Wild Beast Mate(22)

“Oh, now you wanna save me, Romeo?” I swung my head back and missed his nose. My bicep shook, my left hand calling a time out. Vice pressed against me, closing the cage.

“I’m done with this drama,” Jamie said in a voice that bore no argument. “Get her. The entire city is starting to walk down here. You two look ridiculous.”

“Listen to me.” Vice’s hand came over my left one on the fence and held me in place. “Give me another chance. We can’t go on like this.”

“Leave me alone like you left me at the community. If you did it then, you can do it now. Ahhhhh!” I thrashed against his front, my face scraping the fence. With my legs, I pushed away from the fence, my back against him.

Twisting, I bit his shoulder.

He let go of the fence.

We fell, his hands around me, and his right side hit the grass.



Thump!



My teeth rattled, but I didn’t relent. I kicked, hands gripping the wet grass. I tried to get hold of something to lift up. My nails dug into the dirt, stars played over my eyes, the shelter seeming miles away, not right under the bakery two blocks from the Park. Through a blur, a syringe appeared before my eyes. Vice flipped me, my back flat on the ground. He held my hands above my head in one of his.

Alpha Beast crouched next to us. He was unperturbed, watched me, calm and cool, before he ripped off the needle cap with his teeth.

Another needle.

Yeah, put me down like a dog.

Silver eyes bore down on me. I looked from Jamie back to Vice. Blood trailed down from his nose over his mouth onto his chest. “I’m sorry about your nose,” I said.

“It’ll heal.”

I smiled a sad smile. A tear escaped my eye. “You were my Prince Charming,” I told Vice. “You were supposed to swoop down on your iron horse and take me with you and away from poverty, where I could buy a pair of jeans and a new skater. You weren’t supposed to leave me there for another month, because by the time you came back, I was a woman without the woman parts. If you took me with you, they wouldn’t have had the time to remove my parts. I’d have given you all the beast babies you wanted. But I can’t, and it’s your fault. Who buys something and then leaves it? You buy shit and take it home with you. Right then and there. You take it.”



Vice



My breath caught at her revelation. I stumbled, then sat on the grass next to her. My chest felt hollow, as if my world broke. I opened my mouth, tried saying something, anything, but nothing came out. People gathered around us, not too close, yet close enough. They whispered, pointed fingers, and I tuned them out.

Silence wrapped around my mind as I tried to process what she’d told me. They removed her parts? Images of a helpless Dewlyn came. I gritted my teeth. Dewlyn struggling to get away just like she did with me. People’s hands on her, forcing her to do shit she didn’t want to do. Dewlyn crying for help when nobody was there to help her. I could’ve been there. I should’ve been there.

Jamie broke the silence first. “Did she just say what I think she said?”

Dewlyn stared at the sky above us and whispered, “The morning after my surgery, my mom explained that the pairs from our community did not breed beast babies. It’s like the Bible over there, something we do but don’t speak of. We’re conditioned; we serve God, the creator of men. But, you see, I refused the nasty tea, refused their values, the driving force of their existence, so they took the driving force of mine.”

Jamie spun and threw the syringe. He placed a hand on my shoulder. “Anytime, brother, we’re a go.”

Jamie spoke some more, but I couldn’t hear him past the buzzing in my ears. The world sort of closed in on me, my chest constricted, and I struggled to breathe. Maybe my heart was breaking, I wouldn’t know, but I did know the day I left her, this was how she must’ve felt. Heartbroken. What a mate I turned out to be. They…they butchered her so she couldn’t give me babies, so she couldn’t breed with me. What kind of people did that? Humans. Humans did that. There was no end to their evil. We’d never give them this planet back. Never.

“Rey can’t see, but you are blind,” Dewlyn told Jamie, and I exhaled a breath I held. “Communities fuck you in the ass. All of you. The girls who get paired, then hate the mates run away. Some of them are conditioned from birth. Some of them are forced to leave men they love for beasts they don’t even know. Some of them are so desperate to stay at home, they end their lives. I tried to give pairs choices, because choice is not a privilege. It’s a right. I found a shelter. You know, like a house where we could do whatever we wanted. No parents to sell us, no mates who wanted to breed us. They depend on me, but you kept my ass here, and now people are hungry. I stole your key, Alpha Beast. Kiss my ass. I won’t tell you where I put it.”