Captive Mate (Mismatched Mates Book 2)

by Eliot Grayson

  So when Nate started to bitch at me for taking too long, I didn’t argue. I was clean, by most people’s standards, anyway, and surely Matthew had a shower in whatever room we’d be locked up in together. I could be more thorough later on.

  And if I didn’t get to him soon, I was afraid I was going to pass out. The steam was making me lightheaded and my heart was beating too fast. What the fuck had I done wrong? I couldn’t remember making any mistakes when I assembled the components, and the casting had gone off without a hitch.

  Without a word, Nate handed me a pair of jeans and a t-shirt that had to be his: they were almost the right size, only a little too big in the shoulders. Asshole.

  I dressed, trying to hide how unsteady I was, and then Nate opened the bathroom door.

  Time to face Matthew, and hope I could be manipulative enough to fend off a love-spelled alpha wolf who had every reason to be pissed at me. I gave myself fifty-fifty.

  Chapter 3

  Crazy for Loving You

  The rest of the pack house was exactly what I would have expected from seeing the basement: infested with dust bunnies and poorly maintained. We passed through a large living room on our way up from the basement, where three younger werewolves were lounging on the couch, playing some kind of outdated video game. They all glanced up as Ian and Nate led me through, and they sneered, but they didn’t say anything. I could hear other voices in the house, though, maybe coming from what I thought had to be the kitchen around the corner. I could smell food from that direction. The smell turned my stomach and made me ache with hunger all at once.

  The whole scene made me shudder. So many werewolves in one place…ugh. I wasn’t a pack animal, and the mingled scents and close quarters were just disgusting.

  We went up the stairs, along a gross mint-green hallway that looked like it belonged in a cut-rate mental institution, and right up to a closed door with peeling off-white paint and a rusty doorknob. Outside of it was an armchair holding one of the biggest guys I’d ever seen. Matthew’s guard, I presumed. He grunted at Ian.

  Ian unlocked the door without bothering to knock. Not that a lock would’ve kept Matthew in if he really wanted to get out, but if that huge mountain of a wolf was sitting outside all the time…well, I wasn’t loving my own chances of breaking out of there. Nate opened the door, and Ian shoved me inside.

  “He’s all yours,” Ian said, and slammed the door behind me.

  The lock clicked.

  Matthew stood up from where he’d been sitting on the bed.

  He looked like shit, with dark bags under his eyes and a tension in his body that practically thrummed in the air.

  Although as I watched, that tension started to evaporate. My own nausea was receding, and my headache faded away within moments.

  Well, fuck.

  “Are you all right?” Matthew demanded abruptly.

  I blinked at him, not quite fluttering my eyelashes, but close. “I’m hungry,” I said simply. “And cramped from being chained up.” I threw in a little pout. “It was awful down there.”

  Matthew’s hands twitched, like he was resisting reaching for me. “You look good. More than good,” he said, and then added, more coldly, “I’m sure you’ll survive. But they should have taken better care of — I know you’re just trying to get to me. Fuck!” he shouted, and spun around, his shoulders heaving and his hands rubbing through his hair.

  I edged away, but then my back hit the wall. His own common sense, and probably a lot of evidence his brother would have shown him by now of my active involvement in trying to kill him and his whole pack, was obviously having a knock-down drag-out fight with my spell. The spell made him love me, but it couldn’t prevent that love from turning toxic, becoming so intermingled with a vengeful alpha’s possessive, aggressive rage that it was indistinguishable from hatred. So I’d been expecting either care and concern or anger and lust, but not all of it at once.

  Oh, this was bad. He wouldn’t need to try to break out of the room when he went crazy, which looked like it was happening any second; I’d be conveniently right there, and he could just break me.

  And fuck, but this was ruining my half-formed plans. I’d had an idea of how to manage him if he was stuck in poor-Arik — well, poor-Jonah, since he still had my fake name — mode. I’d milk it for all it was worth. And if he was furious and finally convinced that he hated me but also wanted me, I’d have let him fuck me through the mattress, while appearing to resist, and then used either his remorse or his afterglow against him.

