“He’s still your brother,” I replied. That was Ian’s weak spot, I knew it. I had to lean on it, hard. “Do you do whatever the pack council says? Are you just their puppet? Even if they want you to betray your own family?”
“Fuck you,” Ian said, his eyes narrowing. “Don’t try to manipulate me. Like you give a shit about Matt. You’re the one refusing to remove your spell. This is your fault, not mine.”
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. He had half a brain after all.
Nate frowned down at Matthew, biting his lip, deep in thought. Double fuck. Maybe Ian could squeeze an idea out once in a while, but Nate was really the brains of the operation, even if he clearly thought with his little head as much as his big one — see Exhibit A, his mate.
“It may not be all that dramatic, but being cut off from your magic is worse than being beaten, for a warlock,” Nate said slowly. “Probably for a shaman, too? I mean, the only real difference is he’s a werewolf. And in chains like that, he can’t shift, either, which has to suck. Right?” Ian nodded, and for the first time since my capture, a frisson of real fear skittered down my back. “Okay, so no killing, and no torture. We can just leave him locked up here. Toss a loaf of bread and some water down the stairs every day, give him a bucket, someone can come down and empty it every morning. We won’t actually be hurting him. Unless you count having to stare at that abomination of a piece of furniture twenty-four seven.”
Triple, triple fuck. My chains rattled as my hands started to tremor. In my chest, my heart began a sick double-pound. How the fuck did he know? He couldn’t know. He couldn’t, because no one knew some of the things that’d happened to me when I didn’t have my magic to defend myself. Kimball and his shaman hadn’t known where I’d come from, not exactly, and whatever they’d guessed or discovered had died with them.
Ian smiled — the smile of a predator, which of course he was. Not the smartest predator, but he had instincts, and he’d probably already picked up on the dilation of my pupils. “Okay, works for me. He can go nuts down here all alone until he cracks. Maybe Matt’ll forget about him after a few months.”
“I won’t crack,” I said, and then swallowed hard, basically giving myself the lie. Could they see the sweat breaking out on my forehead in the low light? “Easy peasy. I’d like some time alone, after all these fun little chats.” Fuck. I was an idiot.
No, focus. Focus. I couldn’t do this. I had to make them think it was a bad idea. Torture, maybe they’d reconsider torture.
“He wasn’t bluffing before,” Nate said before I could try another argument. “But now he is. He’ll definitely crack if we leave him down here. And I believe him that Matthew will die if we kill him. So I’d call locking him in the basement a win-win.”
Ian nodded and strode across the room, scooping up Matthew and heaving him over his shoulders with the resigned air of someone who’d done this before. He stayed as far from me as he could, his lip curled with disgust. I wanted to sneer back at him, but I had enough to do trying not to hyperventilate.
With Matthew slung across his back, Ian grunted himself to his feet and headed for the stairs. Nate followed, turning his back on me without even so much as another glance, let alone a word.
Gods, no. They couldn’t just leave me here like this.
“I could kill myself down here and kill him with me,” I yelled after them, my voice rising to an embarrassingly high pitch. “This is a bad fucking idea. You’ll regret it!”
“I doubt that,” Nate called over his shoulder. “And just so you know, I’ll be the one throwing the water bottles down the stairs. So remember to duck.”
Two sets of footsteps echoed up the stairs, and then the door at the top slammed shut. They’d left the light on, thank every god there was, but I was alone, and it was silent. And I knew it was going to be like that indefinitely.
I closed my eyes and sought my center again. I wasn’t going to crack. Fuck that. I wasn’t going to crack.
Chapter 2
Let Me Out
Cold. Black. The rattle of chains when I shift my position, never relieving the ache in my muscles and bones. I can’t stretch my arms out all the way, and my elbows are starting to seize up. Alone, and I can’t scream. My throat’s too dry.
How long? Can’t remember. Can hardly remember the feel of air, or sunlight, what the stars look like. Trying to count imaginary stars only lasts so long. So cold, so cold. My throat’s so dry I can’t swallow.
