by Milana Jacks
“Share,” I repeated. “But he shared his aftershave with you, or you stole it from him.”
Torrent chuckled. “Never mind the sharing.”
A pause. Torrent picked at the leather strings hanging from his kilt. “I looked for you, you know. After I recovered from getting shot, I went to see Larry at Com Twenty-two. Even back then, I knew I shouldn’t have done what I had. Hell, I regretted it the moment you cried out after your dad.”
“Why did you do it?”
Torrent banged the back of his head against the wall. “I saw my mate for the first time. She was beautiful. Then a man came and took off his clothes, intent on joining her. Rage took me. There was nothing I could do.”
“Monster.”
“I’ll take that.”
“You know, human women have brothers, uncles, and fathers, so attacking a naked man for taking a bath in a lake is…crazy.”
“It’s perfectly natural for me. He was naked. My mate was naked. End of story.”
“He was on the east side of the lake. We don’t take baths together. But we have to manage with what resources we got.”
“I’m telling you how it looked to me.”
“I see you’re remorseful.”
“All I’m saying is it’s natural for us to react in the way I did, but it doesn’t make it right.”
“You almost killed my dad. I thought you had. I didn’t have anywhere to go.”
“You could’ve stayed with me.”
“Says the crazy monster who attacked my dad and whisked me away.”
“How did you get to Beast City?”
“Hitched a ride.”
“Fuck me. Why didn’t you go back home?”
“When the car pulled up next to me, asking if I were going there, I…I sort of went with him.”
“Him.”
“Him. A man. Handsome too. About my age. Asked for my number.” Torrent’s upper lip lifted. I smiled. I’d hitched a ride with a family on their way to visit their daughter—what was her name? I looked up, trying to remember what the girl in the back had called her. Ah! Reem. The family felt safe, so I got into their car.
“And?” Torrent asked.
“And nothing about the guy. But I got something to say about your food supplies. Apart from the gold, your food supply is poor. Even if I rationed carefully, the reserves you carried wouldn’t have lasted me till home. Beast City was closer.”
Torrent tilted his head. “What food supply?”
“The ones you stashed under the bike’s seat.”
“Ah.”
“At least you had some beef jerky.” His eyebrows shot up. “What?” I asked.
“Don’t get mad, okay? That wasn’t beef.”
The back of my hand flew to my mouth. Ew. “I feel like strangling you.”
He threw an arm over my shoulder and squeezed. “Me and you, Sienna, we’re gonna swim out of our shit and live happily ever after.”
“You’re delusional.”
“We are, we’re gonna make it. What do you want? Tell me, and I’ll do it.”
“I want out of this cage.”
He scrubbed his jaw. “To do what? Run?”
“I want to be with my people.”
Torrent shook his head. “You have no idea how the world works. You’ve been sheltered from it all your life. You refuse to believe there’re evil humans, and you think they’ll accept you because you are human. It is not so.”
“Oh, and you’d know a thing or two about humanity. Yeah, right.”
“Men of Earth had me in the back of their truck, then underground for months. I got to meet some of them. One on one. You see, they didn’t want to kill me. I don’t know why, and believe me, many times I wished they had, especially on days when they tried forcing me on a female.” He paused.
I swallowed, didn’t think I’d enjoy listening to the rest. “I’m not interested in your escapades.”
“Are you jealous?”
“No.”
“You shouldn’t be. I am a mated male. No matter what you do, I will always”—he tapped the floor—“sit in your corner.”
Liar. “You told Hasel what I’d done.”
“Never.”
“She knew.”
“She’s old and wise. She will manipulate you to tell her. Don’t say anything. Deny.”
“I have.”
“Good girl.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I’ll even let you go back to your people, and when you realize those women aren’t sane, that they’ve been brainwashed and used, you’ll return and have your place with me. Don’t hesitate to return.”
“You gonna let me out of the cage?”