  But now both of those ideas were out the window.

  Speaking of. I eyed the two windows in the room, both of them regular old-fashioned sash windows just large enough for a full-grown man to climb in and out of. I’d have given a lot to be able to do that right about then.

  But no, that could wait until I’d had a chance to lull Matthew a little bit — and then there was the problem of getting the cuffs off. I was short on allies outside of this house, not that I had any here, either.

  And I had to work on that.

  Change of tactics. I needed to reconcile his competing feelings, stat.

  “Look, I cast this spell on you because I was afraid for my life,” I said, a little breathily and a little ruefully. The role of victim didn’t come naturally to me, but I could play one on TV. “I know I’ve done bad things. But — you know what Kimball was like. He threatened me. I didn’t have a choice.”

  “You always have a choice,” Matthew growled, gravelly and low. The wolf was pretty close to the surface, it sounded like. “You always — fuck. You did have a choice. You did.” He sounded like he was trying to convince himself as much as me.

  “Putting the spell on you didn’t hurt or kill you,” I said. “But if I hadn’t — do you have any idea what he was going to do to me?”

  In an instant Matthew was right in my face, his hands planted on the wall on either side of me and his eyes glowing.

  “Four of my pack died the other night, Jonah. Four. Because I was —” His jaw worked. “Because I was thinking about you instead of my family. Because I betrayed them to Kimball. Because I told the council, and all my betas, that Kimball wasn’t a threat and I was negotiating with him privately to form an alliance. No one was on their guard. No one was ready.”

  I tried not to have a conscience; it was an inconvenient burden I couldn’t afford. But that shook me. I hadn’t known the death toll on either side; no one had bothered to tell me. I was sure the Kimballs must have lost a few more than that, but then, they were a bigger pack.

  The thing was, it took a lot to kill werewolves. Fatalities were usually pretty low, even in a pack war. Wounded enemies would be left to live or die while the mobile combatants moved on to another fight, and they often lived. I’d been counting on that when I turned Kimball into a monster. He looked fucking horrifying, but that was more for shock and awe. And because I wanted to. I’d assumed most of his victims would live to tell the tale.

  No wonder Ian wanted me dead. Those were his friends, people he’d known all his life. It was a weird thing for me, to try to put myself in the place of someone with real connections to other people. But for a moment, I almost saw it from the Armitages’ perspective.

  Nope, twinging conscience or not, I couldn’t afford to worry about it.

  “Kimball didn’t want me to put that particular spell on you, Matthew. He wanted me to tie you to him directly. If I had, you’d have been his puppet, and it would’ve worked out even worse for your pack in the —”

  “You could’ve not done what that son of a bitch and his fucking psychopath of a warlock told you to at all!” Matthew roared. “You could’ve said no!”

  “He would have killed me!”

  “No, the fuck he would’ve. A shaman’s too valuable. Don’t give me that fucking bullshit, you —”

  With a wordless snarl of rage, Matthew wrapped one of his huge hands around a fistful of my hair and smashed his mouth down over mine. He outweighed me by a lo
t, and his body pinned me to the wall...I could feel his erection digging into my stomach.

  When I started to struggle, it wasn’t fake. His kiss was brutal, all teeth and force and anger, and I could’ve used it against him later and filed it away to get revenge for instead of fighting it, but it didn’t matter, it was wrong, and it hurt…

  The next second he was halfway across the room again, panting for breath, his claws half extended. I leaned against the wall, my lips tender and bruised and the rest of me aching with some kind of pain I couldn’t define and didn’t understand. And at the same time, my whole body felt stronger, more alive — as if the spell was rewarding me for doing what it wanted.

  “I’m not going to rape you,” he gasped. And again, it sounded more like he was trying to convince himself. Which was the opposite of reassuring. “I’m not.” A little more confidence, that time. And then he added, “I’m sorry.”

  That shocked me into speaking without thinking. “Why?”

  He looked up and stared at me. “Why aren’t I going to rape you?”