My eyes popped open. The contrast between the pitch-blackness of my nightmare and the gloomy blur of the basement made me wince, and I squeezed my eyes shut and sat gasping against the couch, drenched in sweat. Inside myself, I flailed, trying to reach my magic, but it was gone, still gone, out of reach, and I felt so empty and hollow…
Something creaked — the door at the top of the stairs. I’d been straining my ears for — how long? I didn’t know. Searching for any sound at all, and sometimes catching distant voices or the muffled thud of footsteps upstairs. Twice a day the door had opened. In the mornings — maybe, because if I were them I’d be doing it at different times and at irregular intervals, just to fuck with me — someone, maybe Nate, lobbed a large plastic bottle of water and a chunk of bread down the stairs. The first time probably wasn’t Nate, because the asshole’s aim sucked.
In the evenings, one of the goons came lumbering down the stairs and carried the bucket I used for waste into the basement’s attached bathroom to empty it.
If they thought making me use a bucket while a working toilet was only ten feet away was effective torture, they were right. I hated being dirty. Hated it, hated it, hated it, and when I could, I bathed several times a day.
On the fourth day, probably, the bread had been so dusty and dry and my stomach so upset I’d forced it down and then thrown it up again.
The smell was still festering a day later. Maybe a day. Too long, anyway. No one had come yet that morning.
Just as well, because I didn’t think I could keep any more bread down, or even the water. My stomach churned, and my head was swimming. All my limbs felt loose and weak.
I didn’t deserve this. Yes, I’d helped a trio of psychopaths try to kill the Armitages. I’d plotted with Jonathan Hawthorne, possibly the most terrifyingly emotionless bastard I’d ever met, so that he could enslave his own son. (Hawthorne would’ve deserved this.) I’d turned another one of my co-conspirators into a mindless half-undead monster and driven him into battle, where he’d injured I didn’t know how many of the Armitages’ pack and allies.
So objectively, maybe I did deserve this — from a certain point of view, that being that I’d had a real choice in my actions, rather than simply trying to survive. And also objectively, what they were doing to me wasn’t so bad. But I hated to be dirty, and I hated being cut off from my magic, and I needed to wash my hair before I lost my ever-loving shit. And I felt so sick. Why did I feel so sick? I hated being so weak.
How long were they going to leave me down here? They were supposed to be the good guys, right? The heroes. Where the fuck did they get off using tactics I might have used against someone else? The fucking nerve.
The creak at the top of the stairs turned into the door opening all the way, and then footsteps thumped their way down.
“Fuck, what’s that smell?” Nate’s voice.
“What do you think?” Ian replied. “He’s using a bucket. I told you I could handle this alone.”
“I’ll manage,” Nate grumbled. He’d manage? He’d probably had a shower that morning.
Nate and Ian appeared at the bottom of the stairs and stood shoulder to shoulder, examining me. Like they’d get any joy out of that.
“Where’s my bread and water? Run out of budget for grocery shopping?” The Armitages were notorious for being one of the brokest-ass werewolf packs in the west. A lot of the pack worked low-paid blue-collar jobs — or had, before the paper mill in the area shut down. Now they were unemployed and living off of odd jobs as handymen or fur
niture movers, and I was pretty sure they owned a junkyard.
An unprofitable junkyard, even as junkyards went.
I expected a sneer, or a mocking retort, but it didn’t come. Ian was pale and exhausted-looking, and he frowned at me silently.
“He looks like shit too,” Nate said. “He’s white as a ghost. And he’s sweating.” Come to think of it, he wasn’t looking his best either.
And…too? Little alarm bells were starting to go off.
Ian’s frown deepened. “What kind of spell did you put on my brother?” he demanded at last.
“As I told you in our first charming conversation the day after your fluke of a victory, I don’t share my proprietary techniques.”
I slumped back against the end of the couch. That long of a sentence had really taken it out of me, not to mention the effort of sounding like I wasn’t about to start begging for a bottle of Tums. Fuck, there was really something wrong with me.