“I am.” Torrent flipped to the side. A palm flat on the floor, he bent his elbow and pushed his body up using his cane for balance. “It pains me to have to let you go, but you must see for yourself, because nothing I say will make you believe it.” He walked to the door, then opened it.
“I don’t trust you,” I said.
“That’s the thing. I lost that, so I gotta work on it one day at a time.”
I rushed out of the cage before he changed his mind. At the door, I spun around. “Thank you for not punishing me. Or cooking me.”
He leaned a hand on the cage, gripped the bars tight, and smirked. “Oh baby, I will punish you, just not right now. It’s not the time or the place for it. Still, I dream of our life together. And in my dreams, you are constantly doing something you shouldn’t be doing, and I have to correct you. I foresee you will live in a perpetual state of swollen ass, because, you, my sweet girl, are a brat.”
“You think there’s a future for us?”
“I’m an optimist.”
“Since when?”
“Last night. I realized that if I don’t make it, you won’t either. I gotta stick around for you.”
“I used to be an optimist,” I said.
“Dressed too.”
“Hm?”
“You used to be dressed.”
I crossed my arm over my beasts. The entire time he’d been here, I’d worn only my underpants.
Torrent chuckled. “I’ve seen them already.”
I rushed past him back into the cage and put on my black dress, then tried to get back out, but his big body blocked the cage, his hands gripping the bars.
I stepped up to him, inhaled his aftershave, and he bent his head when I looked up. Freckles of hazel sparkled in his eyes.
He kissed my nose. “You be careful over there. If it doesn’t feel right, it is not right. You’ve survived this long on your own, so you must have listened to your instinct. Go on and do that.”
“Okay.”
“Cole!”
I jumped.
A minute later, Cole appeared at the door.
“Escort Sienna to the east wing.”
Chapter Fifteen
Torrent
Twenty minutes later, the boy returned to the kitchen where Hasel chopped onions as if they were made of steel. My eyes watered as I ate crackers and all the chicken soup I could stomach while her chopping prickled in my ears. Any minute now, I half expected her to chop through the entire counter.
I’d pissed her off. Both Sienna and I denied anything had happened, and keeping a mate in a cage without any proof wasn’t happening. It would send me into madness. Although I was still on the mend and weak, Hasel and the two others on the premises didn’t have the resources to contain me or my mate. They’d need to cage me and put her under observation. Seeing as my sweet mate had escaped her captors before, keeping her in this place against her will would prove a challenge, one Hasel couldn’t undertake. Sienna’s dad worked for us, and she’d promised Alpha Beast to keep Sienna at the community.
Cole returned and sat down with me. I leaned in. “Tell me.”
“You were right,” he said, his blue eyes wide. “She went, she saw, she’s back.”
“Mm-hm. Did you take her to my rooms?”
; “I did.”
“Great job. Thank you. Now, I want to clear something up with you. Man to man.”
“Okay.”
“She is not your woman.”
“I got that on my own.”
“Good. Hasel?” She pretended she hadn’t heard when her hearing was better than mine probably. Thing was, I should’ve, at the very least, punished Sienna. Hasel wanted to have her stripped naked and lashed so she’d think about what she’d done to her mate. I didn’t have the heart to punish her, because I didn’t think it was fair. Raised sheltered from the world, then thrown into the fray to fend for herself, she was lucky she’d survived unharmed this long. I couldn’t punish her for falling under the spell of a much older woman who had treated her as a daughter. Sienna had never known a mother’s love. And I sure as fuck couldn’t punish her for wanting revenge against me.
In fact, I was proud of her.
Twisted shit. Such was mating. All fucked up until somehow it worked out. And ours would work out. Right now. Because I’d secured her in my room with no place to go. The women in the east wing had rejected her. Whether it was for failing to poison me or for getting away with nothing but half a day in the cage and some dirt on her black dress remained to be seen.
“Torrent?” Cole said.
