Page 33 of Collared Mate

He’s giving me a look I kind of know I should take as a warning, but I can’t. I feel so out of sorts, so separated from myself and my life. I am coming to terms with the fact that I can’t go home, but that doesn’t stop my brain from wanting to go home every five minutes. This house is probably nice, but it’s not like my house. It doesn’t feel safe. It feels like something out of a movie about wholesome Americans being wholesome about stuff.

Henry takes me downstairs, where his pack are getting dinner ready. Tinker seems nice, but she’s not really my sort of person. Hades is huge and scary, and gives me a brief glance and a nod before turning his attention back to his mate.

“I’m making pasta,” Tinker says as she finishes draining the spaghetti, then tosses it into a skillet where meatballs are simmering in a tomato sauce. “Got garlic bread in the oven, meatballs on the stove. It’s pretty much done so help yourselves!”

I watch as everyone grabs a thick ceramic plate in the gaudiest blue I have ever seen and takes turns diving in, serving themselves. It actually smells really nice, but my stomach is churning. The day I’ve had has left me without much of an appetite mentally even if my stomach is growling. How can I eat pasta when my world is in ruins? How can I enjoy garlic bread when the bitterness of betrayal is the only taste in my mouth?

“Come and sit,” Henry prompts me.

Henry has made me a plate, of course. He ushers me to the table, which is set for six, though there’s only five of us. There’s Jacob, and Hades and Tinker and me and Henry. Everyone makes noises about how good the food is, and I make similar sounds to be polite.

I push the food around my plate a little, having a little nibble here and there. Conversation is brighter than I thought it would be given how many serious men are here. Tinker is telling some story about following people using the cameras they keep sticking everywhere.

I am listening to her, sort of. My mind is mostly on what happened at the office, and before it. Rick set me up without blinking. He didn’t seem nervous, sad, or guilty at all. He wanted me out of the way. As far as he’s concerned, I’m in Russia right now having to sleep with some gross old man who thinks he owns me.

My own brother would do that to me after everything we lost. Our parents, our family. He traded me away for no reason at fucking all. That’s fucked up.

“Eat up,” Tinker says.

For some reason, her cheerful kindness is calibrated at exactly the right level to set light to my incredibly short fuse. She’s happy. She’s content. She feels safe. I can see all of those things written all over her. She’s not even special. She’s not rich. She’s not powerful. She’s not a Swale. But somehow she has everything I can never seem to have for very long.

I feel an intense rage that cannot be expressed in any reasonable way. I want to take my fucking wolf form. I want to flip the table. I want to scream to the moon. But I can’t do any of those things, so instead…

“I don’t want this,” I say abruptly. “I don’t eat the kind of garbage you people eat.”

I’m being unforgivably rude, and I know it, but I have been silvered and I can’t do what I really want to do, which is take my wolf form, run all the way back to the city, and rip my traitorous brother’s throat out for him.

The silence that follows my statement is intense. And heavy. Everyone looks at me, most of them like I’m a piece of shit. Tinker’s eyes well up a little and Hades looks like he wants to rip my fucking arms off.

“Excuse me,” Henry says. “I need to talk to my mate.”

He grips me by the scruff of my neck and picks me up from the table like I weigh absolutely nothing. I get marched up the stairs like a criminal, my feet not really touching the carpet on the way up.

“That was embarrassing,” he growls at me. “You know how to act better than that. I don’t know what got into you, but I can tell you right now I’m not going to tolerate that.”

* * *

Henry

I say I don’t know what’s gotten into her, but I know precisely what is happening. Fiona is furious and she’s taking it out on my pack because she doesn’t have a better target. She is about to learn that is absolutely never acceptable. Someone of her status and position cannot lash out at those lower than them in the pack order. It’s unseemly. It’s disappointing, too. Killing nasty men in the streets is one thing, I could allow that, but making Tink’s face crumple is never going to fly.

If I hadn’t taken Fiona out immediately, I think Hades would have—and not in the same way. She really doesn’t understand how much her world has changed today. She isn’t going to be protected from the consequences of her actions the way she was in the past. There are no discounts on punishments because she happens to come from a powerful family. Even her status as my mate will only protect her so far. I may be feared, but disrespect will only be tolerated so far.

I close the bedroom door and turn to face her. She is standing with her arms folded over her chest, her face set into a rebellious scowl that tells me she is intending on doubling, or even tripling down on her current behavior. God help all of us.

“Tinker made a very nice dinner, and even if you didn’t like it, there was no need to be rude.”

“I wasn’t hungry,” she says. “Besides, you said you were a successful businessman with his own pack, but everyone is slumming it here like it’s a flophouse.”

Rude little minx. It’s hard not to take her incendiary comments personally, but I know she’s coming from a place of extreme privilege. I also know she’s in a terrible mood, and that she’s an aggressive little whelp and she’s probably furious at her brother. None of that is any excuse for her to be a spoiled little brat, and I won’t be tolerating that.

“This is not anybody’s home. We are all here, and many others you cannot see besides, to keep you safe. You are at the center of all of this, and you are acting as if everyone else is putting you out. I won’t have it. You’re going to learn to appreciate what’s done for you.”

That’s all I have to say on the matter. It’s time she felt some of the physical consequences she has been able to dodge for far too long.

“What are you doing!” she squeals as I sit down on the bed, the same bed she thinks is too small and too firm, and turn her over my knee. She kicks and writhes and tries to fight me off, but she’s so much smaller and unfortunately the female form really does betray its owners more often than not. I pin her down over my lap and hold her in place as I lecture her like a spoiled little brat.

All the while I’m doing it, I’m very much aware that she both needs this, and missed out on any kind of loving guidance in her life. If her parents had spent less time dying in traitorous scandals, and more time parenting her, this would be entirely unnecessary.