Freeing the Warrior's Deceived Mate

Chapter Four: Gross Negligence

Amelia POV

“What the hell were you three thinking?!” Alpha Rhyner bellowed.

He had us on a log in front of the central fireplace. If it had just been Birdie and I, it would have been fine to yell at us from the comfort of his home, but Kyle’s bulk would have made it a tight and uncomfortable squeeze on the bench seat of his trailer. Plus, Luna Freilla was having to perform first aid as we spoke. It would seem Kyle had hurt himself in the fight pretty bad- bad enough to not have healed yet, at least.

“It’s not their fault,” I said, with more confidence than I felt. “I heard about the party, and I snuck into the back of Kyle’s truck. They didn’t know I was there until we got to the party.”

“Who told you about it?” Rhyner asked, the look of eternal disappointment gone and replaced with pure fury. “You understand you could’ve been lost to us tonight, girl, don’t you?”

I clammed up, looking at my feet. I highly doubted that. The fight was brief, and I don’t think the pack males wanted to kill us, just scare us a little. I looked at Kyle’s arm. There was a large bruise forming over his shoulder, where it’d been twisted out of place, and his face was a little busted up. I returned my gaze to my feet when he met my eye.

“I just… wanted…”

“I just want to keep you safe,” he yelled. “And I can’t understand why you would do something so stupid and reckless. It spits in the face of all I’ve done for you!” He paced in front of the fire, clearly agitated. He came to a stop, “Your father would’ve had a right fit if he were here, you know that, don’t you?”

I shrank. My father had been one of the biggest, bulkiest warriors we had. Most of the time, he was kind and intelligent, and catered to me like I was his princess. But sometimes… when I crossed boundaries, I shouldn’t have…

Well, the bruises lasted for weeks.

It was a side of him I didn’t like to remember. After all, he was dead and gone. Killed by one of my many foolish mistakes. “I’m sorry, Alpha,” I said, knowing those were the only words he’d hear me say anyway. “It won’t happen again.”

“You’re damned right, it won’t,” Rhyner said. “You’ll be lucky if I don’t place you under constant supervision.”

“That’s not necessary,” Dale said. He’d been leaning up against Rhyner’s trailer, leg propped up and smoking a cigarette. “She’s just a kid, Alpha. Tryna live her life like the rest of us. She needs to stretch her legs- like I was tellin’ you earlier.”

“Shut up, Dale,” Rhyner snarled. The aggression rolling off him was so potent, I couldn’t help but flinch. “Amelia, back to your trailer. I don’t want to see, hear, or smell you until I’ve come up with a fitting punishment for you.”

I nodded and retreated. I cast one last look at Birdie and Kyle. Neither of them was looking at me- probably pointedly looking away. I just hoped their punishment wasn’t anywhere near as bad as mine would be.

Tiberius POV

I had been pacing all morning, the look on my mate’s face perplexed me. I had felt it- I had felt it clear as day, warm as the sunshine, sweet as honey. Did she… not?

I ran the events of the night through my head again. I called her my mate. She looked back at me with pure confusion. Not disgust, not anger, not fear, but confusion. As if she’d never heard the word before.

But that was preposterous. Every wolf knows of the mate bond. Even if she’d been abandoned, left to humans, her inner wolf’s natural instincts would be howling for me. The word was innate to us, it was not something easily forgotten. It was not something a wolf couldn’t know.

“Ty,” Cai chided, “You’re going to make a rut in front of Alpha’s office. Could you stop?”

How could I stop? I ignored him completely. I hadn’t told him yet, that the prettiest rogue had been my mate. How could I when she’d pulled away from me to help another man to his car? We’d just been trying to scare some sense into them. We didn’t want to hurt any of them, not really. But he had been more aggressive than we’d counted on. And I’d been… distracted.

“You’ve been acting strange since last night,” Cai said, grabbing hold of my arm. I jerked free of his grip to continue my pacing. “I mean, where was your back up when I needed it?”

The door to the Alpha’s office opened, and Beta Mateo opened the door, looking at me suspiciously. “The Alpha is ready to see you boys now,” he said.

