Dark Ink Tattoo: Episode 2 by Cassie Alexander Page A

be.”
    He’d left me alone for seven long years, until last month. Maybe he’d changed behind bars. Found Jesus, or Buddha, or whatever.
    He put his hand up to the glass and tilted his head. “I just want to be a family again.”
    And at that, I laughed loud and true. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
    His eyes went cold, like a predator’s, and I remembered just how hard he could hit. “He’s not yours,” I repeated.
    “Cut the crap, Angie – unless you want someone to help me get a DNA sample.”
    I froze. I wasn’t sure what I was more scared of for Rabbit sake -- him finding out that he was a werewolf – or that he was related to Gray.
    “Being in here,” he said, knocking on the glass between us, “has given me some perspective. I know now I never should’ve let you go.”
    At that – all the anger and all the memories came rushing back. “Like you let Willa go? And all the girls before her? Fuck you, Gray,” I said low, this time with my own wolf’s voice, and watched him startle. “Fuck you. You knew she might die – that I might die – and you never said a word.”
    He leaned forward on his side of the glass. “I didn’t need to say it. I wanted you to be my mate for life. I wouldn’t have knotted you otherwise.”
    “That was supposed to make me feel special?” I forced myself laugh hollowly, to hurt him, even though there was no way I could ever hurt him the way he’d hurt me. “After you left – do you know what Wade did?” I swallowed down the stomach acid that rose as I remembered the night. I’d only come back to the bar for my tattoo guns – they were Dringenbergs, practically irreplaceable, as I didn’t have a penny to my name, and doing tats was the only way I could make any. And that was when Wade had stopped me. He just picked me up and carried me off to the back room, me screaming the whole time. “He took me. Carried me off to your room – our room – and threw me on the bed. Said he’d waited long enough, and it was finally his turn.”
    Gray’s jaw tensed and his eyes narrowed, and I knew no matter how in control he was of the Pack that no one outside had ever had the balls to tell him this story. Or, none of them had ever though he would care – one of those two. I leaned in.
    “I could hear the rest of them through the walls – so I knew they could hear me screaming. Trying to fight him off, kick him away. And when at the end – when I was covered in claw marks and bitten – when his knot finally flared and trapped me there, on him, him touching me, holding me for half-an-hour while he whispered apologies to me for what he claimed his wolf made him do, begging me to stay? I will die before that ever happens again.” I stood. “Maybe Rabbit is his -- but I know he’s not yours, and I’m definitely not your mate. Don’t ever contact me again.”
    I dropped the phone and walked away.
    “What’re you going to do when the moon calls him?” Gray shouted after me. I ignored him and kept walking.
     
     

Chapter 2
     
    I woke like I always did -- to the sound of scratching against my coffin.
    I wasn’t in a coffin because I was a vampire – although I was -- I was in a coffin because I’d acquired a cat, and an EMT client of mine had once told me a horrible story. I kept Sugar well-fed, but when you died each day and shared the house with a carnivore, it paid to play it safe. I heard an inquisitive meow, and another scratch right by my head. Somehow, Sugar always knew when I was up.
    “Shush,” I said, pushing back the lid of the plywood box I’d built for myself. Sugar jumped inside and rubbed her head on my hand, as I knuckled between her ears.
    The only upshot of being a vampire was that I didn’t dream – I could never toss or turn at night, when I fell dead I stayed dead, until dawn. I could count the number of people that’d seen me dead on one hand, including Sugar, and I wanted to keep it that way.
    But if I’d still been human I knew what