Caught Beast Mate (Beast Mates Book 4) Read online

  Once I pried my eyes off my mate, I scanned our surroundings again in case another male was watching. I would gouge his eyes out. Nobody was around. Still, it prickled that my mate’s community leader or her male next of kin would allow her such freedoms. She was alone and naked where anyone could see. On the off chance we could conceive a female beast halfling as beautiful as her mother, I would lock her up in the highest tower in the Beast City. Mm-hm. Sounded great to me.

  My mate dipped her toe in the water. She yelped and jumped.

  I crouched, ready to defend what was mine.

  She rubbed her arms. “Dios mio, it’s cold.”

  I agreed. She should put her clothes back on and return to her community so that I might follow and buy her from her negligent leader. But no, my mate fisted her hands, clamped her mouth shut, and braved her way into the water. Her nipples hardened. I groaned at the sight. Her tits weren’t too big. One would fill my mouth. I’d take the other one into my hand and twist the pale nipple with my fingers. My mate would coo into my ear, tell me how she couldn’t wait to take me inside her, tell me how I was too big for her little pussy. Then I’d have to work with my fingers and my tongue to get her pussy wet so that when I penetrated her, it wouldn’t hurt so bad.

  Yeah, she’d look up at me with those pretty blue byes and bat her eyelashes. Oh, Torrent, I love your monster dick. Poke me some more.

  She dunked under, then back up. Under, then nothing.

  I waited.

  And waited.

  Checked my watch.

  Ah, there. She came back up. Shivering, her lips blue.

  The human cold. A condition that caused humans to drip snot down their noses as if they had snot reserves up in their heads. It made them miserable and weak. They believed they catch their damn cold from being cold, and I was gonna kill her father, her leader, or any male that should be here and wasn’t. Strangle them with my bare hands if my senseless mate caught a cold. When she didn’t come up for air the third time she dunked under water, I stripped, left my clothes on the sky bike, and approached the lake.

  Warm water trickled down my face. Wait. Why was the water warm? Where was it coming from?

  I sniffed.

  The lake and all its beauty disappeared from my mind, and I was back in the desert. Alone, and…I sniffed again. Piss. Someone was pissing on my head. Fucking hell.

  When the activity stopped, I peeled open my good eye. The other was shut from the dirt that got in there while I crawled. But I didn’t need a pair of eyes to see the human child tuck his wiener under his…kilt and shuffle his right foot so that sand stuck on the urine he’d put on my face. “You little shit,” I groaned out.

  “Oh hey, you’re alive.”

  “Get away from me.”

  “No way. I got my first prey. Marked you and all.”

  “Go bring me water.”

  Another pair of feet shuffled, and a female crouched next to the boy. She wiped the sand from my face.

  I didn’t need one good eye to see.

  I didn’t need eyes at all.

  Because I’d recognize my mate if it was the last thing I did.

  But she couldn’t recognize me. I was beyond recognition. Body and soul, I had changed from that day by the lake. I knew she couldn’t recognize me, because if she could, she’d know not to rescue the beast who had once taken her.

  Chapter Three

  Sienna

  “Ew.” Covered in dirt and blood, the beast male stank like the mouse that Bowser, my cat, had once dragged in. The male was in the same shape as the rodent as well. Broken and almost dead, his hair knotted, his beard overgrown, his entire body covered in purple bruises and cuts. Might’ve been a large beast once, but not anymore. His ribs showed. He’d starved for a while out here. I’d finished off the poor mouse, and now debated what to do with the beast. Maybe I should finish him off too. One less beast to worry about.

  I slid off my backpack and got my water. I splashed some on his face. “Is he one of Mayhem’s hunters?” I asked Cole, since I avoided Mayhem’s visits and his males in general.

  “Never seen this beast,” Cole said. “That’s why I marked him. He’s my beast. Gonna serve me.”

  I blew my bangs out of my eyes and glanced at the kid. “Are you crazy?”

  “No, dude. Mayhem said if I wanted it, I should piss on it. That way everyone will know it’s mine.” He touched a finger to his nose. “Beasts smell and know.”