I nodded to him respectfully and entered the office. Alpha Servando was a tall man of Hispanic origin. His family had run the Duskfall Pack for four generations- we were one of the oldest packs in recorded history. As such, he sat proudly on the prestigious Alpha Council. Currently, his hands were steepled over his stomach as he leaned back in his office chair to take in the view from his office window. He was on the third floor of the packhouse and could see the little suburb of our pack spread out before him. He turned to us with a smile. “Boys. How’s your mother doing?”

“Well,” I answered, unable to hide the irritation in my voice.

“Tiberius,” he said, after giving me a searching look, “You seem agitated this morning. What’s got you bothered, son?”

I wanted to lie, but of all people, I couldn’t lie to Alpha. “One of the rogues last night was my mate.”

“What?!” Cai said, raising his voice despite the fact we were in the presence of our Alpha.

Servando frowned but didn’t chide him. “A rogue. Hm. That’s troubling. What was she doing?”

“Just… dancing,” I replied. “She didn’t seem… like a bad person.”

“Was she the blond? Because she had one hell of a bite,” Cai said.

“No,” I replied, meeting his eye. “The brunette.”

“Did you catch her name?” Servando asked, “If she gave you a name, I can search her in the Alpha database and see where she came from.”

“No,” I said with a sigh. “She didn’t talk to me at all, actually. The other female that was with her pulled her away.” I searched my memory, “No, actually she did ask me to let her go…” I couldn’t help but chuckle. “Said please and everything.”

Servando scratched his beard, taking several moments to compose a plan. “This is a difficult situation. If the rogues are a danger to our pack, we’ll need to eliminate them. But if your mate is among them… there’s no way to peacefully recover her, or to tell if she’d even be someone welcome in our pack. Apologies, Tiberius, but you should prepare yourself for the possibility that your mate is… less than ideal for you.”

I stiffened. I wanted to argue, or to yell, or fight, but I couldn’t do any of that. Instead, I nodded. “I will… take that under advisement.”

“For now, the best approach is to continue tracking the rogues. If you find your mate again, make sure you get a name for me this time,” Servando said.

“Yes, Alpha,” I said. He waved to excuse us, and we stepped out. “What other leads did you have on the rogues?”

“Oh, suddenly interested in my work, are you?” Cai asked. He was also a warrior- of a different kind. He was slimmer and more conventionally attractive, so he managed a lot of relations outside of the pack. He dealt with humans, and situations like this one, where Rogues were getting too close. “There’s a pawnshop in town they’ve been to a couple of times. We might be able to twist an arm and get some info.”

“Then let’s go,” I said, charging ahead. I tried to ignore the sound of my brother’s laughter.

Amelia POV

Mate.

He’d called me mate.

Like… matey? Ahoy?

No, that wasn’t right. I’d heard my packmates use the word before, but in relation to their partners. Partners they’d had for years. I had thought it was an abbreviation for ‘soulmate,’ but that would be strange thing to call someone you’d just met.

For that matter, it was strange to be so fixated on someone I’d only seen for all of three minutes. Gabin would be a more appropriate male to obsess over, but something about his eyes, the warmth of his touch… goddess, asking him to let me go had been one of the most difficult things I’d had to do- and hefting Kyle into the backseat of his truck hadn’t been easy.

It wasn’t like I had much else to do, anyway. Might as well dwell on a strange fixation.

Alpha Rhyner still hadn’t come for me. I’d tested the door to my trailer and found it locked from the outside. In the past, that would have infuriated me, or panicked me. Now, I recognized it as my punishment. I wondered how long it would be this time- two days? Ten? I’d been locked away for a month before, only allowed visits from Dale. They weren’t social visits, either. He’d brought a map and requested I point out a treasure. No matter how much I’d screamed, cried, pleaded to be free, he’d stood there emotionlessly and watched. When I cried myself empty, he pointed to the map and commanded I do my job.

I shuddered at the thought and tried to recall what I’d done to upset Alpha Rhyner that time. It could have been anything. He hadn’t liked me very much when I was smaller.

Mate.

I picked up my dictionary and searched for the word.

Each of a pair of birds or other animals.

A person’s husband, wife, or other s****l partner.

One of a matched pair.

A fellow member or joint occupant of a specified thing.

A friend or companion.

An assistant to a skilled worker.

Perhaps he’d just been referring to us both being werewolves? We could be mates in that way, I supposed… by a very loose definition. I picked up the thesaurus and searched for it again.

