by Milana Jacks
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
His Beast Mate
Beast Mates, #4.5
Milana Jacks
Copyright © 2017 by Milana Jacks
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Free Beast Mate
About the Author
Also
Chapter One
Kitten
Red manicured fingernails dangled from a hand inside my food bowl. I flicked one cold nail. The hand didn’t move. It must belong to Karen, who had entertained in the poker room last weekend. The same Karen who’d once entertained the males in the beast compound. I’d seen her over there.
I glanced up at the tiny high window ten feet above me as if it offered me a memory of when I’d seen Karen at the compound. Rey and Jamie’s wedding night. “Ha!” I snapped my fingers. That was right. I remembered her from their wedding night. I hadn’t gone completely crazy yet.
Karen had called out Jamie about his mate. I should’ve killed her then for insulting his mate, but resolved to party on instead. Had I killed her, she wouldn’t have ended up inside Owner’s mansion after Jamie threw her out. She wouldn’t have ended up as my meal, and I wouldn’t have had to deal with the internal debate.
To eat or not to eat.
My stomach rumbled. I glanced back at the window. By my count, it was Friday. On Fridays, Willam Ghason, who made me call him Owner, shipped his wife off back to her parents in the community and opened his home to potential business partners. Some came with their wives, some came alone, all came for a poker game where they could sample Owner’s stock of captured women. The other females, tucked in soundproofed rooms ten feet under his mansion, were human. I was a beast bitch. It made me special. It made me the weekend flavor. Everyone wanted the beast bitch, though not for sex as they did with human captives. They wanted me to serve them on my knees. It was their way of saying fuck you to my Alpha.
I ate. They’d filed my sharp teeth, so it was exceptionally difficult ripping flesh with the blunt ones, but I managed only because I couldn’t take another beating. My body could take it, but my mind slowly slipped away each time I rebelled, each time I didn’t take from the hand that fed me. Not this hand. Owner’s hand.
I threw the bones back into the bowl. Footsteps sounded. Music to my ears. Maybe a rescue? One never knew. I scampered to the door and gripped the iron bars of my cage. Someone sniffed. These human women cried a lot, and I wondered if they’d dehydrate from the water spilling out of their eyes. “Shut it,” I barked.
They listened. Feared me. As they should.
Ah, I recognized his footsteps. I counted the steps from the very top to the bottom. One hundred and twenty-five. He entered our holding quarters and paused. My caged room occupied the east corner of the house. Where would he turn? Would he go right for the twin girls down the dark narrow hallway, or left for me? My palms sweated, my stomach uneasy after the meal. I chastised myself for fearing him and gritted my blunt teeth.
He stepped to the left. For me it was. I scurried back and into the middle of the room, dropped to my knees, spread them, and put my upturned palms on my thighs. I lowered my head and listened to the tech scan his retina. The dreaded cage lock clicked. I’d never thought I’d want to be caged like this, but now, when it offered me protection from the others who’d tried to come in uninvited, it was a good thing.
It didn’t offer me protection from Owner, my gatekeeper.
Polished black shoes appeared in my line of view. I knew better than to lift my head and greet him. I bent and kissed the tips of his shoes.
“What is your name?” he asked, his voice rough with need. Owner loved his weekends, especially Fridays. He didn’t visit during the week. Whatever food and water we got from Friday night through Sunday afternoon would be all we’d have for the week. I couldn’t be sure, but I believed during the week, his wife roamed upstairs, completely unaware of the females in her basement. Nobody dared scream to alert her. It was certain death. I wasn’t suicidal. I would survive him the same way I’d survived Alpha Nie’s prison when I was twelve. And I would escape the same way I’d escaped our home planet of Tineya. Alpha Beast would come for me. One day, he’d come for me. But not today.
Today, after greeting Owner, I intertwined my fingers behind my neck and squared my shoulders. “My name is Kitten, Owner.”
With his shoe, he kicked my knees wider apart while he wound the collar around my neck and snapped on my leash. “I see you’ve had dinner.”
“Yes, Owner.”
“Good kitty. A new client came in tonight. Wants to play a few hands of cards.”
“He will lose his money,” I said.
Owner smiled. “Yes, he will. You will serve him any way he wants to be served. He’s eager to meet a beast bitch.”
“Thank you, Owner.”
He gripped my jaw and yanked me up. I locked my eyes with his green ones, praying to Great Mother to give me the strength not to bite his face off. If my eyes paled right now, he’d cancel the party upstairs, and he and I would party down here. He’d tie me up and beat me until he tired. The weekend was long, and Owner kept in shape. He wouldn’t tire quickly enough, and I would go mad. I couldn’t slip. I couldn’t allow my temper to get the best of me.
His thumb swiped over my lips.
I followed up with my tongue.
“I love how eager you are. Every weekend, your eyes betray you. You think you don’t like what I’m giving you, but you love it. Shall I serve you the man upstairs this weekend? He’s big, would make a nice meal.”
“Yes.” Whoever waited for me upstairs could become my next meal.
