Mating Games (3 page)

“So you’re more of the school of mind that what happens within a pack stays in the pack?” Mike asked.

“Of course. The council isn’t there to play parent to every little thing. But whipping pack members that have broken no laws is way out for normal pack dealings.”

“If a pack or its inner circle was breaking human or council laws, though, you would feel the need to report it?” Alpha Rodrick asked, drawing Sebastian’s focus.

“No, not necessarily. Most often I would handle it within the pack, unless, like my current Alpha, they couldn’t be made to see reason.” Sebastian realized the moment he spoke that he had gotten too relaxed with them and forgot that they may be holding a human hostage. As he saw movement out of the corner of his eye and then felt a bright white, sharp pain in his head, he realized he’d said the wrong thing before all he saw was darkness.

Dobry heard someone unlocking the door of the shed he was being held in. He quickly lay down on the floor and pretended to be passed out from his last beating. There had been so many he’d lost count.

He recognized the voices of the two who
played
with him the most. They were the ones that the
master
kept referring to as Betas, the master being the one Dobry knew was in charge. The two Betas seem to defer everything to him. Dobry wasn't really sure why that was, but he figured it had to be a werewolf thing.

“Well, shit! The little pet is still out,” asshole Beta number one said. “I was hoping to play with him some more.”

“Keep it in your pants, dude. We have things we need to handle,”

asshole Beta number two replied.

“I’m bored.”

Someone snickered. “Then you can damn well be bored. If Rodrick catches wind of you playing with his little pet without his permission he’s going to use you as a dartboard. Besides, we have company coming, and he wants us there.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Dobry heard a loud thud close to him, then his captors left and relocked the shed door. Waiting a few minutes before opening his eyes, he was shocked to see they delivered another prisoner. This one was a werewolf just like the ones who kidnapped him. Dobry knew it.

Dobry watched the man curled in the corner of the room for any sign of movement. He wished he could say at the first sign of movement he would run, but he’d be lying to himself. It was hard to get away when he was locked up in a three-by-three-foot metal cage.

At least they let him keep his blanket. He could cover his nakedness and hide it from the man even if he couldn’t hide anything else. The werewolf would know Dobry was human and pretty much fair game the moment he woke up.

All werewolves considered humans fair game. Dobry knew that from personal experience. He didn’t know exactly how long he’d been a
pet,
but it was long enough to learn a few things about a society he never knew about before.

Werewolves used humans as pets. At least, that’s how he’d been used. Not even an hour after he was brought before the master, a collar was placed around his neck, one he couldn’t remove. From then on out, whenever he was released from his cage, he had to walk on all fours and be led around on a leash. He was a pet.

Dobry hated werewolves. They were all the same. They used, abused, and degraded humans any way they could. Just because the man in the corner was also collared didn’t mean he would be any different than any of the other werewolves Dobry had met since he’d been captured.

As far as he was concerned, they all needed to be taken out and eliminated. He drew his knees up to his chest and tried to cover himself as best as he could with the ratty blanket the master had allowed him to have. It wasn’t much, but it was his, or at least all he had. He wasn’t allowed to wear clothes anymore.

Dobry held his breath when he saw a small movement from across the room. He narrowed his eyes as he watched the man start to wake up. The man shook his head a little, groaned, and grabbed his head.

“What the fuck happened?”

Dobry snorted, then quickly lowered his head when the man glanced over at him. He should have stayed quiet.

“Who the hell are you?”

Dobry turned his head away and tried to ignore the man. It didn’t pay to get chummy with anyone in this place. Dobry learned that in his first week here when someone he thought he could trust set him up, then laughed as the master whipped him for his escape attempt. It had been a costly lesson, one that took nearly him a week to recover from. Dobry hadn’t made that mistake again. He would never trust a werewolf a second time.

“Man, are you deaf or something?”

Dobry turned to look at the man. If he looked at him as simply a man, Dobry would have found him attractive, maybe even stunning.

