Captive Mate - Eliot Grayson Page 0,12

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.

I scrambled to my feet and pressed myself to the wall.

It might actually work, and Matthew was coming through the door.

I’d been bitten before, more than once, by alphas trying to get control of my power for their own purposes. But shamans, being both shifters and magic-users, had a lot more control over the formation of a mate bond than the usual submissive mate would. When I’d been bitten with my magic available to me, I’d prevented the bond from taking, tearing it apart from the inside before it could get its hold on me. On the one occasion when I’d been bound like I was now, it had taken — but I’d broken it with the brute force of my magic once the bastard thought he had me, and it was safe to let me loose.

Only that one scar remained, since the bond had been completed before I’d gotten rid of it. I hated the sight of it, and though my shifter healing had long since made it inert, I could still feel it, like a phantom limb, reminding me of the violation I’d felt when the wound was made.

Of course, the shifters who’d tried to mate me were dead — with one exception. I’d seen to that, even when it took me a while to make it happen. Remembering that helped most of the time.

But it didn’t help right now. A thud against the door echoed through the bathroom, and the door cracked down the middle. I jumped, my heart pounding. If my spell had only gone one way, as intended, no worries. But now? With me affected too? I might not be able to break the bond once I got out of my manacles.

Matthew might not let me out of the manacles and give me the chance.

Or I might be so overwhelmed by the spell, and the bond, that I wouldn’t even want to try.

That terrified me most of all. To have my will taken away from me? Overridden by magical urges I couldn’t control? Just like I’d done to him…

Fuck, no, fuck. I was not going to feel bad about it. About anything.

Especially not when his claws flexed and the door peeled away from the frame like it was made out of paper, the broken lock and the doorknob clattering to the floor.

Chapter 4

Near But Not So Dear

Matthew shoved the remains of the door out of his way and stood framed in the gap, his shoulders filling it from side