  Well, that too, but… “Why are you sorry?”

  “Why am I…sorry.” His eyebrows drew together. “I came really close to — why am I sorry? Aren’t you supposed to apologize for something like that? What kind of fucking question is that?”

  “Nothing’s stopping you.” And nothing was. I didn’t get it. Maybe he had too much self-respect to fuck someone like me, or too much human decency to get off on forcing me, but apologizing? For thirty seconds of taking advantage of me? “I’m a prisoner. And you only kissed me.”

  “I wouldn’t apologize for kissing you if you weren’t a prisoner. You have enough magic to fend me off. Usually,” he said, with a nod to my manacles.

  “So take them off and kiss me again.” I extended my arms, cocking my hips provocatively. It was worth a shot.

  Matthew shuddered, and his claws dug into his wrists as he clenched his fists. “You should lock yourself in the bathroom,” he said, slowly and evenly. “Right now.”

  “A lock won’t stop you —”

  “It’ll slow me down enough to get it together. Fucking now!” he growled, and his eyes were glowing again.

  I dashed into the bathroom, slamming the door shut right as his body thudded against it hard enough to rattle the hardware and knock a few bits of chipped paint off the wall beside it. I pressed myself back against the opposite wall, breathing hard. Silence.

  No, not quite silence. I could hear him breathing too, deep rasping pants that could’ve been used as a movie sound effect for the part where the ingénue was hiding in a closet with the serial killer heavy-breathing right outside.

  Those scenes could go on for what felt like hours, with the tension ratcheting up until everyone, from the director on down to the moviegoer, wanted to scream.

  Nope, this was going to drive me insane. “Matthew?”

  “Yeah?” His voice was thick, like his fangs were showing.

  “Are you going to break the door down?”

  A long pause. “Jury’s still out on that,” he said ruefully, and I laughed a little despite myself. “Look. I hate you. You got my pack members killed. And I’m fucking crazy in love with you. I hate myself. I want to tear the door off its hinges and fuck you through the wall, rip you to pieces and then tuck you in bed and hold you all night while I tell you how beautiful you are.”

  My lower lip hurt. I realized it was because I was biting down on it, hard. How the fuck was this making me…hard. I was getting hard, my cock thickening and pressing against the fly of Nate’s stupid tight jeans.

  Oh, gods, there was something really, really wrong with me.

  There was a thump against the door. His fist? Or maybe his forehead. “You asked, Jonah,” he said in a low almost-growl.

  I swallowed hard. I couldn’t trust him, and I didn’t trust him. But I could at least give him something, one true thing that might make him let his own guard down a little.

  Besides, I really, really hated that fucking name.

  “Arik.”

  “What?”

  I sucked in a deep breath. It shouldn’t have felt as meaningful as it did to tell him my name, but maybe the fairies had something, with their obsession with the importance of it. And I almost never used it. I had more aliases than most guys had pairs of boxer-briefs.

  “My name is Arik. Not Jonah.”

  I hadn’t turned on a light when I went in, and there was only one small window set high up above the shower, so when the door rattled, I could see the light seeping underneath it go dim. Matthew had sat down, then. I let out a silent breath of relief. Sitting was good. Sitting meant breaking down the door wasn’t happening until he stood up again.

  He sighed. “I’m glad to hear it. Jonah’s an awful name. It didn’t suit you at all.”

  Now I was still half-hard, and also kind-of-sort-of starting not to dislike him. Ugh. “You don’t sound surprised.”

  “That you lied?” He snorted a laugh. “No. Not surprised.”

  Well, I wasn’t touching that with a ten-foot pole. He sounded almost normal, and I wanted out of this bathroom eventually. I seriously was fucking hungry — for anything that wasn’t bread. Gods, what I wouldn’t have given for a nice Cornish game hen cooked rare. I doubted this pack would have anything more sophisticated than a box of frozen chicken nuggets. Not that I’d turn that down at this point. Even if they were served still frozen.

  I needed to get out of this bathroom. What was with this pack? Every one of them seemed to want to chivvy me or drag me or lock me into various crappy outdated rooms.