He squeezed my throat. “Yes what?”
“Yes, Owner.”
“What’s your name?”
“Kitten.” I remembered my real name. Felicia of Wiedeg, the first battle-trained female on Earth. And I would get my revenge. “What’s his name?”
“John.”
“What shall I call him?”
“Whatever he wants to be called.”
“I can’t wait to meet him.”
“Let’s go.” Owner released my throat, spun around, and tugged my leash. I crawled behind him.
My cage clicked closed. Two cages next to mine were empty, but not the third or the fourth. As we passed the third cage, Sonia lifted her gaze from the floor. The seven months she’d spent down here reflected in her brown eyes. They showed a lack of willpower and hope, and matched the chain burns around her neck from when she’d tried to hang herself. Her lifeless eyes also went along with the multiple cuts on the insides of her wrists and thighs from the times she’d tried to bleed herself to death and failed. She kept calling herself a coward for failing. I told her she was brave for enduring and ordered her to shut the fuck up and think about her life outside, five years from now.
Five years from now, I would be mated. I didn’t know that for sure, but it was the second motivation I needed to get through the weekend.
The fourth cage held Alexandra, a kidnapped eighteen-year-old brunette with royal Spanish bloodlines. They would sell her to the highest bidder. Nobody had touched her since she’d been h
ere, and I presumed she would fetch the highest price if she were sold as a virgin.
“Hey, asshole!” she said and rushed at the door. She gripped the bars, knuckles white. “Let me out of here.”
Owner ignored her. I winked. Soon.
We climbed the steps. My knees were scraped and bruised from the many months I’d been walking on all fours. They believed me an animal, a domestic cat without claws and with blunt teeth. Some days, I felt like one. Other days? Not so much. On those days, I feared myself, I feared I’d piss Owner off and he’d beat me to death, so I tried to behave.
I held my instinct to flee this place in check when we emerged into a foyer and his butler spared me a glance. Beside him was a door. A huge one from top to bottom, all decorated glass. The door was my favorite part of the forsaken house. The exit to the outside where a beast ship waited for me somewhere among the stars.
We passed the main living space and headed for the small, dark room. Male voices drifted from behind the closed doors. Owner stepped inside the room and closed the door behind us. The chatter died. I knelt with my bottom touching my heels, my right thigh touching Owner’s pants, and my gaze on the floor.
“There you are, Kitten,” Boris said. He was one of the two Men of Earth guys who’d declawed me, raped me, driven me here blindfolded, and sold me to Owner. “We’ve missed you.”
I winced at the sound of his voice but didn’t lift my head. These two had gotten quite a bit of money for stashing me here with Owner until my transport to Retreat, Texas. So now they had plenty to spend on poker games. They came nearly every weekend, and when either of them won, Owner would give them a cut of winnings from the poker game. Since my heat, the one that had reduced me to begging for Torrent but getting the Men of Earth, they hadn’t touched me in a sexual way. Perhaps the novelty of it had worn off.
There was another man in the room. He would be the one they ripped off tonight. Owner and the other two bet high and cheated in cards, then they’d split the profit. Only once had a stranger won, and he hadn’t collected his winnings. I knew that because Owner fed me the man the same weekend.
“What is this?” the new man asked.
“A gift for the winner. A rare jewel in my collection.”
Huh? Usually I served drinks and food during poker parties, which made the men who came here either nervous or excited. In any case, Owner wanted a distraction while they cheated. This was something else, though. It made me uneasy. I didn’t know what Owner had cooking upstairs.
Owner jerked my chain.
I looked up and squinted, adjusting my eyes to the lamp hanging low from the celling. It lit up the table. Boris was a middle-aged man with a receding hairline, small green eyes, and a small wiener. He wore a brown suit and smiled to show me his buck teeth. His buddy, Alex, wore a gray suit, no tie, and a pink shirt that contrasted with his tanned skin. He had long black hair he kept in a ponytail, and bushy eyebrows that nearly hid his brown eyes. He didn’t comment. A quiet, deadly human, whereas Boris was a loud, stupid human.
Tonight’s victim was a tall, broad-shouldered, dirty-blond man who wore a finely tailored suit and sported a watch from another era when human watchmakers cared enough to make such expensive things and decorate them with tiny golden crowns. With his back turned, I followed the watch on his hand as he grabbed his whiskey glass and sipped. He turned around and leaned on the bar, crossing one ankle over the other.
Our eyes met.
His were cold and gray.
Mine widened instantly. My heart thudded in my ears, and I emitted a soft whine as my mating instincts ignited. I bit my lip, trying to suppress my need to curl up at his feet.
Tonight’s victim was my mate. My human mate.
Chapter Two
John
My mission: retrieve Felicia of Wiedeg, the warrior beast female who had been captured with Torrent, the High Priest of Earth—and now my son-in-law—because I was an unlucky bastard, tied to the beasts for the rest of my life. Even my grandkids would be beasty. I could’ve killed my son-in-law, the sorry-ass fucker. God knows I wanted to, but then Sienna would hate me. After all he’d done, she loved him, and if she could forgive him so could I. For as long as he didn’t fuck up.
