Isabelle's Mate (Shifters of the Bulgarian Bloodline Book 6)

by Daria Wright

  “No. Not all humans are monsters.”

  “Am I a monster?”

  “Obviously.”

  “But I don't eat human flesh. I eat beef. Chicken. Pork. So by your definition of monster and not monster, I'm not one.”

  Now her mind insisted on spinning in vertigo. At a loss for words, Isabelle glared at him, not bothering to add anything to the statement. She attempted to process it, before muttering a curse under her breath. She hated his type, beyond the obvious werewolf affliction. The kind that knew better, thought better, and looked down their noses at you as if you were stupid and naïve, some kind of fool blundering around the world.

  He was a monster.

  That was the basis of her whole existence right now.

  “You shouldn't put everyone into one group because it suits you,” Milev said, his voice soft. “Everyone's different. And, for the record, I do agree with you. A lot of werewolves are bad. Nasty. But some are not. Do not mistake one for the other.”

  How was she supposed to mistake them for anything else? Werewolves were werewolves. They didn't change their spots.

  What was the point of what she did, if there were good werewolves?

  Isabelle closed her eyes, the headache continuing to assault her skull. She just wanted to shut her eyes right now. Never mind she hadn't been bitten, she was still captured by werewolves, and stuck with one.

  An annoying one.

  What was even worse was that despite herself, she knew she might grow to like him, given the time and space. That, or be driven insane by his constant banter, his mocking of her views.

  Presently, she heard a scratching sound. She opened her eyes to see that Milev had transformed into his feral form, and was using his teeth to gnaw at the chains at the edge, all without a growl or snarl in earshot.

  The familiar zip of terror faded at the knowledge he couldn't reach her. Instead, in a kind of morbid fascination, Isabelle watched the feral Milev as he chewed away.

  “This is harder than it looks,” he said, voice harsh and grating. “I've been at it for a while. I think they're wearing thin. Or I'm filing my teeth.”

  “You can speak?” The surprise made Isabelle forget her enmity. She'd never seen someone in feral form have so much control over their personality. Usually she expected growling, a little bit of gnashing, some biting.

  “I still have a tongue.” He did appear to chew on his words, with the way his jaw moved to form them. “It's just... more of an effort.”

  “I thought you didn't have any control in that form.”

  Milev stopped gnawing. “Of course we do. We choose to turn into it. The same way we choose to bite, and attack, and kill. We choose to give into our anger. Or we choose not to.”

  Running through lessons in her head, along with past interactions with werewolves, Isabelle felt fairly certain that what Milev had just described was impossible. Once a werewolf had shifted, the control on their instincts lessened to near nothing. They became primal savages.

  And then here was Milev, happily chewing away at his chains, without any apparent change in his personality.

  What the actual fuck.

  “I'm serious,” he said, finding clear amusement in her flabbergasted expression. “It's all mind over matter. So, rest assured, when I do break out of this, I'm not going to have an uncontrollable urge to consume you.”

  She took a deep breath, focusing on his peculiar golden eyes, which gleamed brighter under the transformation. “Why are you even here, anyway? Why did they lock you up?”

  “Didn't I already explain?” He shifted back into human form. The way the snout melted back into a human nose unnerved Isabelle, but also made her oddly curious. Didn't that hurt?

  “Uh, maybe.” She rewound her memory, fighting past her initial derision. “Your... alpha is away. You were overrun by another clan?”

  “Oh, good. You were paying attention. Maybe there's hope for you yet.”

  “How long have you been down here?”

  An enemy of my enemy is... not an enemy. For now.

  Snapping at this werewolf wasn't going to get her out of the cell. For whatever reason, he was stuck down here with her, treating her with an amused, slightly condescending air. Maybe it was something to do with the irritating way he talked. Maybe they'd just shut him down here so they didn't have to listen to his theatrics.

  For some reason, his stupid, dumb speech about the cannibals resonated in her skull as well.

  Not all werewolves are monsters. Yeah. That's gonna take a while to wrap my head around.