But Dobry knew better. He knew the man was dangerous.

“My name’s Sebastian,” the man said as he leaned back against the wall. “What’s your name?”

Dobry watched the man carefully from under the cover of his hair, ignoring his question. Sebastian had to be at least a few inches over six feet, though it was hard to tell with the man chained up. Dobry was a little confused at how a werewolf could be chained up. They seemed so strong to him.

If someone told him two months ago before he was captured that werewolves were real, he would have laughed in their face. Now, seeing them for himself, it was hard to deny their existence.

He wondered more than once if they were spiking his water with something that made him hallucinate. Even though they barely fed him, it seemed they were more than willing to give him lots of water.

They said they didn’t want his throat to dry out. They liked his tears and his screams.

Yeah, they were really upstanding people who held him, but they had to have some sort of reason to keep him. And why him? What was the reason they had taken him? Was it because they figured he was a nobody and no one would notice him gone?

Well, that was true enough. Dobry was orphaned as a child, or so the story went, and some American couple came to the orphanage in Poland to adopt him. At first it had been all sunshine and roses, but after the first several months, the abuse had started. The man who adopted him would beat Dobry when he didn’t understand the man or speak English to him.

How was he supposed to know English? They didn’t know any Polish and didn’t do anything to teach him. He would have learned English at that age, not just to stop the man from beating him, but because it would have made the rest of his life easier. People from the government eventually stepped in, and he never saw the couple who adopted him again.

He’d stayed at some bad places and some not so bad, but the last one was wonderful. Grace, the woman who had taken him in, was from Poland, too. Dobry moved in with her when he was fifteen, still barely able to speak English, and of course never having gone to school. It seemed he fell through the cracks of the system that way.

The foster parents who had him before had lied, saying they were homeschooling him.

They had at least given him books on how to learn English, so by that time he could read and write in English. He just didn’t know how to speak it. The pronunciation was quite different than Polish, having different letters in the alphabet. But Grace had taught him. He had loved spending time with her, learning, helping her around the house, taking care of her like she took care of him.

She had helped him get up-to-date with his studies, and by the time he was seventeen, he got his GED. Grace had told him several times that he had to be a genius, but what did Dobry know? He’d spent most of his life watching, not understanding, and never being in school, he had nothing to compare it to. She had helped him access libraries of books and information, feeding his addiction to learn everything he had missed out on.

Dobry had been crushed when she died a few months after his eighteenth birthday. She had no children, so she left everything to him. He sold her house and most of her possessions, but kept several things that had significant meaning to him and hit the road. He wanted to see all the things he had read about, taking small jobs along the way, staying in some places for a few months at a time.

He still had most of the money in his account. It wasn’t like he led a lavish lifestyle. He figured he’d use the money when he knew what he wanted out of life. Dobry stopped in this little town, thinking it would be a good place to stay for a while. He got a job as a busboy at the local diner. He liked it.

It took a few weeks to get into the flow of the town, but he always seemed to notice there were several men who gave him strange looks.

Dobry tried to pay them no mind, avoiding them as much as he could.

He thought he was doing a good job of it.

One night he was walking back to the rundown motel he had been staying at, and they jumped him. When he woke up, he was in the lovely shed he was in now. That had to be at least six weeks ago.

Dobry snapped back to the present when the man groaned again.

He glanced over at him to see the man rub the side of his head. A part of Dobry wanted to feel concern. Another part, the scared and abused part, felt that the werewolf probably deserved it.

“Let me guess, you’re the human they are holding captive?” the man asked him.

“Yes, I am he,” Dobry replied, jumping a little in surprise that the man had guessed his situation so quickly. Was he sent here as a spy?

Someone to make him fall into another trap?

“You have an accent,” Sebastian said.

“I was born in Poland,” Dobry said, feeling slightly insulted. He spoke very good English. “I have only been speaking English the last five years.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-one,” Dobry replied. “What is your name again?”

