Captive Mate - Eliot Grayson Page 0,51

go into it, but the shit Taft’s saying about what he wants to do to the guy —” Another pause. “Fine. Fuck. Call me back.”

Colin poked at his phone like he wished it was an old-fashioned landline he could slam back down into its cradle, cursed, and stuck the phone in his pocket.

My mind whirred through what Colin had said, trying to process it all at once. The hardest part for me to wrap my brain around was that the Kimballs, and Parker, still thought I was on Armitage territory.

The Armitages knew I was gone, obviously. Or at the very least, Matthew did.

Had Matthew somehow hidden my escape from the rest of his pack? No. That was absurd.

So the pack knew, but they were hiding it from the Kimballs. But why? Parker might want revenge for Tyler, but…I’d never gotten to do that exam on Tyler I’d wanted to perform. Whatever was on his claws had been deadly to Matthew, and it had to have been seeping into his bloodstream too. Parker would’ve known that; if he’d planted that booby-trap on Tyler, Parker probably wasn’t that broken up about his death. He must’ve finally gotten paranoid about Tyler and decided he was expendable.

If Parker didn’t want revenge, then he’d have no reason to go after the Armitage pack if I wasn’t there. Of course, they didn’t know Parker, and might not follow that chain of logic. They might think pretending to still have me gave them leverage, rather than simply making them a target.

In a few hours Matthew would be fighting for his life, fighting Parker, because Parker wanted me. I shivered, my fur ruffling, and my claws flexed involuntarily.

Matthew wouldn’t be fighting Parker for me. I’d ended any chance of that when I took the spell off of him. He’d be fighting Parker because of me, a subtle but significant difference. Why did that leave me so hollow? Defended not because I was worth defending, but because Matthew was embroiled in a pack war that he had no way out of other than through…I owed Matthew nothing. Nothing at all. Just as little as he owed me.

I didn’t care if the Kimballs killed him and Ian and Nate and all of them, as long as I killed Parker.

I could picture it as clearly as if it was a memory and not my imagination: picking my way through the battlefield, stepping around bloodied, torn-up bodies until I found Matthew’s. His blue eyes glassy, staring at nothing, his throat a bloody pulp, one arm thrown out at his side with the fingers curled as if waiting for someone to take his hand, just like when he’d slept beside me after taking me to bed…

Fuck. My stomach was in painful, twisting knots, and I couldn’t attribute it to the fast-food hamburger I’d scarfed down earlier in the evening.

The fact was, I couldn’t walk away, not knowing what was going to happen.

And I couldn’t kill Parker and escape, either, because the Kimballs wouldn’t stop. They didn’t give a fuck about me one way or the other. They were going to take this fight back to the Armitages no matter what; as worked up as they were, there was no stopping them now.

I certainly couldn’t stop them, not on my own. All I could do was warn Matthew, hope he believed me, and maybe sabotage the Kimballs a little bit from behind the lines.

And then kill Parker. That was non-negotiable.

Fuck. I had to take a chance; I had to talk to Colin. He might be loyal enough to his father not to betray him, but he sure as fuck wasn’t loyal to Parker. And it didn’t sound like he believed stopping this fight would be betraying his father, either, necessarily. If I could convince him I wanted to help the Kimballs stay out of Parker’s bullshit and avoid a fight with the Armitages that would just result in more pointless deaths, Colin would be on my side.

But my window for that was closing, because Colin was heading back toward the meeting room.

I popped up out of the shadow of the bush I’d been crouching under and let out a soft meow. Colin froze, then turned and stared. I lifted one front paw and waved it in a clearly beckoning gesture.

Colin peered at me through the gloom. “What the ever-loving fuck?”

I meowed again, beckoned again, and trotted down the hill away from the meeting room.

“Either that’s a cat wearing a backpack, or someone drugged me,”