Captive Mate - Eliot Grayson Page 0,19

them, and the threats come later! It’s been five fucking minutes!”

“That’s because it’s not a negotiation.”

I stared up at him, afraid to struggle in case it set him off. His eyes were getting a little wild again, like having me trapped under him was bringing out the worst of his instincts.

“I don’t know very much,” I hedged.

“We’re skipping the part where you dance around the questions, remember?” he snarled. “Now fucking talk.”

Talk. Something I avoided at all costs, most of the time. Talking only got me in trouble. I lied, and I prevaricated, and I seduced, but actual talking? Honest answers? Ugh. Anything I said, he’d use against me. And the parts I could actually spin to make me look good? I wasn’t sure I could force the words out of my mouth, relive all of it in the telling.

“I don’t know where Hawthorne was while he was supposed to be dead,” I said, because that at least was both true and not all that important to me. The asshole had faked his own death two years before, disappeared, and only returned shortly before I came on the scene. And I hadn’t known him before then. “He mentioned Seattle. I think he was in Washington part of the time. But that’s all I know.”

“Not all that helpful,” Matthew said. “And also not the most pressing issue. How did you end up working for Kimball?”

“Working with Kimball,” I corrected him, piqued at the implication that I was some kind of pawn, and then realized my mistake when he frowned down at me. He still hadn’t let go of my wrist, and his fingers tightened.

“So he wasn’t coercing you after all.” Matthew wasn’t even angry. He simply sounded…resigned. Disappointed, but unsurprised. Like he’d known all along that I was a piece of shit and I’d just confirmed it for him.

Fuck, fuck, shit. “It was the best option I had at the time,” I said, my throat tight. “It wouldn’t have worked out well for me if I’d tried to walk away.”

Not that I had tried to walk away. What the fuck did I care about the Armitage pack, or the Kimball pack, or any pack? Werewolf politics were nothing but a means to an end for me, and the end was survival and coming out on top of whatever war was brewing. The werewolves themselves were nothing to me. I didn’t do loyalties.

“Yeah, because power-hungry murderous assholes don’t like being stabbed in the back by other power-hungry murderous assholes. Big fucking surprise.”

“I’m not power-hungry.” And I wasn’t, unless you counted my own magic — I was always looking for ways to make that more potent. But that was a matter of pride and principle, not a means to getting more control over other people, or money, or whatever. My power was mine. It was the only thing no one could take from me. Even the manacles only suppressed it and prevented me from using it. It was a part of me, and would be as long as I lived. “I didn’t care what their goals were. It didn’t matter. I needed somewhere to go. The Kimball pack was — somewhere.”

That was sort of true. An alpha pack leader from eastern Nevada had gotten it in his head that I belonged to him, and he wasn’t taking no for an answer. He’d knotted me and bitten me, with an allied pack’s shaman keeping watch and keeping me under control. The mating hadn’t taken, but I’d pretended it had long enough to get the fuck out and make a run for it.

I’d been lying low in southern Oregon when the Kimball shaman had come up to me in the shadows outside the back door of a biker bar where I’d been trolling for a place to sleep for the night and made me an offer. I’d seen a couple of guys who smelled like werewolves and looked a little familiar staring at me from across the street earlier in the day, and I was getting a bad feeling about sticking around. So I’d headed south across the California border with Adam, getting to the Kimball pack lands early the next morning.

Matthew’s jaw had clenched so hard I could hear the faintest grinding coming from his teeth. “Somewhere to go from where?” he gritted out. “You know what I need. Information about what you were doing. What they were doing. How’d you hook up with their shaman? Who else was involved? Who’s going to be