“Hm?” I peeled my gaze away from Hasel’s knife.
“Zarik says there’s a training program for warriors in Beast City.”
“There is.” I crunched on a cracker.
“When you and Sienna go back, can I come with you guys?”
“No,” Hasel answered. “I need you here.”
“You don’t really need me, and I’m no good with throwing spears, but I could be if someone trained me. I wanna go, dude. Please take me with you.”
“I said no,” Hasel repeated.
I sipped my soup, giving Sienna some time to get accustomed to our new rooms, the ones we would share together for as long as I stayed here. Which was another two or three days. After that? Well, I didn’t know what would happen in Beast City, what Alpha would say, but I knew after the excitement of my return settled, Vice wouldn’t let me get away with picking up an unregistered mate.
Since I didn’t know what was in my own future, I couldn’t promise anything to the poor kid with innocent wonder in his eyes. Man, it must be great to be eight. “I began my training on my fifth birthday,” I said.
Hasel stopped chopping. She washed her hands, turned around, and leaned against the counter. I wiped my mouth. “So the morning I turned five, I leapt out of bed and found my mother with my aunts busy with my older sister. It was her wedding day. Or so I thought. I pulled on my mom’s skirts to get her attention, but she shooed me away, told me to wait by the mirror. So I did. Waited by the mirror where I could see my sister’s face. She stared into her reflection. There was no joy in her eyes, so I stuck my tongue out to make her laugh.” I sipped my soup, my mouth gone dry.
The boy leaned in. “Did she?”
“Did she what?”
“Laugh.”
“Nah. You see, at five, my entire world revolved around me. That morning, I was supposed to start my male journey, follow my father and his father before him in preparation for one day becoming High Priest of Tineya, Alpha’s highest councilor. But everyone ignored me because of my sister’s wedding. I didn’t like that, so I threw a few tantrums, which got me locked up in my room. I never saw the wedding, and my sister returned to the house instead of leaving it. I was too busy to notice her ’cause I got into my training the next day. I thought I wanted to follow my dad, be like him. I even talked like him, walked like him, thought like him.”
“But here you are,” Hasel said. “What happened?”
“Sixteen years later, at the time of my first Judgment, a day when I would judge another beast for his crimes, I stood in the same place my sister had stood when I was five. Same mirror. She sat on her bed and asked me to set the beast free.”
The boy didn’t move, kept his gaze locked with mine, eyes like saucers. I scuffed up his hair and continued. “My sister told me about Earth, about the youngest of Alpha Nie’s sons, Goner, who was quietly sneaking out beasts from Tineya to Earth. She told me she was leaving, told me not to believe my father, for there is no one true descendant of Great Mother, no one true way, no one true Alpha. Our alpha is the strongest beast among us, not the truest beast. She believed Jamie was the strongest, one she wanted to follow. I accused her of blasphemy and threatened to tell our father she planned on leaving.”
Hasel gasped. “If you were mine…” She picked a wooden spoon and waved it. “Mm-hm.”
“We got into a fight, and in a fit of anger, my sister lashed out about her wedding day, a wound she’d kept to herself all those years. You see, my sister’s mate was found to have conspired against Tineya’s Alpha, namely he’d helped smuggle goods off Tineya and back to Jamie. It was her mate’s Judgment day and not their wedding day. Father made her wear a white dress and took her to the Judgment Hall in hopes her mate would deny his involvement, denounce another alpha, and accept the holy nature of Alpha Nie so that he might join with my sister. Her mate admitted his involvement, proclaimed Alpha Nie an imposter, and pledged loyalty to the Alpha Beast. My father sentenced him to death. My sister’s life was ruined. My mother has never been the same.”
“Because your mother wanted your father to free him,” Hasel said.
