Wolf Mate (Wolves of New York #4) Read online

  Wolf Mate

  A Dark Mafia Shifter Romance

  Bella Jacobs

  Contents

  WOLF MATE

  About the Book

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Epilogue One

  Epilogue Two

  Sneak Peek

  About the Author

  Also by Bella Jacobs

  WOLF MATE

  Wolves of New York

  By Bella Jacobs

  Copyright Wolf Mate © 2021 by Bella Jacobs

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. This contemporary romance is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners. This ebook is licensed for your personal use only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with, especially if you enjoy sexy, fast-paced urban fantasy reads. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work. Edited by Fedora C. Proofing. Cover Design by Violet Duke and Lori Jackson.

  About the Book

  Maxim proved he would give his life to defend mine.

  I proved I would kill to keep him by my side.

  But is the bloody devotion of a united king and queen enough to win this war?

  My fated mate and I are finally fighting on the same side, but our enemies have burrowed deeper into our pack than we ever imagined possible. Before we face my mad sister and her army, we’ll first have to free the minds of our own people.

  Meanwhile, Maxim’s sister is still in enemy hands and black magic rises with the full moon.

  Can we save the people we love and heal the shifter world before it’s too late?

  Or will we lose everything we hold dear—our hope, our freedom, and maybe even…each other.

  Chapter One

  Diana

  Fourteen years earlier…

  “Don’t be-member, don’t be-member—nope, nope.” I chant the words beneath my breath, turning them into a little song as I push my toy tugboat through the bubbly bathwater.

  I’m delivering a load of tiny milk bottles to the other side of the tub. If I’m not careful, they’ll tumble off the side and I’ll have to start again.

  Those are the rules of Tugboat Milk Delivery Service. You have to get the six full bottles all the way from the back of the bath to the front without spilling any, feed the milk to the plastic cats waiting on the edge of the tub, and then get the empty bottles safely back to the beginning or you lose the game and have to start over.

  Also, the cats will get super mad and start yowling for their supper, and no one wants to put up with that racket.

  Mom says there’s nothing worse than a hungry cat—unless it’s a hungry baby wolf whining that she wants pizza instead of grilled fish and veggies for dinner.

  Mom…

  “Don’t be-member, nope,” I chant more firmly, tightening my grip on the boat until the tips of my fingers turn white beneath my nails.

  I can’t think about that, or I’ll go back into the dark tunnel where I was before Maxim showed up and pulled me out from under the coffee table. It was so cold in the tunnel, cold and lonely, with only my wailing cries to keep me company. It felt like I was blind, like Aunt Emily who feeds the birds on the tower roof on Sundays.

  She puts seed in her hand and holds real still until one of the braver birds comes and sits right in her palm to eat. Then she’ll stroke its feathers, very gentle and slow.

  She says that’s how she sees them, with her fingers.

  I don’t want to see things with my fingers.

  I want to see things with my eyes, but only good things.

  I want to see my bath toys and my favorite unicorn pajamas folded in a pile on the sink and then, later, my bedroom with the nightlight on and the covers turned back. As soon as I’m done with bath time, I’m going to go right to sleep and stay in my room until morning. And then I’ll ask Maxim to bring breakfast into my room on a tray like Mom did sometimes for a special treat.

  He’s never done that before, but I bet he will if I ask real nice.

  Maybe he’ll bring my breakfast to my room every day from now on.

  I’ll have breakfast in my room, run straight through the apartment to the door to go to pre-school, and then have dinner with Daddy downstairs in the Atrium while he works on business until it’s bedtime again.

  That way I’ll never have to be in the kitchen or the living room or Mama and Daddy’s room ever again.

  Mama and Daddy’s bathroom, especially…

  “Don’t, don’t, don’t be-member,” I whisper, but my voice is weak and shaky and bad pictures are already popping up in my head.

  Images of Mama wrapped in a towel…

  She’d just popped into my room for a second to tell me to clean up my block mess while she was having her bath and then promised she’d make me a snack as a reward.

  I’d said I wanted apple slices with peanut butter, and she said that sounded like a healthy choice. Then she said she loved me bunches and started back to her room, but only a few seconds later someone slammed into the apartment.

  It was my biggest brother, Bane, yelling so loud it made the picture frames rattle on the walls in the hall. When I peeked out of my room to see why he was angry, his colors were so pitch black it looked like there was a shadow monster crouched on his shoulders.