  She glowered at Milev, annoyed at herself for even considering him as an ally. For deigning to talk to him at all.

  His nose twitched. He narrowed his eyes and glanced towards the basement entrance, up a flight of rough-hewn wooden steps. “Here they come. With food, maybe.”

  The scraping sound of metal reverberated, followed by a click. The door swung open, and three werewolves trumped down the stairs, their boots thundering over the boards, sparking up a mountain of dust that spiraled in the atmosphere.

  Immediately, anxiety and hatred blossomed in Isabelle, and she glanced at Milev, who raised a finger as close as he could to his lips, warning her to be silent.

  “Well, well, well,” one of the werewolves said cheerfully, carrying two cereal boxes with two bottles of water tucked under his left armpit. “We got our illegal alien and our human whore down here. How've you two been getting on? Bitch likes killing her wolves, man, know what I mean?” He winked at Milev, who returned a thin smile back.

  “Drop the food and head back up.” A taller, blonde-haired and gray-eyed werewolf muttered. The third one skulked behind with a bandage over his arm, glaring daggers with orange eyes at Isabelle.

  The initial speaker tossed the cereal and bottles at each captive. The bottle bounced away from Isabelle, and he shrugged. “Oh well. I'll maybe pick that up later. Bye!”

  The werewolf with the injured arm, however, went to pick the bottle up. He placed it beside Isabelle, before viciously kicking her in the ribs. She gasped, as he said, “You murdered my brother and my father. If I had my way, you'd be fucking dead. You murdered them. Filthy little swine.”

  “Just repaying the favor,” Isabelle wheezed, “after what your kind did to me and mine.” A dark, evil smile crept over her lips, designed to infuriate him beyond reason.

  The werewolf snarled, his canines lengthening.

  A drop of sweat pushed out of her hairline. Maybe I shouldn't have done that.

  “George! Come. You'll have your retribution later,” one of his companions barked.

  George shivered in incandescent rage, before backing off and following the other two upstairs. The promise behind his eyes left no doubt in Isabelle's mind what he intended to do to her later.

  Chapter Two

  “That went better than expected,” Milev said, after the door had slammed shut, with the key twisting in the lock. “A whole box of cereal? They shouldn't have.”

  “Could have at least brought milk,” Isabelle muttered, rubbing her ribcage where George had lashed out at her. “Cornflakes is horrible dry.”

  “I don't think you're in a position to complain at the moment,” Milev pointed out, before tearing open the packet and grabbing a handful of flakes to stuff down his face. Isabelle watched him in a mix of disbelief and slight entertainment before she struggled to open her packet as well, and crunch through the dry, plain flakes. It tasted like cardboard without milk to soak it in, though she tried rinsing it down with the warm bottle of water.

  “A full stomach. Now I can continue trying to break out.” Milev let out a burp.

  “You're incorrigible, aren't you?” Isabelle munched through a few more flakes, shaking her head at the quirky werewolf's antics.

  “I certainly try. My alpha's such a lovesick idiot, though. Found his human girl after years of separation, and he's gone off to kill his uncle with her. The things people do these days for love.”

  Isa
belle drank more water, letting it trickle down her throat, and wiped her mouth. “Say what?”

  “It should be okay, though. We have an ally in a Canadian clan who will come for this place. I was actually on the phone to him when these bastards decided to take over and attempt their subjugation of North Dakota.”

  “Look, I don't care about that. You're saying a werewolf has gone to kill their uncle? With a human? What?”

  Milev shrugged. “He's a nasty piece of work. The whole Spirova clan is trying to find him and kill him, because he's a flesh-eater. They're the alpha clan in Bulgaria. Alpha clan rules go – and they say no flesh-eaters under their jurisdiction.”

  Isabelle gaped. She had never heard of anything like this. Ruling clans? Rules? “You... are hunting someone for being a flesh-eater?” Her mind struggled for clarification. “You kill your own kind?”

  “Well, of course. Humans tend to notice if too many people go missing, and we prefer staying secret, you know. So we punish the flesh-eaters. Don't you know the arrangement between the North American clans? It's illegal to hunt humans. Any werewolf you catch doing that is breaking the law, and subject to the wrath of the free clans.”

