Fated

by R. L. Mathewson

  Fuck, he didn’t know what to do and he hated admitting that.

  Shoving his fingers through his hair with one hand, he took a long sip of his beer as he tried to tell himself that everything was going to work out. He would keep Kara protected, figure out a way to fix his club and make this new life work for them, but he knew that was all a fucking lie.

  There was no fixing this.

  Either the assholes surrounding the outside of his club were going to get tired of waiting and break in and do what they came to do, or they would wait until they let their guard down and make their move. Whether it was tonight or tomorrow, the assholes were never going to leave them alone.

  “Fucking hell,” he muttered to himself, because really there was nothing else to say.

  They were good and fucked.

  So much for giving his family the life that they deserved.

  “She’s not safe,” the Pyte said softly.

  “I can keep her safe,” he said, trying to convince himself that it was possible.

  “No,” Kale, the asshole, said, “you can’t.”

  “Yes,” he growled, letting his eyes go silver and fangs descend as he stared the bastard down, “I can.”

  The Pyte shook his head as he looked at him and asked the question that he never saw coming, “How are you supposed to protect your mate when she’s carrying a Sentinel?”

  Chapter 49

  “Good morning, Sunshine,” an annoyingly chipper voice said as she turned over onto her stomach and tried to go back to sleep.

  The overpowering sweet scent of Sentinel blood had her throwing back the covers, jumping off the bed, slapping her hand over her mouth and running for the bathroom where she started the day off with a lovely encounter with the toilet.

  “Don’t worry about me,” the Sentinel said from the bedroom as she hugged the toilet, earning the type of glare that she used to give Drew, “I’ll just entertain myself!”

  She had no idea who this man was, but something about him told her that she was going to end up kicking his ass one day. She finished her new morning ritual of getting to know the toilet better, grabbed a quick shower, brushed her teeth and grabbed Drew’s robe off the back of the door and donned it all while the bastard in the other room was apparently flipping through channels, looking for something to watch.

  Once her hair was brushed out and she didn’t think that she would need to say good morning to the toilet again, she opened the door, and spotted a large Sentinel with a nasty looking scar on his neck, sitting on her bed, looking bored.

  “Took you long enough,” he bitched as he shifted to get more comfortable on the bed.

  “Umm, what exactly are you doing?” she asked, deciding that it was the polite thing to do before she ripped his throat out for being annoying.

  “Protecting you,” he said around a yawn.

  “Okay,” she said with a frown, wondering why he thought that she needed his protection when she could shift at anytime and rip apart anyone that-

  “Oh my God!” she screamed, jumping back until her back hit the wall and she placed her hands over her face to protect herself.

  She may have continued screaming. Not that she was overreacting, because she wasn’t. Screaming and jumping out of danger was a perfectly natural response for a shifter.

  It was self-preservation.

  “Please tell me that you really didn’t just do that because of a Daddy long legs spider,” the annoying bastard said, sounding amused as she stood there, cowering against the wall and waiting for the bastard to announce that he’d killed the vicious insect.

  “Kara?” came Drew’s roar as she heard him running towards their room and she could tell by the sounds of it, he wasn’t alone.

  Good.

  That was good, because that meant that he would have help hunting the spider down and killing it. Knowing that help was on the way, she stayed where she was, keeping her eyes closed and waiting for the moment when her mate told her that everything was going to be okay.

  Instead of the reassurance that she so badly needed, she heard a putout sigh as she suddenly found herself in the arms of the annoying Sentinel and-

  A squeal tore through her as she found herself tossed across the room. There was a slight grunt as Drew caught her and held her tightly. Keeping her eyes closed, because she knew that if she opened her eyes right now that she would need that second visit with the bathroom, she held on tightly to Drew.

  “Don’t fucking throw my mate!” she heard Drew growl and she couldn’t help but nod in agreement, because she definitely didn’t want to experience that ever again.

  “Yeah, because I’m really going to hold her when a fucking shifter comes at me with silver eyes and fangs ready to tear my throat open.”

  “Chris,” someone said with a heavy sigh, making her frown because she couldn’t quite tell what he was.

  “He would have killed me if I didn’t hand her over,” the asshole apparently named Chris, said. “I didn’t have a choice.”

  There was another heavy sigh, followed by, “You can’t toss pregnant women around.”

  “Oh, come on! This was the first time!”

  She wanted to open her eyes and tell him that it had better be the last goddamn time when her body made the decision, that yes, it definitely missed the bathroom and wanted to return to it immediately. All it took for Drew to get her there quickly was a little groan that he was becoming all too familiar with.

