Fated

by R. L. Mathewson

  the mating by killing her to make sure that the bloodlines weren’t ruined.

  Since the old bitch had done exactly that to her mother once she’d figured out the truth along with her father’s help, it wasn’t really all that hard to figure out what her fate would have been once they’d managed to get her home. Then again, she could be wrong. Maybe they planned on making her child an orphan like they had done to her and treated her like an unwanted dog, starving her, humiliating her and making her child serve them on her hands and knees until puberty came.

  Once signs that puberty was going to hit, they would simply just kill her child off before he or she could come into its immortality and cause problems for them. Kind of like the way they’d tried to kill her off when they’d realized that she was beginning her turn. If she hadn’t…

  She closed her eyes and willed the pain that normally shot through her heart when she thought about what she’d had to do that day to stop them before they had the opportunity to knock her on her ass and keep her there, trapped in that one moment where they’d forced her to cross the line.

  “Look at me, Kara,” Drew said as she felt his large warm hands gently cup her jaw. “I don’t give a flying fuck about what you are. The only thing that I care about is that you are mine.”

  Deciding not to prolong this, and knowing that he couldn’t mean it. His Pack was too important to him to accept this. Wanting to get this over with, she opened her eyes and met her gaze as she said, “Human. My mother was human before my father and his Pack kidnapped her out of her home one night. They used her in every way possible, made her their slave, and when she was old enough to be of some use to them, they changed her.”

  Drew’s expression had gone cold, but other than that he didn’t say a word or interrupt her. He just waited for her to finish telling him the past that she’d been working her ass off for so long to hide.

  “When my mother reached her immortality, it was decided that they had enough females and my father took it upon himself to kill her. Only when he touched her, their mating mark appeared,” she said, looking down at her hands in her lap as she forced herself to keep talking.

  “He wasn’t happy being mated to an impure, a slave, someone who was only meant to serve them until she’d become useless,” she said, not mentioning the beating that her mother had taken at the hands of her grandmother, because her father wasn’t allowed to strike his mate without feeling pain. She also didn’t mention that they’d locked her mother in chains and threw her down into a cellar, leaving her there without food or water for three weeks straight, forcing her to go through the change three times locked up like that and by the time that she was released she was nothing more than a sobbing mess that was willing to do absolutely anything to make sure that she never ended up in that basement again.

  “My father decided to keep her, because he wanted children. He made sure that word never got out about my mother’s true origins and started forcing her to breed,” she said, making herself to say the words and trying not to think about what her mother had been forced to go through each and every time she’d failed to give birth to a shifter. “For over a hundred years, she provided him with child after child,” she paused to swallow hard, “only they were human.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Drew bit out harshly, already knowing where she was going with this so she didn’t force herself to say the words.

  “When my mother finally managed to have me, my father decided that I would have to do. He didn’t sense any power in me so I was allowed to live, only he couldn’t stomach the idea of a weak impure child being his so he shoved my mother and me back into the group of slaves, only acknowledging my mother when he needed her.”

  “That son of a bitch,” Drew snarled, without a doubt easily realizing exactly what kind of life she had led. “My mother didn’t last very long, she suffered from depression and as a turned human she was already weak,” but not as weak as she had been from carrying all those babies and then being forced to watch them be killed in front of her eyes.

  “When I was about to hit my immortality, my father had decided that I was too much of a problem to keep around so he sent for me,” she said, struggling to take her next breath.

  “What did he do to you, Kara?” Drew demanded.

  When she didn’t answer, because she couldn’t seem to make the words come out of her mouth, he grabbed her by her arms and squeezed just enough to get her attention as he gave her a little shake, “What the fuck did he do to you, Kara?”

  “He didn’t do anything,” she said, breathing a little too hard as she forced herself to meet his gaze head on and admitted, “I killed him before he got a chance to have my throat slit.”

  *-*-*-*

  He’d never wanted to kill anyone more in his life than he did right now. He wanted to howl at the moon, tear apart everything in his path, and cause as much pain as he was going through right now.

  Never in a million years would he of thought that he could hate someone that he’d never met so fucking much, or even be capable of feeling this much pain before. If he had known the extent of what they’d put her through, he would have taken his time killing the fucking ice bitch instead of tearing through her, giving her the easy way out.

  She’d deserved more, so much more for what she’d done to Kara and her mother and he’d let her get off easy. He would never forgive himself for that. If he had known what that angry little filthy girl standing in his father’s foyer had gone through, he would have gone after her fucking Pack that day, not giving a rat’s ass that he was still too young to take on a whole Pack by himself.

  At least this explained why his father had allowed her to stay in Boston, but refused to let her have anything to do with his Pack. He’d wanted to keep the Pack pure. His piece of shit father hadn’t wanted to take the chance of Kara being mated to someone in his Pack and dirtying their lines with human blood.

  That piece of shit, Drew thought as he sat there, staring into the darkness as he kept watch over his mate. He would give anything to get his hands on his father again. That asshole had the chance to right a wrong and protect an innocent child, but instead he’d treated her like garbage, always making sure that she knew that she didn’t belong and Drew had fucking followed in his tracks like a fucking idiot.

  He’d never known the reason why she hadn’t been allowed to be part of their Pack and to be honest, he hadn’t really cared, because she’d always managed to piss him off. First as a little girl who simply lived to glare at him whenever he spotted her walking down the street or when she’d reluctantly joined them on Pack land to shift. The little brat had annoyed the hell out of him to the point that he told himself that he didn’t give a flying fuck if she was okay or being taken care of.

  She hadn’t been.

  Since she wasn’t allowed to join the Pack that meant that she had lived the rest of her childhood without Pack protection. She’d been living off the streets, and not very well, until one day a truancy officer found her and threw her in an orphanage. They hadn’t treated her very well, hadn’t made sure that she’d had enough to eat, clothes good enough to keep her warm or making sure that the other children didn’t pick fights with her, which they had every fucking day.