  Milev clicked his fingers then, a beatific smile overriding his oddly attractive face. Attractive? Isabelle shook her head, trying to dismiss the wayward thought.

  She shouldn't find werewolves attractive. That was wrong. And yet...

  “These guys are your basic kidnapper rabid human people. Except they happen to be werewolves. That's all. Crazy kidnappers.” Milev glanced at the ceiling, rolling his eyes. “Though I hear you gunned down about a third of their number. Not bad. I'd give you a medal, but my hands are tied.”

  “Can you stop with the jokes?” Isabelle pleaded, half exasperated, half bemused at his attitude. “This is a serious situation we're in. We're prisoners, and I don't see them being friendly to us for long. Try and look for an escape.”

  “That's what I've been doing for the past two weeks,” Milev said. “Whilst languishing away in this luxurious basement. These chains are quite weak now. I'll help you break out of yours if you want afterwards. As long as you don't shoot.” He grinned wolfishly. “I've been here a while.”

  “Oh.”

  “For the record, by the way, I'm glad they didn't kill you.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, I have a pretty woman to keep me company. And to remind me I have something to fight for, other than myself.”

  Utterly bewildered at his compliment, Isabelle watched as he morphed and continued his gnawing of the chain. She felt completely misplaced and in shock, as if someone had just plunged her into cold water. The hatred inside drained away from the onslaught of his exuberance. It was hard to hate someone who insisted on smiling and making light banter. It was hard to hate someone who seemed fundamentally likeable.

  And some of the things, well... they made sense. Somewhere. It didn't help with the developing headache, because she really wanted to hate the werewolf in front of her, but somehow, her rage felt impotent. Channeling such volatile emotions towards Milev was worse than useless. He would likely just smile at her with that irritating grin, golden eyes twinkling, and tell her to lighten up.

  She sighed, resigning herself to the presence of her cellmate, and the encroaching threat above.

  An enemy of my enemy is an ally.

  This time, she believed the words. A flash of irritation coursed through her when she thought about her hunter allies, who had abandoned her to her fate.

  She had chosen, of course, to stay behind and help. She could have left him behind, like he did to her. Or he might have provided covering fire, along with Kevin. However, the both of them had simply slammed on the gas and motored out of there.

  Betrayed. Not a nice feeling. And now this werewolf, a representative of the race she hated, gave her talks about cannibals and insisted that not all his kind followed the same path as the ones who had brought Isabelle to the allure of the hunters.

  He likely had a finely curved face under that growth of beard, and probably nice, fine hair. At the moment it clung to his head, unwashed and greasy. Of course, now he was in feral form, with a fine golden coat of fur over his snouted face, and he chewed and scratched and twisted the chain, eyes narrowed in concentration.

  “You know, I'm surprised your teeth are still sharp, if you've been doing that for two weeks,” Isabelle said, pacing through her cereal, grimacing at the texture.

  “It's because I'm magic,” Milev said, spitting out a fleck of something onto the wooden floorboards. “And everyone knows werewolves are magic.”

  The remark amused her for about a millisecond, before her humor dried out into the grave seriousness she accustomed herself to. One of the comments from earlier wormed into Isabelle's head. “That guy called you an illegal alien. What did he mean?”

  “I'm Bulgarian. Had a Dutch mother, which is why I have the light hair. He's a little upset that a Bulgarian werewolf has overtaken North Dakota as alpha. Never mind what the Americans did to the natives a fair few years back. Damn immigrants!”

  He laughed, and gave a helpless shrug. “I try to not worry about it.”

  “Do you worry about anything?” Stupid question, really, Isabelle thought. Stupid, but he did act as if all this wasn't a big deal.

  “Sure I do,” Milev said. “But worry doesn't solve anything, does it? Would you prefer me to sit here, grinding my teeth in despair and complaining about the situation, or grinding my teeth on an escape, and actually doing something?” He chewed with renewed vigor at the chain.