  But at least it saved her time in having to explain what she needed, she thought as he gently placed on her knees and made a strategic run for it, knowing the unspoken rules well enough to know that she would kill him if he stayed to watch, he left.

  Besides, he had a spider to kill so this was probably for the best, she told herself as she became reacquainted with the toilet.

  *-*-*-*

  “Why exactly are you staring at me?” Kara asked him, which was actually a good question. Unfortunately for him, he wasn’t exactly sure how to break the news to her that she was carrying a-

  “Because you’re pregnant with a Sentinel,” Chris, the insensitive bastard whom she had gone for his throat after the large bastard had told her that a spider was dropping from the ceiling above her just to screw with her head, announced.

  Slowly, ever so slowly, because she really hoped that he was kidding, she turned her head to glare at the bastard until he told her that it was a joke. For whatever reason her glare didn’t seem to bother him. He simply ignored her as he helped himself to another bowl of Lucky Charms.

  When the silence became painful, she turned her attention to Ephraim, apparently Chris’s adopted father and a Pyte if you could believe that, to find the man staring up at the ceiling, shaking his head and muttering something about hanging the little bastard up by his feet when they got home.

  “Izzy would kill you,” Chris said between bites of cereal, not appearing overly concerned with the threats of bodily harm so she shifted her attention back to Drew to find him staring helplessly down at his folded hands on the table.

  Realizing that he wasn’t going to be much help, she sighed heavily and turned her attention to the infamous Kale Quinn, who as a shifter she should hate, but since she’d been Packless for most of her life, she really didn’t give a rat’s ass that he was considered a traitor. Pausing mid-bite on his spoonful of Lucky Charms, he shrugged and added, “It’s also an Alpha.”

  Jaw dropped, because this really wasn’t fucking happening, she turned her attention back to Drew to find him trying to give her a forced smile, which was actually kind of creepy so she turned her attention back to the plate of Drew Specials that he’d made for her and began toying with the crust as she tried to digest everything.

  “Also, we need to move our asses, because apparently my sister did something incredibly fucking stupid and we need to go bail her ass out,” Chris said with an unconcerned shrug.

  “Okay,” she said slowly, because she really had no idea how to respond to any of
that.

  “Good,” Chris said, getting up and placing his empty bowl in the sink, “then we should probably move our asses before she pisses anyone else off.”

  There was another heavy sigh from Ephraim as she once again returned her attention to Drew. “Is there something that you want to tell me?”

  Swallowing hard, Drew gave her another one of those forced creepy smiles and said, “It’s a boy?”

  “Right…,” she said, because that was really so damn helpful at the moment.

  So, she once again found herself looking to Kale, feeling an instant bond with the Alpha most likely because they were both shunned by the shifter community. Muttering something in Gaelic, he gestured lazily towards her and Drew. “We need to get you up to the house in New York before all the fucking demons, shifters and vampires surrounding the building figure out that you’re not only carrying an Alpha, but a Sentinel as well, break in, slaughter your mate and kidnap you,” he said, sounding incredibly bored with the whole thing while she sat there trying to make sense out of what he was saying.

  After a minute, she decided that this was just too much to deal with. So, she grabbed a Drew Special sandwich and took a bite just as she was forced to slap the tan hand trying to steal one of her sandwiches.

  “Goddamn it, woman!” Kale snarled, shaking off his hand as he scowled at her.

  She would have apologized, but something told her that he respected the fact that she was willing to kill him over a sandwich. Glancing back at Drew to find that creepy ass smile frozen on his face, she sighed heavily, stood up, grabbed her plate of Drew Specials and headed for the bedroom only to remember the spider, turn around and head to the living room where she decided that a little reality TV was in order to clear her head and if that didn’t work, then she’d settle for a nap and possibly another plate of Drew Specials.

  Epilogue

  One week later…

  William’s Mansion

  “Mother fucker!” Drew snarled when the bastard managed to throw him across the room with a flick of his hand.

  Fucking Ions! Drew thought with a groan as he slammed into the padded wall and dropped limply to the ground where he decided to lay panting while his mate and the love of his life sat on the other side of the room, enjoying the plate of sandwiches that she’d demanded before he started his daily training.

  Christ, if he had known that there was this much fucking torture working with the Sentinels he would have kept his ass in Boston. Looking bored, Christofer, the most powerful Pyte in residence, walked over to him, picked him up and set him on his feet.

  Only to send him flying into the opposite wall a few seconds later, but thankfully Drew managed to land next to his mate, who was still nibbling on her sandwiches.

  “Looking good, sweetie,” she said, not even bothering to look at him, offer him medical attention or even a bite of her sandwich.

  “I think I’m dying,” he admitted, not caring that he sounded like a fucking wimp, because he was actually worried about internal