Mated (6 page)

Every time the coffin locked shut she thought she’d never survive it. Almost twelve hours of darkness most days inside that box. And the last hour, so hard to breathe, counting down the seconds, watching the glowing digital numbers tick down. Running out of air, past the panic point, banging on the door. What if it didn’t open in time?

Jane woke screaming, tangled on the floor in the bedsheets where she’d struggled through her dream trying to escape Sedrick. She looked wildly around. It took her a few minutes to realize where she was, to know she wasn’t back in the coffin with the sadistic vampire. The cave was silent. Could the wolf have slept through that?

She turned on the light, her hand still shaking from the nightmare, and made her way out into the main room. His pillow and blanket were in a pile on the floor beside the sofa. Growing more frantic, she searched the rest of the den.

Tears stung at the corners of her eyes. “No, No, No, No.” She paced back and forth in front of the sealed steel door. “No!” She couldn’t get the thought out of her head that it was just another larger coffin. What if Cole never came back? What if he got hurt or killed? She could die in here.

She pressed buttons on the security keypad.

“Incorrect code.”

She kept trying.

“Incorrect code.”

“Incorrect code.”

The recorded voice sounded so smug. She started to bang on the door.

“Let me out of here!” The room was growing smaller, shrinking until it felt no larger than the coffin, as the air got heavier. “Please! Please let me out!”

***

Cole’s muzzle was wet from a fresh kill. He stood, running his tongue around the side of his mouth to get the last drops of life. He nosed at the bear’s mauled remains, deciding he was finished. All the good parts were gone.

As he moved through the woods away from the carcass, his senses were swamped with the most heavenly smell. The most forbidden smell.

Human blood.

As a man he could have resisted, but as the wolf, the scent was too intoxicating. He salivated as he moved nearer, then whined when he reached the source. There was a small pool of blood rapidly soaking into the ground.

He dug into the dirt with his paws, pressing his nose against the scent, flicking his tongue out to get some of the precious liquid. But it was too late. He prowled around the spot, then finally growled and shifted back to his human form.

He felt momentarily ashamed by how badly he’d wanted to lap up the leftovers from a human kill. Gaining control of himself, he knelt beside the blood-soaked earth, inhaled deeply, then got to his feet again.

There was evidence of a struggle. Branches were bent. Piles of leaves were thrown about in haphazard fashion where feet had flailed and kicked. Furrows had been dug through the dirt by fingers clawing at the ground. He smelled blood on a nearby tree.

He followed the fading trail of the human and wolf. The wolf had masked his scent, wearing a human-made pheromone marketed to attract the opposite sex. It was strong and musky to his nose, but to a human would have been barely discernible. It might aid in luring a human female from a place of safety into the woods. It also made it impossible to separate the scent of the wolf’s natural pheromones from the synthetic concoction.

Cole followed the trail to the edge of the forest where the mingled scents ended. There were no broken branches or disturbed leaves. Up until the spot the human had died, there had been no struggle. It wasn’t a loss of control with a hapless camper. It had been premeditated.

He returned to the kill site. The killer had done this before. Many times. It was too clean. A wolf taken by the wildness of the first human kill wouldn’t have had the cognitive ability to clean up the mess. He shook his head and went for his clothes. He hated when Cain was right.

He was a quarter mile away from the den when he heard the screaming and pounding. He broke into a run, panic gripping his chest.

Not Jane.

His fingers flew over the security keypad to input the code, and when the door slid open he was ready to catch her as she pitched forward into his arms. He scented the air, his eyes wild, searching for the threat.

When he realized she was alone, he carried her back inside.

She’d stopped screaming and collapsed against him, still crying, but the panic had faded. He sat her gently on the couch and took her chin in his hands, his eyes locking with hers. “I’ll be right back.”

She nodded.

She looked so small sitting on the couch in one of his T-shirts. He was in and out of the kitchen in less than thirty seconds with an open bottle of water.

“Drink.”

She took the bottle and drank. Her face was red and flushed from crying, her eyes puffy. Her throat was no doubt raw if she’d been screaming for long. He wondered if any of the pack had woken. Well, if they had, the cat was out of the bag, and they were either going to think he was having really wild sex or torturing someone.

“I won’t leave you alone here again,” he said, the guilt starting to weigh on him that his behavior had been the cause of this much fear.

She nodded and lifted the bottle to her lips again. That’s when the scent of her blood hit him. Her hands. She’d pounded on the door until her hands had bled. His pupils dilated but he resisted the change, glad he’d eaten a bear.

He lifted the hand she wasn’t using to drink and caught her eyes. “I’m not going to hurt you. But we used the last of the ointment on your cheek. Can I?”

She looked at him confused for a second, then her eyes widened a fraction.

“I know it might seem disgusting, but it’s really the best antiseptic. And I can make the bleeding stop.”

She nodded.

He ran his tongue gently over her hand, and he could taste the vampire in her blood. He’d deal with that issue later. For now, what was important was to try to make her feel safe.

The guilt crushed in on him. He’d meant to help her, and instead he’d traumatized her. Well, what did he expect keeping her against her will? Had he thought she’d be A-okay with being locked up?

Her arousal hit him hard, jolting him out of his thoughts. He looked up at her, his pupils dilating this time for a new reason. She looked away, clearly mortified, knowing he’d sensed her reaction. He released her hand.

They sat silent for a few minutes. Her other hand was still bleeding and clutching tightly onto the water bottle. He didn’t push the issue. Finally, after a few minutes of neither of them speaking, she shifted the bottle to her cleaned hand, and gave him her other one.

“Jane?”

“I’m bleeding.”

