Page 60 of His Runaway Mate

I spent years fearing this version of myself, and now it is here and now the father I missed for all that time is approving of me, and there is something so very intoxicating and fulfilling about being here with him.

Some of the pack call out to me with glee. They seem happy to see me. I wave back. They don’t approach. They respect my father too much. I have to wonder how he got them here. Did he steal them away? Or did he lure them with the promise of the kind of freedom only a man with no morals can offer?

“How did you get them here?”

“They were ready to come from the moment I met them,” he says. “You had nothing to offer wolves like these. You were doing what you’ve always done. Pretending to be human. Pretending to get along in a human world. They wanted what I offered them.”

“An outdoor toilet?”

He snorts. “Freedom. The real life of a wolf. You turned them into low-level workers. They need more than that. They need to hunt. They need to starve from time to time. They need to feast. We’re bred to fight for survival, kid. They do all that here.”

“And none of them left so much as a note. We’ve been worried about them.”

“You’ve not been worried about anything besides catting about,” he says. “Attracting the eye of Rex Regent, so I hear.”

“How did you…” I ask, then I realize that a few of the wolves out here in the forest shanties were around when Rex first showed up. He’s taken almost a dozen wolves from my pack. Maybe he’s right. Maybe I didn’t offer them what they really needed. Maybe I was always bad at leading them.

“Come and eat,” he says. “We have venison and sweet pork.”

I know what sweet pork means. I won’t be having any more of that. Having taken so much as a bite of my would-be attacker is making me feel nauseated enough as it is. I don’t want this life. I don’t want any part of my father’s world.

“Why didn’t you come and get me after they took me from the gas station? I waited for you to come. You never did.”

He turns and looks at me. “I told you to get in the car,” he says simply, as if that single act of disobedience justified the rest of his abandonment. “You chose differently. That’s what you wanted. I gave you what you wanted.”

“I was fourteen.”

“Old enough to make a decision,” he says. “And old enough to bear its consequences.”

I don’t agree with that, but he doesn’t care. My father feels justified in what he did and all the arguing in the world isn’t going to change it. I didn’t want to see him again. He didn’t look for me, and I didn’t look for him.

I turn. “I’m going to go back to the city,” I tell him. “You can keep the rest of them. If this is what they want, this is what they can have. Good luck to all of you.”

“Not so fast,” he says, gripping me by the arm. “You’re staying here.”

“Why? You told me I made my choice, now let me make it.” I try to pull away, but his grip tightens on me.

“Uh-uh,” he says. “I don’t want a daughter of mine giving birth to a Regent pup. I’ve got a better idea. You stay here. With us. You embrace the thing you were always meant to be. All you need is enough flesh.”

“What does that mean?”

“The more you have, the more you will want to have. The more you hunger, the more you feed, the more you understand what it is to consume the weak, the stronger you become.”

He hauls me through the encampment to a big tent at the back. Inside this tent is a commercial large dog crate designed to keep a German Shepherd or similar sized dog. There are chew and claw marks all over it, and when he pushes me down and into it, I find that it has a stinking blanket and nothing else.

“Why?” I ask the question, already knowing the answer. He wants revenge on the version of me that didn’t become the one he thought I should be.

“When is a better question,” he says. “And the answer to that is as long as it takes.”

* * *

There is one cage in this den, and that is the one I find myself in.

“You’ll get hungry, and when you do, you’ll eat the way you used to.”

“What do you mean, used to?”

He grins, flashing white teeth that are at odds with the rust-red stains of his sins. “I fed you well as a pup,” he says. “You were such a good eater when you were small.”