  Isabelle digested his words, considering their message. Honestly, she didn't understand. She didn't understand how someone could smile so much. Not with the position he dwelled in. She caught dark stains around the werewolf's chaining area, like droplets of blood, and wondered what had happened to him in the time he was trapped here.

  Then, after a focused session of gnawing, the chain snapped off. Milev spat out more rust, then growled, “Well, only took half a month. Now I should have more traction...” He stood up, no longer restricted and near immobilized, braced his foot against the wall, and yanked on the second chain.

  It tumbled off after a few minutes of solid tugging.

  “Perfect,” he said. “Now, I assume you want to be freed, too? Or are you still terrified of me?”

  “Just free me. I'll decide what to feel about you later,” Isabelle said.

  The werewolf bared his sharp teeth in a vicious smile. “Sounds good to me.”

  He advanced over to her, golden eyes bright, and Isabelle followed him, still shrinking back in spite of herself. He was one of the biggest werewolves she'd ever seen – his human clothes stretched to near bursting point under the full feral transformation.

  Those massive, bulging arms reached over to her chains, and he began the same arduous process, but with all his limbs unrestrained. A few minutes later, both of them were free. Isabelle wrapped the chains around her arms to stop herself getting caught in them, and Milev did the same.

  “Now, getting out might be the awkward part.” He rubbed his wrists, his lips wrinkling around his jagged teeth. “S’pose you should hop onto my back when we're out, I can run like the wind.”

  “Can't we just kill them?”

  Milev turned to face her, one eyebrow raised. It appeared slightly comical on his wolfish features. “You know, the answer to everything isn't always 'kill.' Doesn't your God say that's bad or something?”

  “If they usurped your alpha, don't you have a duty to him?” Isabelle countered. She didn't know, honestly, but she really wanted to find a reason to kill the werewolves above. Especially the one called George, before he got to her.

  You killed my brother and father. You murderer. The words bounced in her mind.

  They affected her more than anticipated. She had done the same thing to this werewolf's family as one did to hers.

  She'd also attacked first.

  She didn't know
what to feel about that.

  “I suppose I could make an exception... if there weren’t about eight werewolves to deal with. I'm good... I'm not that good.” Milev let out a theatrical sigh. “Our best bet is to try and make a break for it – I'll listen in for their positions, and then we'll just sneak outside and be off.”

  “That's a terrible idea.”

  “You have any better?”

  Isabelle shrugged. If there were eight werewolves crawling in the building, she couldn't think of anything else. Not without finding wherever they had stored her gun.

  “Were you thinking of smashing down the door?”

  Milev shrugged. “Yup. Unless you have a better idea.”

  Isabelle smiled at him, before plucking out the hairpin wedged on her scalp. “I might know a thing or two.”

  Milev grinned. “Nice one! You'll have about three hours before they come and check. In case you're slow with lock-picking.”

  “Depends on the lock.”

  Milev prowled up the stairs, and listened against the door. Isabelle examined the lock, before bending the hairpin and inserting it into the hole, also leaning her ear against the door to listen for the clicks.

  The werewolf's massive form towered above her, yet she didn't feel afraid.

  Somehow, though she couldn't explain why, she trusted Milev.

  She had to hope that trust wasn't sorely misplaced.

  Chapter Three

  Milev tapped her on the shoulder, making her flinch in surprise. “Sounds like they're watching T.V. Probably five in the house.”

  She calmed down, and scowled up at him. “You can hear the T.V? Because I can't hear shit.” Isabelle placed pressure on the lock, gently teasing one of the pins up.

  “Like I said, I'm magical.”

  Isabelle snorted, but kept working on the lock. In the meanwhile, she had the scent of the werewolf to contend with, slowly undulating into her nostrils and triggering her brain with pheromones. She gritted her teeth, irritated. Those pheromones were seriously messing up her concentration, making her mind digress to unexpected places, such as imagining those huge, bulky arms of his wrapped around her protectively, his lips pressing against her temple. Her cheeks flushed, and she knew full well that the werewolf could scent any form of arousal on her skin.