had a tribe of misfits at his disposal, including a witch. They actually weren’t bad to have at house parties, and we saw them often enough, but they weren’tnormal. Samael’s group seemed to scream ‘otherworldly’ through a megaphone. Kaci was still a human. She had no idea that we were a tribe of Lycans, and so we were just going to let her keep thinking that we were run-of-the-mill men who had singled her out for mysterious reasons.

“They might be able to answer some questions,” Ry admitted, rubbing at his face.

“They would create a fuck ton more of them for Kaci, I guarantee it. His witch alone wouldn’t knownormalif it bit her in her Gen-Zass.”

Ry shrugged, unable to argue with that logic. “Okay, so we figure this out delicately. Keep it in-house.” We settled ourselves in speculative silence where we both tried to think. He pulled a toothpick out of his pocket and picked his teeth thoughtfully. “Are you able to think about anything other than fucking?”

“Nope. I keep thinking I do, but then whenever I try to think about the Kaci problem, my dick gets in the way. It was easier before I spent so much time in the same room,” I admitted.

Ry gave me a threatening stare.

I shrugged. “What?”

“How do you thinkIfucking feel?” he demanded, gesturing to himself and seemingly trying to illustrate how he just came through a few hours of horrible sex-hell.

“Probably pretty frustrated,” I admitted, then pushed myself out of my chair and grabbed my suit coat. “Okay, so you go find someone to fuck. Start hitting your contacts list or something. I’ll take a turn with the brat and make sure she’s set up in the mansion. I’ll make some calls to some other packs, see if I can scratch the surface a little bit.”

An hour later I was sitting outside on the hood of my car, listening to Taylor Swift blare from one of the upstairs windows of the mansion where I was sure Kaci was, and making calls to the closer packs around us.

The more calls I made, the more I realized that it was common knowledge that a rogue pack had an eye on my turf. That often happened with packs; rogues always wanted to steal rather than build, but this was bad timing. It was dangerous, especially because Kaci was a liability during a turf war, and at the moment I couldn’t send her anywhere. I was starting to call older alphas to see if they had heard of any remedies.

Their responses weren’t exactly what I wanted. They thought I was insane for forsaking my mate as well as selfish and a few other choice words that most people had felt about my whole pack since I’d started it twelve years before. They thought I was trying to “have my cake and eat it too” by trying to live among the humans in a successful, real-world role. We were surrounded constantly by intelligent people, beautiful women, and were respected in the community. We got our asses kissed by hundreds of students each day, and we thought we were on top of the world.

About the time lightening bugs were beginning to swarm up from the long grass in front of the mansion, I took a deep breath. When I first got here, Kaci’s smell had been evident.

Now, it wasn’t so much. It wasn’t strong.

I looked slowly up towards her room and got up from my seat, eventually moving in that direction. Was every encounter with her dangerous? Yes. As far as Lycans went, I had the self-restraint of a saint. But Lycans weren’t well known for their restraint in the first place. I didn’t want to put it to the test.

But I had to make sure now that she was up in her room. Ry had assured me she would be; she had no car here, and we were ten miles from anything.

Yet when I went to her room and knocked on her door, there was no answer. It was locked, and music played, but there was no movement. She had better fucking answer when I knock, I decided, flooding with irritation within a moment.

So I busted the door in. Oh, I thought about it for a moment, thought about giving her time, walking away, coming back, but that wouldn’t make me feel any better.

There was no Kaci inside. In a way, I was impressed. Apparently, she wasn’t stupid; she had gotten wind of the fact that she was in a not-normal situation, and she wanted out of it. On the other hand, she was out of the house now, going wherever the fuck she wanted, at night. There was a rogue pack in Louisiana, and if she got to a car, she could literally hurt me from distance alone.

“No problem,” I told myself. It was the sort of pep-talk I’d sometimes give myself in front of the mirror when I had a very large PR event I had to do. “This is fine. I’m just going to get her. I’m just going to get her, bring her back, and…” I was grinding my teeth and clenching my fists now. MyPresident of Newsome Universityfaçade felt like it had been lit on fire.“Fuck!”

I was turning into my wolf now, which wasn’t ideal, but I didn’t give a shit. My mate was out there, and I was going to make her sorely regret running away.

Because my wolf really loved tofetch.

CHAPTER 7

Kaci

This shit was bananas.

Like crazy bat-shit bananas.

Like the Great Big Guy Upstairs had decided it was Fuck With Kaci Day, and the whole world had decided to take on the challenge and make it their greatest life’s achievement kind of bananas.

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