Page 53 of His Runaway Mate

“I can seem all sorts of things,” I say. “But I’m not ever going to be a fit. You get it. It’s a culture thing.”

His eyes narrow at me a fraction, and then he is stalking toward me, capturing my chin in his hand as he wraps his other arm around me.

“What are you not telling me, Nicky? And don’t be glib.”

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.”

* * *