  The monster had a huge head like a goblin and long shadow teeth. Its fingers dug into Bane’s throat, making the veins in his neck bulge like angry worms as he shouted Mama’s first name in the meanest voice I’d ever heard.

  He wasn’t talking to Mama like she was a grown-up or his mom—he was talking to her like she was a bad little kid, and he was the one in charge. For some reason, that scared me even more than his mean colors.

  On whisper feet, I dashed into my closet, dove into the pile of stuffed animals in the corner, and burrowed down deep to hide. I grabbed Yub Yub, my favorite round beaver stuffy that’s the perfect size for hugging and curled into a ball beneath the pile of animal friends.

  I closed my eyes and wished I could close my ears, too.

  I didn’t like what I was hearing. Bane was shouting that Mama was a liar and a bitch and some other words I didn’t know, but I could tell they were super bad.

  I only know “bitch” because when I’m at his apartment for a visit, Maxim lets me watch a show about teenage vampires and the girls in the show are always fighting and calling each other “the B
word.”

  Maxim tried to turn the T.V. off the first time I heard it, but I begged him to let me watch and swore I wouldn’t tell Mama or ever use those bad words. I just had to know if the girls were going to stop fighting long enough to realize there was a coven of bad boy witches out to destroy them. It was so obvious! But they were too busy fighting over the cute boys they liked and who was going to be the next vampire queen to notice.

  At the end of season one, when all three of the vampire girls were locked in a cage because they hadn’t seen trouble on the way, I told Maxim I was done with that show.

  And that I was never going to be a girl like that.

  When I grew up to be a teenager, I wasn’t going to fight with my friends over boys or anything else. I was going to be a good friend and keep my eye out for trouble so it couldn’t sneak up on me or any of my peeps.

  Maxim smiled real big at that, like I was making a joke, so I had to tell him, “I’m serious, Zim-zim. This isn’t a funny thing. This is a serious thing.”

  His lips turned down at the edges, but his eyes were still laughing when he said, “I know. And I think you’ll do a great job at that, Dee.”

  “Because of my pack gift,” I said with a sniff, trying not to act too proud. But I’m one of the only wolves in recorded history to develop a pack gift before age nine.

  I’m super special. That’s not being cocky or sassy; that’s just a fact.

  “Because of your pack gift, yeah,” Maxim said. “But not just that. You’re really smart, too. And you’ve got a super good heart. Any gang of bad boy witches who came after you and your girls would be sorry.”

  I grinned and crawled up onto the stool beside him in his kitchen. “Does that mean I can watch season two next week?”

  “I thought you were done with that show.”

  “But I have to see if they get out of the cage. And who Darren falls in love with. I think it’s going to be Sorcha, don’t you?”

  He exhaled. “I’ve already done some asking around about season two and there’s going to be way too much kissing and violence in that one for a four-year-old, kid. Sorry, but we’re going back to cartoons for a while. Until you’re say…eight or nine. Maybe ten.”

  My lips parted in an outraged huff. “No! That’s forever and I’m not scared. I can watch it. I’ll just cover my eyes if it gets to a bloody part. I’m not a baby. I know it’s just pretend.”

  It was just pretend.

  But this…

  The shouts and then the scream coming from the bathroom…

  Those were not just pretend. And several long, terror-filled moments later, Bane’s heavy footfalls on the carpet in my room weren’t pretend either.

  Hugging Yub Yub so tight my arms began to tremble, I squeezed my eyes shut again, willing Bane to go away.

  Bane isn’t like Maxim—he’s always busy and doesn’t like to play with me or talk to little kids—but I’ve never been afraid of him before.

  Usually his colors aren’t bad, they’re just…bored.

  Or annoyed.

  Bane doesn’t like hanging out with Mama and me and he’s jealous of Maxim. But why wouldn’t he be? Maxim is way nicer and funnier and smarter than Bane. And Maxim would never yell at Mama or make me feel afraid.

  Maxim would protect me from bad guys, no matter how big and scary they were.

  I crossed my fingers, willing Maxim to come through the door. He’d make Bane go away and everything better, I just knew it.

  “Diana?” Bane called out, my name followed by a soft sniffing sound. “Dee, are you here?”

  I didn’t answer and I didn’t move. If I stayed buried under the animals, maybe Bane wouldn’t be able to track down my smell. My whole room smelled like me, even more than usual because Mama was too tired to clean my sheets on Sunday and said it was okay to skip a week every now and then.

  As my brother stalked around outside, trying to catch my scent, I was so glad Mama was tired. As soon as Bane was gone, I was going to tell her she should always be tired and never wash my sheets again.

