Mates: Prequel (Claws Clause 0)

Then he found a spot tucked in a darker part of the woods where the wards couldn’t touch him. With his shifter eyes and the perfect sightline, he could still watch the back of her house, hoping for a glimpse of the woman.

She poked her head out once, peeking into the shadows of the woods long after nightfall as if she could sense him watching her out there, before disappearing inside.

That second glimpse was all Maddox needed to affirm his first impression. His cock immediately went rock hard again, his wolf scratching against his chest to get out and run to her.

She was a human and his mate, and he was already lost for her.

That made things a little more difficult. Humans had funny ideas when it came to mate bonds. So many lawmakers were afraid of the magic behind the bonds—something their science couldn’t explain—that they came up with Ordinance #7304, otherwise known as the Bond Laws.

Paras like Maddox referred to them as the Claws Clause. And while he always knew he’d have to follow them, since he was a shifter, it would be so much easier if his mate was another Para who thought the laws were as ridiculous as he did.

She wasn’t, though. She was a human. And Maddox new that he would have to tread carefully when it came to courting her.

So maybe her equally human neighbors might consider what he was doing stalking. Maddox liked to think of it as protecting her from afar until he could finally claim her. Besides, he felt more at peace, lingering just outside of her wards, than all of the nights he had spent alone in his bed before he met her.

He found his mate. He had hope. All she had to do was give him a chance to prove that no one would love her better, more faithfully, more earnestly than an alpha wolf shifter, and he’d be set.

Only it didn’t seem as if that was going to be as easy as he wished it would be. Whether it was her fright or something else entirely, the wards stayed at full power without any sign that she had slipped out through the front door at all. As if she could sense him out there, lurking, watching, waiting, his mate stayed inside—with Maddox just out of reach.

He couldn’t stay there around the clock, and not because he had anything he’d rather be doing. After the first few days he spent waiting for just one chance to get to his human female, Colt threatened to take his brother’s erratic behavior to their father if Maddox didn’t stop.

Maddox didn’t like it, but he understood. If he got caught harassing his mate and she refused his attentions, he could bring the law down on the pack and neither one of them wanted that.

At night, when it was harder for anyone to catch him loping through the shadowed woods, Maddox stayed, reinforcing his territory markings while hoping to get closer to his mystery mate. Once or twice—or a hundred times—when his erection got too hard, too hot to ignore, and his wolf howled a lonely song inside his chest, he unzipped his jeans, pulled out his cock, and leisurely stroked it to the edge of his orgasm.

He never let himself finish. Not yet. Not while she was tucked away inside, unaware that he was out there, waiting for her to notice him.

It was a punishment and a tease at the same time. He’d had his mate right there and he fucked it up by letting himself strain against the leash all shifters kept on their wild beasts. It was torture, but if it helped him learn control, it would be worth it when he finally earned his woman.

If he finally got her to come to him.

3

It… wasn’t going so well.

By the fourth night, when he still hadn’t sampled her scent again, Maddox returned to Colt’s house, frustrated, dejected, and with three bottles of whiskey tucked in a black plastic bag he carried with him as he slunk inside.

Since the day he first discovered his mate, he had basically moved in with his brother. Colt lived closer to Woodbridge than Maddox did, and he was careful to ignore his father’s call while he was hunting her, luring his prey close. A mate bond was one of the only exceptions when it came to blind obedience to the Alpha.

Terrence would understand, Sarah would adore finally having a daughter to spoil after raising two rambunctious male pups, and the alpha couple in their pack could start hounding Colt to go after his mate.

Maddox hoped he claimed his mate soon. Already the separation was beginning to weigh on his nerves, making it impossible for him to do anything except wait until he could try to see her again.

Which, of course, explained the bag of liquor.

Colt wasn’t at home that night; at least, he wasn’t in the main house, his scent inside a few hours old. Maddox could guess where his brother had gone. Colt had a private shed in his backyard, a workroom where he focused on his hobby: creating hand-crafted wooden furniture that he sold to his father’s clients for more money than Maddox made on a single job. Colt was also a construction worker, like most of the pack, but the furniture pieces he crafted were absolute works of art.

Ever since Maddox refused to return to his house in Wolf’s Creek, Colt had been spending more and more time either at work with the construction crew or hiding out inside of his work shed.

Maddox might have had something to do with that. Maddox, and his tendency to mope with a bottle of human whiskey in one hand, a nostalgia playlist piping out of the phone he held in the other.

As he crooned along to 1980s hair bands later that night, Colt found him sprawled on the living room floor and immediately threatened to find some silver bullets to put Maddox out of his misery. When that didn’t stop Maddox, and Dodge chose to join in on his pity party, Colt threatened to find some silver bullets to put himself out of his misery.

Since then, he put his foot down. He refused to let Maddox get his paws on any more whiskey. Considering how Maddox immediately went back to pacing outside of the woman’s wards when he sobered up, Colt probably regretted it.

They both knew that the Claws Clause worked against Maddox. If the woman invoked the ordinance, it

didn’t matter that he was certain she was his mate. He’d be separated from her, possibly even locked up depending on how he reacted to the distance.