Partner, husband, wife, spouse, lover, significant other.

Friend, companion, comrade, confidant, playmate, classmate.

Under ‘verb:’ breed, couple, copulate, coupling, s****l intercourse.

I slammed the thesaurus shut.

Okay, so maybe I had just heard him wrong. I sat at the kitchen table with a notepad and listed the words that rhymed that I could think of.

Rate. Late. Great. Date. Eight. Gate. Hate. Bait. Sate. Fate.

I scribbled on the bottom of the pad. No, there was no way I’d heard him wrong. He’d said mate, for sure. I pushed myself up from my seat and began pacing the trailer. Alpha Rhyner was going to keep me cooped up here forever, probably, and I would never be able to ask him, the tall, dark and handsome stranger. Would meeting him even be worth it?

They’d looked dangerous. Well, the second of them did. My stranger had looked something akin to a teddy bear. I’d wanted to hug him, truth be told, but the situation hadn’t called for it. I wondered what it would have been like if we’d met under different circumstances. I wondered why I cared. The cycle of my thoughts restarted- it was like trying to untangle a massive pile of yarn. There were too many threads tangled that I couldn’t even see.

I stopped pacing when I heard a key in the lock of my trailer. A jolt ran through me- was it fear or excitement? The door opened, and Dale stepped inside, shutting the door after himself. “Sit down, Ames. We gotta talk.”

That was never good.

I sat back down at the table, pushing my notepad to the side. He eyed it, raising an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything. “Alpha Rhyner is setting your punishment as three days' isolation,” he said.

I breathed a sigh of relief. Three days wasn’t too bad.

“He’s also decided you won’t be joining us on any missions anytime soon,” Dale added.

I slammed my hands on the table. “That’s not fair!” I jerked to my feet and resumed my pacing, “Has he considered that I feel the need to sneak out because I’d never leave otherwise? I’m sick and tired of being in the middle of this damn camp!”

“I know, Ames, I know,” he said. “But you gotta know your worth, girl. If we lost you…”

“I know,” I shouted. “I know that a million times over. But that doesn’t mean I have to stop living life, does it? Am I going to grow old and die here, Dale?”

“Of course not, Ames,” Dale said, rubbing his temples. “This is just temporary. Eventually, we’ll have enough money to get us some pack territory of our own. We’ll have our own pack house, our own woods, all of it. And when that day comes, you’ll have run of the place. You can go wherever you want, whenever you want. But until then, we need you to get there. Be patient, Ames.”

“I’ve been patient for nineteen years!” I continued. “I want to live my life, Dale! I want to go to parties! I want to meet new people! I want to date!”

“Now, hold up,” Dale said, “Where is all of that coming from?”

“Is it so odd?” I asked, collapsing onto the bench seat. “Everyone else gets to do it. Why not me?”

“No one’s holding you back from… that… you know. You’ve just got to… here.”

“Oh, please,” I groaned. “The dating pool here is laughable. One person, in fact.”

Dale glared at her, “Then date that one person and get it over with. And stop the bellyachin’. Thanks to your little escapade, we have pack wolves to worry about now.”

I perked. “Are they nearby?”

“Yes,” Dale said. “Not near enough for you to worry about. We’re well outside of their territory, but they’re on the other side of town from us. And they’re angry we’re in their town, I guess- even if the town does fall outside of their territory.”

“They won’t just leave us alone, will they?” I asked. I tried to sort the feeling in my gut- was it anxiety? Guilt? …anticipation? “Will we have to move again?”

“Likely so. Probably sooner, rather than later,” Dale said.

My stomach dropped, thinking of the long-haired man whose name I didn’t even know, who’d perplexed me with a single word. “Oh,” was all I could manage.

Dale stood and ruffled my hair. “I’ll keep at Alpha Rhyner to get you a little more breathing room. Maybe we can let you go on some…” he cringed, “…dates or something. With Kyle. You’d be safe with him.”

Last week, I would have been elated to leave the camp and spend time alone with Kyle. I wasn’t sure why, but now the thought turned my stomach. Either way, I forced a smile. "Thanks, Dale."

He snorted, pushing up from the seat. "Don't thank me yet. Alpha's right pissed at you now. It'd take a Christmas Miracle for you to leave this camp at this rate."