  Unfortunately, it looked like the only way to get out, and get something to eat, and maybe get a few hours of sleep, was to somehow come to a truce with Matthew. Find common ground.

  And wasn’t that fucking ironic. That was what he’d been trying to do when he first came to Kimball’s territory, summoned under pretense of burying the hatchet after years of muted hostilities between the two packs. I’d fucked that up for him — or helped, since with or without me Kimball was never going to simply make peace. And now here I was.

  “You told me to run and hide just now.”

  A pause. “Yeah?”

  “So I’m gathering that you don’t want to —” I couldn’t say it, which was bizarre. I’d never shied away from saying anything, and often the more uncomfortable it made whoever I was talking to, the happier I was. But the word tasted foul and heavy on my tongue.

  He knew what I meant, though. “No, I don’t want to,” he said, very low. “I shouldn’t want to. Fuck. Of course I don’t want to.”

  Still not so reassuring. “Then you need to tell me how to help you not do that. Because I can’t stay in this bathroom forever. And you could get through the door in about two seconds anyway, so it’s not the greatest solution.”

  “It helps when I can’t see you. I can still smell you, and hear you, and I know you’re there — but just removing one of my senses makes it a lot less overwhelming.”

  And wasn’t that interesting. The part of my brain that still had analytical functions filed that tidbit away to mull over later, when I tried again to figure out what had gone wrong with my spell. It might be helpful. It might not. But if I could get a handle on the shape of the spell as it was now, instead of the way I’d envisioned it, I could maybe unravel part of it without undoing the whole thing. Make it a little easier to live with.

  For me. And only for me. Of course. Fuck Matthew. He was nothing to me.

  It didn’t matter that he’d pushed himself in front of me during a tense meeting when Adam, the Kimball shaman who’d overseen my work for the pack, had raised his hand like he meant to hit me. Or that he’d straight-up told Sam Kimball that there wasn’t going to be any alliance without Matthew taking me as his mate — and taking me away from a pack that anyone could see didn’t like me much.

  Of course, at the time Matthew was under the impression that I was Kimball’s long-lost son, kidnapped by another pac
k as a child. Jonathan Hawthorne had been the one to come up with that ridiculous story, a little ironic considering what a shitty parent he’d been. Even by my standards.

  So maybe Matthew had been the only person to try to protect me for years and years. Maybe he’d spoken to me like a person, listened when I spoke, and sometimes even made me laugh. Maybe he’d even laughed when I tried to make the occasional joke, although my sense of humor was dark enough to make most people cringe. That didn’t mean I owed him jack shit. Besides, he’d been enchanted. Not like he’d give a fuck about me either way without my spell.

  I cleared my throat, trying to clear the bitter taste that thought left in my mouth at the same time.

  Focus. Okay. He couldn’t be near me without needing to jump me. We had to be near each other. That meant controlled, planned contact was the only way forward.

  “Do you think you could handle it if we were touching? Because I’m really hungry.” I hadn’t meant for that last part to sound so plaintive. I only wanted to sound like that when I wasn’t sincere, dammit.

  “Touching how?” Matthew said, his voice hoarse. The door rattled slightly, and I tensed. Nothing else happened. He must have just shifted his weight. “Because thinking about touching you isn’t helping.”

  “The spell kind of…simulates a mate bond. A little bit.” At least, that was my best guess. It had been meant to simply make him my bitch, but the part where I’d fucked that up was now well established. “I think if we have normal contact. You know, holding hands. Sitting next to each other. It ought to calm down the part of you that’s trying to claim me — if we act like you already have.”

  There was an ominous silence. “Or I could just bite you and get it over with,” Matthew said in a low growl that raised all the hair on the back of my neck. Oh, fuck, no…mating an unwilling shaman wasn’t as simple as knotting and biting, but in this case it might actually work.

  There was another growl, a real growl this time, vibrating and reverberating. The door creaked. Claws shot through the small gap between the door and the frame, splinters of wood flying, and the hinges groaned with the strain.