My mat just blinks. “Fine. That’ll save us from having to send him any payments for his services,” she tells me just as casually.
Disappointment fills me. I look at my pat, just like I always do, pleading with my eyes for him to deal with her, because I just can’t.
To say that my mat isn’t maternal is an understatement. With her deep green eyes, hair, and tail feathers, I’ve always thought that she embodied the envy trait rather well. Nothing is ever good enough for her. No matter how green her grass (or feathers) are, she’s always looking over the fence for something better, for more.
To outsiders, she probably looks like a stern, forty-something-year-old woman with an obnoxious hair color and thin lips that are permanently bowed downward. She looks tough before she even opens her mouth. Even her pristine pantsuit shows that she means business. Everyone in our lounge knows that she’s the one that wears the pants.
My pat, with his ruddy complexion and red hair, eyes, and feathers, would probably look scary if it weren’t for his unassuming posture and his easygoing attitude. I’ve never seen him yell, or swear, or cry, or even belly laugh. He seems to be stuck on one setting all the time: calm.
It’s infuriating, especially when I was a hurting teenager who cried and begged for her father to step in, to speak, to do something. He never did. Not when my mat banned me from the house whenever I pissed her off, leaving me to sleep outside. Not during screaming matches between her and me. Not even when she sold me off to a stranger.
My pat is just...incapable of not deferring to her, and my mat doesn’t have a warm or fuzzy bone in her body. We’ve never gotten along. Things got worse when I hit thirteen and stopped trying to please her. I realized that it was hopeless to get her to give a shit about me. There are a few things my mat cares about, but none of them are named Sinclair.
“Did you think getting yourself incarcerated would stop Alpha Bowen?” she asks, her tone and head tilt condescending. “He had his pick of potential mates. He chose you. He’s not going to just let that go so easily.”
“Clearly,” I grumble and do my best to stare at her with pure boredom. “But word in the prison is that I’m a debt trade, not a power alliance like you pitched. Is that true?”
My mat gives nothing away as she shakes her head and hands the phone receiver to my pat, like she just can’t be bothered with me anymore. But she doesn’t answer the question.
My mind whirs with all the possible paths that could’ve led to the lounge being in debt. I still can’t piece it together. It just doesn’t make sense to me, knowing all the pots our lounge has their fingers in.
“What were you thinking coming in here?” my pat’s deep rumbling voice asks me, pulling me from my thoughts.
I narrow my eyes at him. “I was thinking I’d just been sold off to the worst of our kind, all so that my matriarch wouldn’t have to face a possible challenge when I came of age in a year. I was thinking that prison sounded like a better place than the lounge I grew up in. And I was thinking that since I wasn’t in possession of parents who would protect me or look out for my best interests, it was time I stepped up and started managing that for myself instead.”
My pat’s red eyes drop from mine, and I know he felt that hit.
Good.
He loves my mat and bends over backward for her. Behind the scenes, he does that for me sometimes too, but if it’s between me and her, he chooses her every time. It’s time we both come to terms with that fact.
“Our arrangement with Alpha Bowen was in the best interest of you and our entire lounge,” my mat announces after ripping the phone receiver out of my pat’s hands. He just lets it go, and my heart falls even more. “We are second in power only to Bowen and his extensive lounge. If our forces combine, there isn’t anyone who would be a threat to us, not even the Drakes.”
At the sound of that name, I mock spit on the ground at the same time my mat and pat do. It’s something all cockatrices do whenever the Drakes are mentioned. Bunch of fire-breathing, hoarding, dragon menaces. They think they’re hot shit. Cockatrices and dragons do not mix.
“So you didn’t sell me to settle a debt?” I ask.
My mat smooths a hand over her green coiffed hair, pulling back her shoulders so she sits up more rigidly in the metal chair. “The finances of the lounge are of no concern to you, Sinclair. That’s lounge business handled by your matriarch and patriarch.”
I scoff, making the noise louder than necessary just to get the satisfaction of watching her jerk the phone away from her ear. “If you sold me off to settle your debts, then I have a right to know.”
“Actually,” she begins primly. “You have no rights. Not while you wear that horrid prison uniform.”
I look down at the gray fabric and turn it bright yellow without a thought. Not to please her, but because gray is my least favorite color. “Happy?” I ask with a snarky smile.
My mat just levels me with a look. The same one she used when she’d send me to bed without dinner. “Alpha Bowen isn’t happy, Sinclair. He knows you’ve thwarted his attempts to break you out from jail.”
I shrug because I don’t give a fuck. “Good. I’m not happy about being given to him or him trying to break me out, so we’re even.”
“No, we are not!” she shouts, slamming her palm onto the surface in front of her. My brows hike up at her burst of emotion. She leans forward, clutching the phone in her hand so hard that her knuckles go white. “You listen to me now. You will not get any time added on to your sentencing. You will behave yourself. And if you have a chance to get out of this place, you will take it, and then you will go to Alpha Bowen, because that was what was agreed upon.”
Anger and dismay crawls up my throat. “I never agreed to that.”
“We did,” she counters, “as is our right as your parents and lounge leaders.”
“Fine. Then you can consider me a rogue.”
Their faces blanch. My mat’s mouth drops open, and my pat breaks out into a sweat. I just stare back at my mat coldly, dispassionately, though my heart is pounding in my ears. So much blood and emotion is running through me that black circles appear in my vision.
Being rogue in our world is like throwing away your family, your friends, even your identity. It means no protection, contacts, home, alliances, and hell, not even a last name. And once you’re rogue, there’s no going back. No other lounge will take you. You’re destined to live life shunned, to be a pariah.
“How could you...take that back!” my mat shouts into the phone.
“No,” I say, shaking my head, because as terrifying it is to be a rogue shifter, I’m digging my heels in now. I’ve finally gotten to them. I’ve finally found the only button I can press, so I’m going to jam my finger on this motherfucker as hard as I can.
“Sinclair…” I see my pat mouth from the other side of the glass.
“If you go rogue, then Alpha Bowen will consider our deal null and void. He won’t strike our debts off his ledger,” my mat tells me, cutting off whatever my pat was about to say.
I grind my teeth. So I was sold for money. “Guess that’s your problem.”
I start to get up from my chair, but my mat’s voice stops me before I can hang up the phone. “If you do this, you will be the reason for Denali’s downfall. Our entire lounge will go bankrupt, Bowen will take us over instead of watching our backs, and your lounge, your people, will be gone forever.”