“He could’ve,” I said. “He could’ve smuggled both of them out. Instead, he ordered her mate’s head chopped off right then and there. Even after all that, I refused to believe my sister. I didn’t tell on her. I went to deal out my Judgment.” I took a sip of water. “The male before me was a mighty beast with eyes and body as black as Sienna’s dress. Proud jaw and a deep scar in the middle of his forehead.”
“An ax cut,” Hasel said.
“He challenged Alpha Nie.”
Hasel sat down at the table, gaze on the floor. I took her wrinkled hand in both of mine. “He’d have won,” I said.
“How do you know?” When she lifted her gaze, I saw her tears.
“Next to me, my father stank of fear, and I knew he’d lied. I knew we were all being lied to. Alpha Nie was no descendant. He’s a weak beast with lots of power.”
“Did you have the guy’s head chopped off?” the boy asked.
“No. I freed him.”
“But they killed him anyway. Didn’t they?” Hasel asked.
“They killed him down in the prison. I remember the beast to this day. If it weren’t for him, I would have stayed on Tineya. If I hadn’t seen him march up to the most powerful beast and demand he fight him, I wouldn’t have known courage, for my own father was a coward. He never believed in Nie either, but he was too scared, too corrupt, too comfortable in his position. If he believed in Nie, he wouldn’t have feared for Nie’s life. Those who believe they are the hand of a higher purpose, or God, if you will, they are fearless in their destruction.”
Cole averted his eyes. I thought so. Yeah, he still believed his momma and the things his parents had taught him, in the same way I’d believed mine back in the day. “The funny thing is,” I said, “I don’t even know the beast’s name.” I lied. I remembered his name.
“Reor, the first of his name,” Hasel said.
“You think it was your mate I judged?” I asked.
“I’d like to believe my mate challenged Nie.”
“Now you know.”
“Thank you,” she said. “And you’re right, he would have won. Life has a funny way of putting people together, seemingly as strangers, but we’re all connected. Our paths crisscrossed somewhere, somehow. What about your calling?”
“I trained with Jamie when I came here. Forgot all about the priesthood. Don’t plan on becoming one.”
“Well, that’s wasted talent. Nobody on this planet knows more about our beliefs than you. Faith helps people like me who have loved and lost.” Hasel stood. “Cole, double-check the gates are locked.”
“Now, boy.”
“Oh man. So, can I come with you to Beast City?” he asked me.
“You can stay. Hasel can teach you more about beast life than any of us can. We don’t have many elders on Earth.”
Cole dragged his feet outside.
“Hasel, watch the boy.”
“He’s harmless.”
I shook my head, doubting it.
“We should have a mating party,” Hasel said.
“No party,” I countered. Disappointment washed over her face. Hasel went back to chopping. Fuckin’ A. “Have a party.”
She spun around with a smile on her face. “Already have ideas about the cake. And I’m inviting the women.”
“Absolutely not.”
“We must show them who we are. That we drink and laugh just like them.”
I shook my head again but left Hasel in a better place than I’d found her.
Chapter Sixteen
Sienna
Despite knowing I waited in his room, Torrent hadn’t returned yet. I’d been sitting on his bed watching the gray clouds, wondering if it would rain and if the water would ruin the markers I’d set up for my dad. Not that they’d do me any good now since I’d accepted Torrent’s pairing. I chuckled, thinking about my short life and how it changed the day I’d gone to bathe. Forgot to bring soap too, and chastised myself for not remembering it. The lack of soap was one of the peak crises of my life before Torrent stormed into it and turned my day into seasons of running and hiding from him.
Only to now sit on his bed and accept his pairing.
The sun dipped below the wall. Cole ran outside, Zarik on his heels, probably making a quick perimeter check. When I went back to the east wing, Momma Jo refused to speak to me. Georgina informed me I wasn’t welcome there anymore. They called me a murderer and a liar, said I’d tried to blame their mother for my own problems, said Hasel had been there, threatening Momma Jo. They vowed revenge if Hasel came after their mother. They believed Momma Jo innocent. They believed I conspired against her.