And given Ian’s question, I was starting to suspect what it was.
“No, not gonna fly,” Ian said grimly. “Not this time. Something’s wrong with Matt. He’s sick. Like you are, it looks like. So you’re going to tell me what you did, and you’re going to do it now, or I will start torturing you. For real. No fucking bread-and-water bullshit.”
“He’ll die if you kill —”
“I didn’t say one fucking word about killing you.” His blue eyes were cold, icy cold, and they made me shiver. I was starting to get the idea that being a generally decent person wasn’t enough to make him weak.
He’d have a strong enough stomach for whatever he needed to do to help his brother, and at this point — I didn’t. I wouldn’t hold out for long. My head whirled with sickness and frustration and anxiety. Keeping the spell in place was my only leverage. But if it was the spell I’d cast that was affecting me and Matthew…it shouldn’t have, that was the thing. It damn well shouldn’t have. I’d built in the failsafe that would kill Matthew if I died very much on purpose, and I’d been damn proud of it, too. I still was.
Only…the only way to do that had been to modify the love spell, deepening its usually more superficial effects. It didn’t just cause lust. That wouldn’t have been enough to anchor the I-die-you-die that I needed in there. It mimicked a mate bond — specifically a werewolf mate bond — to make it more effective on Matthew.
And mates…well, they didn’t do well when they were separated. Especially when I’d enhanced that effect too, in order to make Matthew crave my presence and keep coming back to the Kimball territory.
Except that it wasn’t supposed to make him sick.
And it wasn’t supposed to do anything at all to me.
But…I didn’t have access to my magic, which had been anchoring the spell, using me as the focal point because that was how mate bonds worked. And now the spell had been running amok for days, without any anchor at all.
Fuck.
Frantically, I ran through my options, which ranged from fuck-that to oh-hell-no on the desirability scale. I could remove the love spell. That would leave Ian free to rip me apart, although he’d need to take me out of the spelled chains for me to do the spellwork, which might give me an opportunity…no, surely he’d have Nate and possibly that other freakazoid mage right there breathing down my neck. Not to mention, he’d have something sharp directly on my neck. I’d die that way, almost certainly.
I could do nothing. Then, Matthew and I would both get sicker, and probably die. Not an option.
That left me with confessing my fuck-up — though I’d try to phrase it a little better than that, to preserve my pride if nothing else — and admitting that actually, it looked like Matthew and I would need to be in closer proximity for the near future.
Much closer proximity.
Fuck.
“Well?” Ian prompted me. “Cat got your tongue?”
I stared at him, my heart pounding. Did he know? How the fuck would he know? I put up a good werewolf front. I’d gotten a lot of practice. And even if Nate had examined my magic or the spell, he wouldn’t be able to tell. Shifter magical signatures looked very, very alike to a non-shifter warlock like Nate.
But Ian didn’t know, obviously. He was just using an expression. I took a deep breath and put my game face on, as best I could given it was grimy and dripping with sweat and probably still streaked with dried vomit.
Best possible spin. I could do this.
I smirked at Ian. “Looks like you’ll need to not only keep me alive, but get me out of this basement and out of these chains. Because if Matthew’s sick, that means the spell I put on him is doing its job.”
Ian’s face went dangerously red, but Nate spoke up first, his brows furrowed. “Doing its job? I don’t believe you. This was an accident, wasn’t it?”
Oh, I was going to kill him the moment I had the chance. “You would think so,” I said snidely. “But not all of us are incomp—”
“Don’t you fucking dare finish that sentence,” Ian snarled, taking a menacing step toward me. “Tell me how to fix my brother, or the claws are coming out!”
“And you obviously did screw up,” Nate put in, “or you wouldn’t look like you’re coming down with the magical I-fucked-up-my-spell stomach flu, would you? Maybe it was meant to do this to Matthew, but not to you. You. Fucked. Up. So tell us what needs to happen to get that spell off.”