His nostrils flared. “Yes, I’m aware of that. Are you sure you’re comfortable with this?”

She nodded and looked away from him while he used his tongue to make the bleeding stop on the other hand.

When he finished, he started babbling. “I didn’t mean to be gone that long. I should have known you’d panic. I should have remembered the claustrophobia. I just thought we’d dealt with that issue. But you were locked in, and I should have known how you’d react if you woke up. I shouldn’t have chanced it. I should have waited until daytime, to go hunting and should have . . . ”

“Had a bad dream,” she croaked, interrupting the litany.

“Will you tell me about it?”

He sat in quiet horror while she recounted the dream and her history. He understood now why he could taste vampire in her blood. He’d been so close to saying something stupid, asking her why she’d fed from a vamp. Though even if she had, it likely wouldn’t have been her choice. He’d been so wrong about her. She wasn’t a vampire groupie; she’d been trying desperately to appease them.

“I finally worked up the nerve to stake Sedrick. He was sure he’d kept such a close eye on me, but I’d made a stake a little bit at a time when he was doing other things. I had it ready for months before I worked up the nerve to try it. I was afraid something would go wrong with the coffin and it wouldn’t open. I knew if it didn’t, Sedrick was strong enough to open it from the inside.

“When I staked him, I thought I would die from the smell, but the coffin opened that night, and I got out. He’d spared my parents, but I stayed away. I’d been gone three years and thought I might lead another vampire to them. So I just ran and lived in shelters for awhile. I tried to make sure I was never out after dark. But sometimes I had to go out at night, like when I had a job and had to work later than normal.”

He’d stretched out on the couch and pulled her back against him, running his fingers through her hair. For a moment she tensed and he stopped, but then she relaxed again.

“I’m not them, Jane. I know you’ve heard bad things about the werewolves, but that’s political bullshit. I don’t allow my pack to hunt humans.” Even as he spoke, the pool of blood from a few hours before taunted him.

“I know.”

He suppressed the growls as she went on to tell him about the next vampire who caught her, and how while that one hadn’t locked her in a coffin, he’d passed her around and whored her out to other vampires. Until Gregory had rescued her.

“Greg was the first vampire I met who wasn’t a complete monster. After a few years I got comfortable, thought I was safe. Almost felt like a person again. Then the tournament came up, and he wouldn’t turn me. He said he didn’t want to curse me like that. And then he let me go because he said he couldn’t be king with me.”

She let out a shuddering breath. “He wanted to believe I’d be okay without a protector. But I knew I wouldn’t be, so I latched onto Paul. I thought if I picked the vampire, maybe I would pick someone who wasn’t that bad. Like Greg. But Paul only looked innocent.

“Almost as soon as Anthony won the tournament, he and Charlee got wrapped up in all the vampire business and politics, and Paul kept getting pushed to the fringes. He started taking it out on me, like the knife marks, and slapping me around because he’d figured out I could take more than most humans.”

“They’ll never touch you again.”

Silence stretched between them, and Jane drifted to sleep nestled in his arms, a few of her demons purged for the night. Cole ran his fingers through her hair while she slept, quietly plotting how he’d kill Paul to make it look like a happy accident.

Chapter Six

Jane woke in Cole’s bed with an arm thrown loosely across her body. She tensed. This wasn’t how she remembered going to sleep. A million thoughts and feelings ran through her. Clearly her body wanted him. Then again, her fucked-up body had wanted the vampire that killed her boyfriend when he bit her, too.
Don’t think about that shit. Don’t even go there.

His arm lifted and retreated back to his side of the bed. “You fell asleep, and I brought you back here where you’d be more comfortable.”

She rolled over to find herself under the covers and him on top. That made her feel better at least, the thick blankets acting as a shield.

“Are you okay with this?” he asked, gesturing at the bed.

He’d been walking on eggshells since the night before when she’d told him about the dream, and then for some indefinable reason spilled her guts to him. Jane wasn’t in the habit of sharing her life history with practical strangers. Especially strangers who were supposed to be the enemy. But she’d been throwing her hat in with the vampires so long out of self-preservation, she’d forgotten that one halfway decent vampire notwithstanding, vamps were the enemy, too.

At least for someone like her.

Her mother had never mentioned a history with the undead. Maybe she’d been kept as a pet and the vamp released her, or she killed him. Maybe she’d been under a thrall and didn’t remember it.

Jane’s skin crawled at the idea of her mother having been some vampire’s pet and not remembering a second of it. She thought about the women in the back room of the club and wondered how many of them even knew what was going on. How many of them woke in the morning with a gap in their memory and no clue about their nightly activities?

The things Jane had been through had been bad. But at least she knew exactly what had and hadn’t happened to her.

“Jane?”

She jumped at his voice and tried to refocus on the present. “It’s fine. I’m sorry, I was thinking.”

“I’m not looking for payment or a business transaction here. You don’t owe me anything.”

She nodded, her eyes drifting to his bare chest. Which made her want to give it to him all the more. This wasn’t like Sedrick or the others. It wasn’t just her body that wanted Cole. Maybe it was because she was out of her element with a werewolf, but the instincts she’d honed so well to stay alive had been flung to the wind now that she was with him.

She could feel his warmth through the blankets, and she wanted to rip away the barrier between them to feel his skin pressed against hers. But he’d made no move toward her and hadn’t shown any overt interest. He knew she’d been aroused when his tongue had run over the back of her hand, and he’d ignored her reaction.

Okay, so she’d been bleeding and that had been gross, but it didn’t seem like he minded. He hunted and ate raw warm meat, freshly dead. Blood was a part of that.