  “So do dogs.”

  “That’s just… Why you so nasty about them? They nice, nicer than my dad and brother. When hunters raided this place, my big brother took off and ran, left my mom and sisters. Got him later, but still, he’d taken off. If Hasel wasn’t so nice, we’d have been in her stew. You better watch it.”

  I ignored the infatuated boy. Without men at the community, he’d taken to the hunters. They were teaching him the beast ways, including morning meditation and prayer to their deity. I didn’t like that. He should be learning how to read and write, not how to be a barbarian. “Hey, you,” I called out and wiped the dirt from the beast’s face. “Whatcha doing out here?”

  “Tanning.”

  I chuckled. “You wanna tan some more? I could leave you out here if that’s what you want.”

  One brown eye looked up at me. “You’d leave me to die?”

  I shrugged. “Sure.”

  “Are you real?”

  “Mm-hm. You wanna stay out here and tan or what?”

  “I’ll take what. Five minutes ago, I would’ve stayed.”

  “Okay.” Might as well. When Zarik ran a perimeter check, he’d find him and, if the beast ratted me out, say I’d left his ass to die, Hasel might cook me. I sat down beside the beast. “Cole, let’s wait for the hunters.”

  “What hunters?” the beast asked.

  “Hunters of Mayhem. They’re here. They’ll take you.”

  “No way,” Cole said. “This one is mine. I saw him first, and I marked him. I’m taking him back.” He circled us, paused, and narrowed his eyes, thinking.

  I took a sip of my water and poured some over the beast’s lips. He wetted his tongue. “How?” I asked Cole.

  “What do you mean how?”

  “How you gonna take him? Even half-dead like this, he’s a… I’d say a two-hundred-pound monster. That’s me and you put together.”

  “Got any rope?”

  “You’re not with me, Cole.”

  “We tie him up and drag him.”

  “We’re two miles out.”

  “I am strong.”

  I ignored the boy and turned to the beast. “How much do you weigh?”

  “Featherlight.”

  Cole smiled. “He’s funny.”

  “He’s dead is what he is.” I pointed. “Look at that leg. Useless. This means you have to carry him. You can’t carry him, and neither can I. Stay until Zarik comes.”

  “Thank you, dearest,” the beast said.

  “Sure thing. I just call ’em how I see them.”

  “Lucky for me you don’t see a whole lot. Go on, tie me up. Drag my dead ass to this community. And by the way, who is Zarik?”

  “My beast boyfriend, so don’t get crazy ideas because I’m saving your ass.” The beast blinked his one good eye shut but couldn’t cover his growl. I narrowed my eyes. “If you growl at me, I will leave you here and delay my beast boyfriend till tomorrow. This way, you’ll have another day to tan.”

  “So sweet,” the beast mumbled.

  I found some leather bindings in my pack. I tied one around his one wrist, making sure I left a long tail end. I did the same with his left wrist, then tied the tails together. I got up, gripped the leather, and pulled.

  The beast stayed put.

  Cole gripped the beast’s wrist and pulled with me.

  Nothing.

  “Told you so,” I said. “Let’s wait for the hunters.”

  Cole stomped his foot. “Oh, come on, Sienna. Help me out.”

  “I am h
elping out. It’s not working. Why can’t you wait?”

  “I sleep with Mom and my sisters. I want my own room. Hasel said I gotta work for it, prove myself, be a man, then she’d give me a room with the hunters. On their side of the community.”

  “And what do I get?”

  “A thank-you.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  Cole shuffled his feet. His shoulders slumped.

  “I’m a sucker. Sucky sucker.” I pulled harder, my leg muscles straining. We moved. I looked back to see the beast pushing forward with his one good leg. “I’d have left you for dead,” I told him.

  Two miles felt like twenty. We stopped for rest at least ten times because, even starved, the damn beast weighed a ton. I didn’t know why I was helping him. Should’ve left his ass out there. It wouldn’t be the first time I left a wounded beast in the desert.