My anger rose past the point of restraint, boiling in my chest like magma. “The spell’s not coming off! No fucking way. I’m a dead man if I remove it. Let me out of this basement!” I yanked my arms, the chains suddenly too fucking much, too heavy — I couldn’t take it. They shook and rattled and banged against the floor. “Let me out! He has to be near me, or he’ll get sicker. He has to be near me, so let me out!”
“No, you’re going to take off this fucking spell —”
“He’s not going to,” Nate snapped. “It was worth a try, but if he ends it, he obviously thinks we’re going to kill him. If he doesn’t end it, he’ll die unless we do what he wants — but so will Matthew. Fuck this, Ian. Matthew got us into this crap, and he can deal with spending however long until we figure out how to break this spell ourselves stuck in a room with a smelly, bitchy, murderous shaman who can’t cast a love spell correctly.” He smirked at me, and I flipped him the finger. “Fuck them both. We can leave the manacles on so he can’t do any more super fun magic tricks. Matthew can handle him. Then we won’t need to deal with this bullshit anymore on top of everything else.”
No, I needed the manacles off, I needed them off… But Ian was nodding, and even smiling a little, his eyes gleaming. “You know, that actually works for me. I love you,” he added, with a sappy look in Nate’s direction that nearly had me throwing up every last drop of bile in my empty stomach.
Once I got over my disgust, what Nate had said really sank in, and…that would work. It would only be a matter of time before I got Matthew to take the manacles off and let me go — because he was in love with me, and leaving us alone together was fucking stupid.
“By the way, you’ll both be under guard,” Ian said. “No using my dumbass brother’s fake feelings to escape. He’s just going to get to be the one to deal with feeding you and listening to you whine.”
I opened my mouth, and then snapped it shut again. My head was starting to ache, and my legs had gone mostly numb. I was going to get out of the basement, and out of my chains. I’d presumably get the opportunity for a shower and clean clothes — and once I was closer to Matthew, I wouldn’t be slowly dying, either, which would be a good first step.
No, I could bide my time.
I nodded, and pretended I wasn’t plotting to kill all of them at the first opportunity.
***
Taking a shower with manacles on, under Nate’s watchful eyes, and in a shower stall that hadn’t seen a bottle of bleach since Jimmy Carter was president — well, it wasn’t my first choice, but the second the hot water hit me I didn’t give a fuck. The whole pack could’
ve been staring at me. Carter himself could have been staring at me. Naked. Fuck, it felt so good.
I moaned, bit my lip, and tipped my head back to let the water run down over my face and neck.
Nate made a choking sound, and I smiled. Yeah, I was hot. And Nate knew it, too, or he wouldn’t have told Ian to wait outside.
I turned around and ran my hands down over my body, staring right at him. I was probably too thin by most guys’ standards — definitely Nate’s, judging by Ian. But hot was hot. I reached up and started to wash out my long blond hair, like that shampoo commercial that verged on soft-core porn. Only with more tattoos, and a lot more cock.
Another moan was just for fun. Nate blushed, but he kept his attention on me.
“You’re not my type,” he said through gritted teeth.
“I know.” I winked at him. “You like them big and dumb, and I’m neither. But you can’t blame me for trying to distract you.”
Sometimes, I’d found, telling people straight-up what you were doing to piss them off was more annoying than just doing it, and it worked this time, too. Nate looked like he was about to blow a gasket.
“You’re not distracting me. I’m still watching you.”
“Yeah, and so you’re distracted either way. Win-win.” Not that distracting him did much for me — I wasn’t going to be escaping anytime soon. But keeping my captors off-balance was one of my favorite hobbies. Some guys took up knitting; I antagonized my guards. It was a lifestyle.
I pointedly turned my back before I started rubbing soap lather on my ass. I could almost hear his teeth grinding.
It made me smile, but I wasn’t going to be able to enjoy pushing his buttons for long. It was getting more and more obvious that whatever I’d done to fuck up my spell was a serious fuck-up. My knees were shaking, and I had to take deep breaths to keep the nausea under control.
Captive Mate (Mismatched Mates Book 2) Page 2
