Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 71067 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 355(@200wpm)___ 284(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71067 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 355(@200wpm)___ 284(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
For a second, I almost feel like I am about to tell him. Seems like the truth is about to emerge. But right at the very last moment, I bite it back.
“Nothing,” I lie.
He lets out a low growl. I feel it reverberate through me, though I don’t really know what it means in the moment.
“Alright,” he says. “You do not have to tell me. But you won’t be leaving either. You are my mate. My fated mate. My knot bonded mate. So you are going to stay here, with me, until you find a way to explain to me what it is I need to know. Consider yourself grounded to the bed chamber.”
“You can’t send me to my room,” I laugh.
“You’re right,” he says with a dark smile. “I’m sending you to mine.”
He takes me to the door, hands me off to the guard, and tells them to take me to his room. I find myself escorted there like a prisoner, feeling very, very odd and quite guilty. Did I do something wrong?
* * *
Rex
Something is clearly going on with my mate. The refusal to shift, the desire to run, the insolence and the testing, and the sending her little pack mates to steal a car… all of it points to a secret.
“Fescue, I’d like you to look into her background more deeply,” I tell him. “Put the investigative division on it. I want to know everything there is to know about her.”
Fescue inclines his head in a nod and goes about executing my orders.
I should have done this in the first place, but we were investigating their pack and business as a corporate concern, not a personal one. The moment I laid eyes on Nicky, some part of me felt as though I knew her. That’s the fated bond.
Actually knowing her is a different matter.
While I wait for him to get back to me, I do some work. Nicky will be contained in my room until I am ready to deal with her. Another spanking won’t do anything. Talking to her won’t do it either. I have to get to the bottom of this.
I should have done this already, but I didn’t take her seriously enough. I thought I’d met a cute little runaway and she’d be easy enough to dominate, but I was wrong.
It takes less than an hour for Fescue to return. Three minutes for him to locate the file he no doubt already compiled and another fifty-seven for him to pretend he’s putting it together.
He comes back to me when I am calmer, which does help. What he has to say does not calm me at all.
“Sir,” Fescue says. “I regret to inform you that there is no Nicky Love.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean her identity goes back as far as an inmate in a girl’s home,” he says. “She was found at the site of a massacre in a rural location, with no memories of who she was or how she’d gotten there. She was kept in the home until she turned eighteen, at which time she aged out of the system.”
I listen to him and I imagine Nicky as she is, and then younger, alone and in a massacre.
She never mentioned anything about it to me. She’s never told me anything about anything. I feel my gut twist as I realize that might be because I have been so focused on how good and hot our present is, and I’ve assumed her past rather than asked her about it.
I have been a spectacularly myopic asshole.
“So we don’t know who she really is?”
“I’d suggest we run DNA, sir. Pack lineages are important. And it may give us some sense of who she is beyond a missing girl.”
* * *
Nicky
He didn’t spank me.
He didn’t even fuck me.
He just tried to talk to me, and it was awful. He was trying to get me to tell him about myself, but if there’s one thing I don’t want to talk about, it’s myself. He tried some casual conversation that I rejected, and then he sort of gave up and I thought that it was over.
Next day, he pretended like it was okay, but we both know it’s not okay. Everybody is in trouble, everything is weird, and I am not allowed to escape.
Now I’ve been in this fucking room for three days, and I think I am going to go crazy. The doors are alarmed and there are guards in the hall, and if I try to go out the windows, I know they will be waiting for me there too.
I’m working on a way out. I suspect that if I climb up onto the bathroom counter, I can maybe cut a hole in the ceiling if Rex is gone long enough, and then…
“Nicky?”
I hear him enter the room. Fortunately I am lying on the bed and not executing my crimes against drywall.