  “Diana, if you’re here, don’t be freaked out, okay?” Bane said. “Mom and I just had a little disagreement. Everything’s fine now and we’re going downstairs to get ice cream. You want to come with us? Get a double scoop on a waffle cone?”

  I love ice cream. I love waffle cones maybe even more—the sweet smell of them toasting in the back of the ice cream shop in the Atrium makes my mouth water every time I walk by.

  But I still didn’t move. I could taste the lie in Bane’s voice, so sour and rotten not even ice cream sounded good.

  I just wanted him to go away.

  That’s all I wanted.

  I crossed my other fingers and my toes and wished for him to vanish so hard that eventually he did. His footsteps faded away down the hall and the door to the apartment opened and closed and suddenly the air was very, very quiet.

  But I didn’t come out right away. My belly was hurting, and my heart was pumping hard in my chest. I was too scared that Bane was pulling a dirty trick to leave my hiding spot. He could be waiting by the front door to see if I would come out once I thought he was gone.

  He could be waiting, watching, and as soon as he saw me step out of my room…

  I didn’t know what would happen after that, but my churning stomach said it would be bad.

  Very bad.

  So, I waited a long, long time, until the fear finally began to fade, replaced by impatience.

  Where was Mama? Why hadn’t she come to get me?

  Was she still in her bath? Surely, she didn’t go get ice cream with Bane without me. That wasn’t something Mama would do. She doesn’t leave me alone in the apartment. She doesn’t even leave me alone in my room for long, not without checking on me to make sure I’m okay and that I haven’t stolen real food to use in my play kitchen—even though that only happened once.

  But it was spaghetti sauce, so it was pretty messy.

  As I crept quietly out of the closet, I could still see the faint stain on the carpet where the sauce didn’t quite come out, no matter how hard Mama scrubbed. For some reason that made me feel better.

  The stain was still there, things were just like they were before.

  But they weren’t.

  And they never would be again.

  “Never, ever, never,” I whisper as I tilt the tugboat to one side, sending all the milk bottles sliding off into the bubbly water. One part of me studies the bottles as they sink to the bottom of the tub. The other part is standing in the door to Mama’s bathroom, watching blood spread around her body.

  The two parts are like summer and winter—opposites that don’t belong together. They can’t exist at the same time. It’s against the laws of nature. One of them has to go away or I’m going to melt like a snowman left out in the sun and when Maxim comes to check on me there won’t be anything left in the bath but water and toys.

  I can’t do that to my brother.

  I can’t leave him. He can’t leave me.

  We have to stick together.

  By the time he comes to get me out of my bath—asking if I want to have a sleepover at his place—I’ve pushed all the bad thoughts away again.

  I do that every time they rise inside me. I pop them like bubbles and turn my face back toward the sun.

  And at some point, I forget that Bane was there before Mama died. My mind edits him out of the story of the day I lost my most important person, but deep down I know the truth.

  Fourteen years later, after Bane kidnaps me, cages me, and threatens to marry me off to one of his evil minions with a taste for assaulting teen girls—the look in his eyes making it clear he won’t hesitate to hurt me if it suits his purpose—it all starts coming back…

  Chapter Two

  Diana

  Present Day

  It’s time. Past time.

  Pulling in a deep breath, I release the mental walls I erected to protect myself when I was a little girl too overwhelmed with grief a
nd terror to know what to do with these memories.

  One part of me sits here, playing cards with Kelley on an old quilt spread out on the cabin floor, studying the lump on her head from where Bane slammed her skull into the fireplace. The other part is busy fitting memories from the past together like a puzzle until they form the picture I’ve avoided seeing for so long.

  Did Bane kill our mother?

  I don’t know for sure. But he was definitely there just before I found her on the bathroom floor, and he was definitely angry with her about something.

  Really, really angry.

  I rack my brain, but I can only understand what four-year-old me understood. That he was angry and using bad words and accusing our mother of…something.

  But what?

  Finally, the not knowing becomes so torturous, I can’t help but ask, “Do you know anything about my mother, Kelley? About what happened the day she died? Between her and Bane?”

  Kelley stills, her hand pausing mid-reach for the draw pile. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean… Bane was there. Right before, screaming at her,” I say, figuring that at this point I have little to lose by telling the truth.

  Kelley seems to be on our side, working against Bane. But even if she’s not, I’m already Bane’s prisoner and under his control. Even if he realizes I’ve remembered that he might be guilty of murder, it won’t matter.