“Sebastian,” he replied, sitting up. “Sebastian Rule. How about you?”

“Dobry Stanaszek. They’ve had me here about six weeks, I think,”

he answered, guessing the next question. When the man started moving toward him, he scurried back against the far wall of his cage.

“I’m not going to hurt you, Dobry, I only wanted to smell you,”

Sebastian said, holding out his hands in surrender.

“I don’t know you. You don’t know what they’ve…what’s happened here.” Dobry cocked his head to one side as he regarded the man curiously. “Why are you here?”

“I was sent by the wolf council to investigate allegations that the pack was holding a human hostage.”

“How astute of them,” Dobry snickered. “How did you end up in here with me?”

“They must have smelled my lie about what I was doing here. The next thing I knew, I was getting clobbered over the head,” Sebastian answered. “And I woke up here with you.”

“So you’re one, too? A werewolf?”

“Yes, I’m a special kind of werewolf, though, a Delta. That probably means nothing to you if you’re just now learning about werewolves, but it means I work for the council and enforce our laws.

What they’ve done to you breaks several. Most of us aren’t like these people who took you.”

“I guess every race has their own bad.” Dobry nodded, feeling more at ease at the man’s explanation. “I have encountered good and bad of humans.”

“Your English is pretty good, considering you’ve only known it for a few years.”

“Thank you,” Dobry said. “I knew how to read and write it for years longer, but no one would help me with my pronunciation until I was sixteen or so. That made it hard to speak it.”

“I think your accent is sexy,” Sebastian said to him, giving him a wide smile.

“Please, no more, I can’t take any more,” Dobry whispered. He crouched down in his cage and held his small blanket to his chest, suddenly very afraid Sebastian would play with him as well. His body couldn’t take any more beatings, any more torture, or pain.

“I’m not going to hurt you. I was just being honest. I have friends who know I’m here. If I don’t check in tonight, they will come for me,” he answered, looking over his chains. “I just have to figure out how to get these chains off.”

Dobry eyed the man for several moments. “I can pick the locks,”

he whispered. “I didn’t take the chains off earlier in case they came back before you woke up.” Dobry gestured to the chains locked around Sebastian’s arms, legs, and neck. He felt a need to help the man, to keep someone else from becoming the master’s next pet.

“You want me to pick your locks?”

“Thank you, Dobry, I’d appreciate the help.” Sebastian gave him a kind smile.

Finding the pin he had snagged before in the hopes of picking the lock that held him, he started to work on the man’s chains. Dobry hadn’t been able to use it on the door because they had the locks on the outside, but maybe he could help the man now.

Quickly picking the locks but not taking off the chains in case his captors came back, he wondered what else he could do. Water! He scooted over to where the water bottle they threw in there yesterday was located.

“I have some water,” Dobry said as he held out the bottle.

Sebastian smiled and took it from him. Dobry immediately scooted back to the far side of his cage and watched the man take several deep gulps.

“Can you get out of that cage?” Sebastian asked as he handed the water back.

Dobry paused to look at the man through the bars of his cage for a moment, then slowly nodded. “I can get out if I want to, but that’s not a real good idea. Master gets very mad if I’m not in my cage when he comes for me.”

“Master?” Sebastian snapped, his eyebrows drawing down as his face flushed red with anger.

Dobry dropped the water bottle and scooted back against the far wall of his cage. He held his little blanket tightly in his shaking arms as he watched the man’s hands clench into fists. He prayed he wasn’t about to be beat again. He wasn’t sure his body could handle another beating so soon after that last one.

Sebastian instantly looked contrite. “Dobry, I swear I’m not going to hurt you. I will never lift a hand against you. I know it’s hard for you to trust me considering the circumstances, but please give me a chance.”

Dobry slowly inched forward until he could reach the lock on his cage. He kept his eyes on Sebastian while he fingered the lock, then used his pin to unlock it. It fell to the floor with a loud clang, and the door swung open.