I stuck a hand into the pocket of my suit pants and played with the bullet with Torrent’s name on it. It was my talisman. From the other pocket, I got my tobacco and paper. Lifting an eyebrow at William Ghason, a businessman who came from old money, I rolled the cigarette. “I hide my rare jewels,” I told him in response to him calling Felicia that.
I’d hidden my daughter for seventeen years. This was before, when I thought the beasts picked their pairs based on looks, and Sienna was a looker. She’d captivated me from the first time I saw her dumped in a basket near my bunker. I sat next to the crying newborn baby, awaiting her father so I could beat the shit out of the guy. I thought he’d left the kid while he went hunting and would come back. It hadn’t crossed my mind that someone had left the girl out there to die.
The night came, and I picked up a stranger’s baby and raised her as my own. Never told her how I’d found her, and I never would. Who the fuck wanted to feel abandoned? Nobody. She didn’t need to feel like people didn’t want her. I wanted her. She was precious and cute as a button, my rare jewel, and rare jewels should be protected. Felicia was no rare jewel to this man. More like a hammer in his toolbox.
“I hide mine too,” William said.
“That makes me think you have more than one.”
He sat at the table, jerked her chain, and she moved to sit beside his leg like a good puppy. He patted her head. “If you’d like to sample, I’ll show you my jewels. Some are for sale, some are not. Stay the night, rest in my home, and have your way with any you like. With the kind of money you brought to the table, I’ve selected the finest one. My apologies, John. Shall I take her back?”
I sat down beside him and across from Boris, one of the two Men of Earth stooges, who stared at Felicia’s tits as if he’d never seen tits on a woman before. Granted, hers didn’t have an areola. They were pale, with a small dent for a nipple. I wanted to reach over the table and slap him. Fucking sick people played here. And I better settle down and learn how to play along. “Deal and we’ll see what happens,” I said.
William dropped Felicia’s leash.
I glanced at him, bent, and picked up her leash, then tugged her over to my leg. Alpha Beast had set me up as a wealthy new neighbor in Highborn Hills, a rich human neighborhood on the edge of Beast City. I made sure to flaunt my cars and money, attended all the right parties, and sure enough, a month later, I met Boris. He hooked me up with a private poker game. I’d played poker before, but not this version of Texas Hold ’em. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing, and this damn suit itched. The whole room pissed me off. It made me want to bite someone.
Before I rang William’s doorbell, I’d met up with Jamie, the Alpha Beast, who gave me one of his T-shirts. I wore the oversized thing under my button-up shirt, hoping Felicia would sniff it out. She didn’t. She kept her head down. I had to get her attention so she wouldn’t fight me when I attempted to rescue her. Vice had advised me of that, had said Felicia trained with their males and could become violent. Though, I didn’t understand how she’d fight anyone in her current state. They’d broken her.
I folded my crappy hand of cards and did what William had done. I patted her head while the other three men continued playing. When she didn’t look up, I hooked my finger under her chin and nudged it up. When our gazes locked again, my heart thudded, maybe skipped a beat. I wasn’t sure what it did, but it was something I hadn’t felt before. Despite her surroundings, there was something alive in her pretty forest-green eyes. And they paled when I ran a thumb over her lips.
The men watched me. I patted my thigh, signaling her to rest her head there.
“I see you’ve come to like my kitten,” William said.
A fucking kitten? “Yeah, she’ll do.”
F
elicia lay her head on my lap, her face away from the table. I shifted in my chair, feeling a little awkward that she’d buried her face practically in my crotch. It was all right, though. Women didn’t excite me. I had a case of limp dick, had had one ever since I could remember. Rarely got the useless thing up.
So when my dick stirred from its slumber, I wanted to die of shame. After all the times I needed it to get going and it hadn’t, now it decided it liked a woman on her knees. Fucking pervert. Here I was, behaving no better than these fuckers. I glanced down at her, and she kept inching toward my dick. My dick extended and met her halfway. I patted her head, hoping she’d take the hint and move away. But she kept going, and when she got right up in my crotch, she inhaled. I heard her soft snort. Her head jerked, but I pushed it down with my hand, not wanting her to alarm the others. I smiled down at her. “That a girl,” I said.
An unspoken understanding passed between us. At least I hoped it had. I hoped she understood I was not here to abuse her. I was here to rescue her, though we’d planned the rescue at a later time, after I’d scoped out the situation. I came smelling of her Alpha Beast so she’d know a rescue was imminent. But now that I’d seen her? I wouldn’t leave without her. “I’m gonna win,” I told her.
She shook her head, but the motion was brief. I picked up on it but didn’t understand. William had invited me over for a night, promised me poker, booze, and now pussy. The winner took the prize, his jewel for the night. She was probably one of the ones not for sale. I needed a moment alone with her, so I better fucking win this. Otherwise, I’d have to kill three armed men in the room, one butler, and a security team standing guard outside the house.
He dealt the cards.