  Dad and I lived away from the communities, or really from any breathing thing other than one big fat orange cat we named Bowser. Dad knew something was amiss when beasts started planting a forest near our shelter. I convinced him everything was fine because we were underground and the beasts worked above us. He limited our travel around the mountain, but we stayed in the shelter when we should have moved.

  One July morning, when water reserves at the shelter ran low, I went to wash up at the lake. It was like any other morning. And then it wasn’t. I didn’t see the beast man there, probably because I wasn’t looking. Probably because Daddy had always looked out for me.

  My dad joined me at the lake.

  The beast advanced, and Daddy fired his shotgun.

  Even wounded, the beast attacked him. I was screaming, begging for Daddy’s life. Once done with my dad, the beast threw me over his bike and took off into the skies. At first I fought him, then I realized I’d fall off the bike if I didn’t calm down. Daddy had gotten him in the chest, and blood gushed out of his wound. I’d dug my fingernails into it.

  He’d lost control of the bike. We descended, and he called for help. I still remember his bright hazel eyes as they pleaded with me not to leave him out there. It was strange. He seemed more concerned about my safety and me being left alone in the middle of nowhere than with his bleeding wound. I hadn’t listened to him. That son of a bitch had killed my daddy. Or at least I thought he had, until Reagan had mentioned she’d seen my father.

  I hoped it wasn’t a random man she’d met, a man who had a daughter named Sienna. I hoped it really was my father, alive and looking for me.

  Shortly after the beast and I landed, he’d lost consciousness, and I robbed him of everything I thought I could use, then left him to die. Since I wasn’t sure he had died, when I reached the Beast City with all its glorious tech, I kept a low profile. I looted, although I didn’t even know what to do with the golden coins I’d stolen from the beast, until Dewlyn, a girl who offered me shelter, found me, and we split the looted goods.

  She took me to a safe house under a shop in Beast City where I met a bunch of other girls who had escaped the beasts. It was the first time I’d ever had girlfriends. It felt great, but didn’t last. Dewlyn had paired with Vice, Alpha Beast’s brother. She couldn’t be trusted. I put her in the same do-not-trust category as one of my girlfriends from the shelter, Patty, who had invited the crazy Men of Earth into our shelter. They came with trucks and asked us to come with them, and when I refused, they drugged me and loaded me up. But karma got them. Their truck broke down on the way to Texas, and we ended up at a traveling circus where I met Reagan, one of the performers. She ended up with Mayhem, but I’m not sure how, because I escaped the circus and found this community. Back then, it was still just a community of humans, but then the beasts came.

  I shivered thinking about the night when Hunters of Mayhem came in.

  Boy, they were silent.

  By the time I’d woken up in the morning, they’d already taken over the community. A rude awakening.

  A spear hit the dirt in front of my foot and jarred me into the present. Oh, we’d finally arrived. I picked the spear out of the ground, and threw it. It hit the community wall, snapped into two, and fell.

  “That’s the second one you broke,” Cole said. “Zarik’s gonna be pissed. You’ll have to work with no dinner.”

  I grunted and wiped sweat from my brow. If only the boy knew. Zarik would make me bathe him, braid his hair, shave him, that sort of thing. I wouldn’t skip dinner. Although I didn’t like living with the beasts, I had to stick it out here until Daddy found me or I found a way to get back to my bunker on Big Bear.

  The leather ties dug into my palms, and with a grunt, I dug my feet into the dirt and pulled. Cole did the same, and when Zarik came through the gates in search of his spear, I dropped the beast we’d dragged.

  Zarik approached and scrubbed his beard. “Who’s that?”

  “One of yours.”

  He shook his head. “Not.”

  “Well, he ain’t human.”

  “Ain’t ours either.” He crouched, shook the beast by the shoulder, and said something in Tineyan.

  The beast answered him. Zarik scrubbed his jaw again, knelt, and sniffed the beast’s hair, then straightened to his full height. He grinned and said to me, “You peed on him.”

  Cole raised his hand. “I did!”

  Chuckling, he said to Cole, “Good boy. Pissed on your prey. This will have Mayhem rolling with laughter. An eight-year-old human and his woman caught Alpha’s male.”