  By the second time that he saw her walking down the street, wearing those fucking rags and sporting another goddamn black eye, he’d finally had enough. He’d gone behind his father’s back, paid to have her removed to an all girls’ school that would take care of her and offered her access to the woods. Most importantly, she wasn’t allowed to wander the streets of Boston alone at night and that’s all that had really mattered to him.

  At the time he’d told himself that he’d only done it so that the little brat wouldn’t give them away, but it soon became obvious to him that she had some special hold over him. Something about her had intrigued him, always had and as she grew older, came into her immortality it only got worse.

  She was off limits, a pain in the ass and he
could never seem to stop himself from keeping tabs on her. He’d always made sure that he knew where she was working, living and if she was being treated right. Those times that he’d found out that she’d been groped, insulted and fired for not letting her boss bend her over his desk and fuck her, well, those times he’d made special visits to the assholes, making sure that they didn’t do anything fucking stupid like give her a bad reference.

  He’d also beaten the shit out of each and every one of them, making sure to send them to the hospital simply because they’d fucked around with a guest in his territory. At least, that’s what he’d always told himself, but now that they were mated and he finally realized just how much he loved her, he couldn’t help but wonder if there had been something more to it that made him go out of his way to protect her even when the annoying little brat was busy making his life a living hell.

  Chapter 38

  “The baby could turn out to be human,” she said into the dark hotel room as Drew absently rubbed his hand over her “flattish” stomach, clearly pleased with himself for getting her pregnant so quickly.

  Sometimes it took several mating heats for a mated pair to conceive and here they were, barely into the first mating heat, pregnant. It must have something to do with her human side, she realized as she waited for the decree that so many Alpha’s would be setting down right now.

  It would be the same one that had her pushing him away and making a run for it, because human or not, she refused to let anyone hurt her baby. The majority of shifters refused to keep a human baby, because it was seen as a weakness. The child could be changed later in life, but they didn’t always survive the turn, which was why most shifters dreaded the idea of being mated to a human or an impure.

  In a matter of weeks the scent of the baby would let them know their child’s fate and if it was human, Drew would be within his rights to have the pregnancy terminated or if he was cruel like her father had been, he’d wait until the child was born to confirm that the child was human before he had it killed.

  That’s what her father had done to all 99 of the babies born before her.

  A day didn’t go by that she didn’t mourn the brothers and sisters that she’d lost, because of that sick bastard. She’d always sworn that if she was lucky enough to find her mate and have a baby that she would love it and protect it, no matter what it was. If Drew didn’t want it, then she would take the baby away and raise it by herself among humans. It would kill her to leave Drew, she realized, stunned at the realization, but the baby-

  “I’m calling dibs on naming her,” he said, punctuating his words with a kiss to her bare shoulder.

  She waited for him to add something, to tell her that they’d only be keeping it if it was a shifter, but he simply continued to press light kisses against her shoulder while he gently rubbed circles on her stomach.

  “Why do you think it’s going to be a girl?” she found herself asking, still trying to get over her shock that he hadn’t said anything about the possibility of the baby being human.

  “Because,” he said, kissing her shoulder, “I expect our first child to drive me crazy just like her mother and what better way to do that than to have a bossy little girl with pigtails glaring at me from across the breakfast table every morning?” he asked with a chuckle that had her lips twitching with amusement, because she could see that actually happening.

  “You’d love every minute of it,” she said confidently, because let’s be honest here, she was freaking amazing and any child of hers would be as well.

  “Yes, I would,” he said, kissing the back of her nape as the hand gently caressing her stomach made its way north and took her large breast into his hand, giving it an appreciative squeeze that had her licking her lips.

  “Are you sore?” he asked even as he pressed that large erection that she was beginning to develop an addiction to, against her bottom.

  “A little,” she reluctantly admitted, because he was turning her on with all his kisses and the gentle grinding against her bottom, but when a shifter bled, announcing a pregnancy it hurt a bit.

  The earlier in the mating heat that a shifter became pregnant, the more painful it was, because her body had to basically shut down the heating process quickly to protect the baby. That’s where the bleeding came from, signaling tissue growth around the womb so that no one and nothing could harm the child, especially during a shift. The only thing that could harm the child was an abortion while the mother was in human form.

  That didn’t mean that the baby was always protected. A lot of shifters, especially during the first few months of pregnancy lost the baby, because their bodies weren’t used to the hormones, which could do a lot of damage to their bodies. If they were carrying a human child, they were in even more danger of losing the baby.

  More than ninety percent of first pregnancies ended in tears, which was why most shifters didn’t make a big deal about the first pregnancy. It was treated as a stage rehearsal for future pregnancies. The female’s body would carry the child as long as it could and while it did that, it absorbed as many of the pregnancy hormones from the frail baby as it could so that the body could be fully prepared to protect the next child. If the next child didn’t survive, then it would only make her body even stronger for the next child after that.

  It took a lot to survive in their world so losing a child for a shifter, or even losing a dozen was not a big deal. To her mother who had been born human, she’d felt every single one of those losses. Kara wasn’t human like her mother, but she knew that if she lost this child that she would never survive the pain.

  She wanted this baby.

  She didn’t care if it was human or a shifter. She wanted it and she would do everything in her power to keep it safe and if that meant going into hiding one more time than-

  “Over. My. Fucking. Dead. Body,” Drew whispered harshly as though he could read her mind, and let’s just be honest here, there really wasn’t much that Drew couldn’t figure out anymore when it came to her thanks to their mating or the fact that out of everyone in this world, he probably knew her better than anyone, which if you really thought about it, was kind of depressing.