  Cole elbowed my side, his blue eyes bright. “Ya hear that? My woman.”

  I rolled my eyes at the same time the almost-dead beast growled.

  Zarik spun around and whistled, a long-drawn-out sound. Minutes later, Hasel joined us. The beast matriarch was a heavyset woman with a wide ridged nose, seven ridges on her chin and two at each temple. If she were a cat, I’d call her Midnight, her skin tone so dark it was nearly black. Her pitch-black eyes narrowed, and she frowned at the beast, then looked to me. “Where did you find him?”

  “Out there.” I pointed.

  “And his bike?”

  “Just him.”

  To Zarik, she said, “Carry him into the basement. The spare room. I need to see to his leg.”

  Fur sprouted on Zarik’s back, his joints popped, his jaw elongated, and his muscles expanded. He grew about four inches in height. There it was, one nightmare monster. I gripped my dress. Zarik hauled the male over his shoulder. We fell behind him, Hasel strolling next to me. Hasel’s features were softer than her beast-male counterparts. Her jaw was rounded and didn’t appear as if it were carved from stone. At an inch over six feet and at least eighty pounds heavier than me, she made me feel like a halfling from fairy tales walking next to her. She placed a heavy hand on my shoulder. “Don’t be afraid.”

  “I’m not,” I lied.

  Hasel stopped. She had disproportionally round dark eyes with long eyelashes and a wrinkled face. I couldn’t guess her age. Maybe hundred. She scrutinized me and said, “You will assist me.”

  “In what?”

  “The male’s leg is shattered from the knee down. There’s no hope he’ll retain the use of it, and his body is trying to mend it, so he’s losing precious life energy on something hopeless. He needs to use the energy to recover.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “I need to cut the leg.”

  I stepped back. “You don’t need me for that. Zarik will do.”

  “Zarik is a male.”

  “Exactly. He can chop that thing off in one swing.”

  “Zarik cannot care for another male in the same way a woman can. A woman in the room calms the beast. They scent you, and they want to impress you. He won’t protest when I tell him what I intend to do. He won’t want to appear a coward. “

  I shook my head. “I don’t… I’m not made for that. Just thinking about it makes my stomach roll.”

  “You will assist me.”

  “I’ll bathe him after. I’ll change the dressing on the wound.”

&nb
sp; Hasel narrowed her pitch-black eyes. “Who else can assist me?”

  “Maybe Momma Jo?” As soon as I said it, I knew it wouldn’t work. Hasel wouldn’t ask Momma Jo for help with anything, and Momma Jo would rather die than help a beast. Probably why I liked her better than Hasel.

  “No, thank you,” Hasel said.

  I chuckled. “That’s only because she makes a killer eggplant parmesan, and you want to taste it. It’s good stuff. Really good stuff.”

  Her lips turned up, her sharp teeth white against her dark skin. “I like you, girl. You’re a survivor, know when to fight, when to back off.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Follow me downstairs.”

  Crap.

  Chapter Four

  Torrent

  The hunter Zarik carried me through the halls and laid me down on the floor next to an old metal bed. I sniffed out bleach. The room was dark, but I could see. Zarik had lit candles. No electricity here. “No tech?” I asked.

  “Nah. We like it that way.”

  “Any com units?”

  “Nothing.”

  I couldn’t call in, not that I wanted to now that I’d found my mate. All I wanted was for her to curl up against me and tell me everything would be all right. As if. I’d have to earn that privilege, and there were no guarantees. Before, when I was a whole beast, my chances of reconciliation with Sienna were slim. Now? With a fucked-up leg and looking like something found in the dumpster? I didn’t stand a chance. A girl like Sienna could have any man. She sure as fuck wouldn’t have me. If I asked politely, maybe Zarik would grant me a boon and end my miserable existence.

  On my right, three first aid kits sat on top of the shelf. Zarik opened the bottom cupboard and rummaged through it, coming away with a stack of towels and a large roll of gauze. He turned back to me, and eyed my leg. “It doesn’t look good.”