Mating Ball
Copyright © 2024 by Olivia Grayson
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permission requests, contact [email protected].
The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.
Book Cover Art: thebookcoverdesigner.com
First edition 2026
Editor: Laura M.
Editing in Progress.
Sam’s P.O.V.
She was here. She was fucking here, mere feet away from me. My wolf roared and spun inside my head.
‘MATE! MINE! MATE! MINE!’
He kept whining before releasing a howl and scratching inside my head, making me snarl in frustration.
Her arm was wrapped around a douchey black-haired Alpha, his nose in the air as he paraded her in front of everyone like a trophy, showing her off to his guests as if she were his to claim.
Alpha Dickbag, I mean Dupont. Nope, I meant Dickbag.
My eyes caught hers at the same moment, and to make my point, I shifted my gaze to their linked arms before narrowing my eyes back to her intoxicatingly white, blue eyes.
One foot advanced while our eyes remained fixed on each other, but she shook her head as a warning and silent plea, causing me to stop.
She was a member of an elite warrior team tasked with protecting vulnerable wolves from malicious packs based on what Parker had told me of her cell mate, if this in fact was Sloane. That one warning made me realize—she was undercover.
My fists clenched. Her powder blue, silk dress clung to her breasts and hips in the most mouth-watering way. Not marching over there and devouring her right now took all my restraint, primarily since Steele fought against my control.
The soft shade illuminated her stunning eyes while her fiery red hair, twisted into an updo, contrasted with them both and made her a beacon to every eager wolf in the room with eyeballs and a dick. Ugh!
Her face was framed by a few soft locks on each side and left loose. The desire to yank the pins out of her hair so it fell free and wild suffocated me. My blood sang with a lustful fire as the idea of burying my head between her thighs consumed me. My erotic thoughts fizzled when the damn dickbag caught my attention once more.
His eyes flicked over her chest before he whispered something in her ear. She smiled back and nervously looked down at her feet with a giggle, but before I could go over there and rip off his arms, he turned to face another Alpha.
Stamped across her face was annoyance, accompanied by a quick eyeroll. My shoulders slumped in relief. That’s right, she’s working. Pfft. Working him was more accurate, and it was pissing me off. Ridiculous, I know, but I hated them touching.
‘Mate! We need to claim what’s ours! Mine! Mate!’ Steele started chanting again in response to my irritation.
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, shut up! I see her, and she sees us,’ I grumbled to Steele. ‘And she didn’t look surprised to see us. I mean, she was surprised, but not at the fact that we existed, right? She must have picked up a better scent of us at Nicholas’ pack.′
I wasn’t sure if I was asking my wolf or myself at this point. Jamming my hands into my hair, I stormed over to the bar, still within view of my less-than-thrilled mate.
‘She’s just scared. She’ll want–oh...interesting.’ I slammed the whiskey I ordered.
‘What, Steele? What’s wrong?’
‘It just seems her wolf is avoiding me too,’ he chuckled in my head. How the fuck was this funny?
‘What do you mean?’
’I’m trying to reach out to her, but she is ignoring me—actually, blocking me. Gorgeous minx. She is a strong wolf, and she belongs to us. She is perfect,′ he sighed dreamily. Well, he was going to be useless.
With nothing else to do at the moment but stare at her gorgeous form, letting hypersexed visions flood my mind, my pants grew tighter.
Adjusting myself casually, I shoved the images Steele pushed into my head aside and diverted my thoughts to the past. It was better than sporting a boner; however, I was at a freaking mating ball. I would be in fine company with an erection, to be sure.
My search over the past six months produced no results. Sometimes I wondered if I would have ever found her if I had chosen to stay at my brother’s pack to help protect them from a possible Fairy meltdown.
Instead, I had left. And while it felt wrong to go at that precarious moment, a thrum in my chest pushed me to return to what would soon become a wasteland of a pack.
There was work to be done there, mainly erasing Alpha Nicholas Phillips’ memory from the world. He was a cruel and disgusting man who tried to steal my brother’s mate for power and his own twisted desires.
Beau never shared much about what his “kitten” had been through before they met. Not his story to tell, he said, and I respected that.
Back then, I gave him a hard time over that nickname. I called him a sap and a cliché, but the moment I saw her, I was a sap—her sap, and she was my firefly.
FLASHBACK
I don’t know why I came back here, other than to see if I had honestly smelled the scent of my mate. If it were my mate, we had yet to set eyes on each other, so at least we wouldn’t get sick.
However, once our wolves recognized each other, it was just a matter of time before that illness crept in, unless we stuck to each other like glue until we mated.
We wouldn’t be horrifically sick if we were both wolves, but we wouldn’t be at full strength either. Okay, so mating wasn’t the only cure; rejection was an option too, but I shuddered at the thought.
Then Steele growled in my head. It wasn’t an option for me.
‘We will never reject our mate!’
‘I agree, buddy.’ I reassured him.
I released a deep breath. Convincing myself that this was all wishful thinking when no delicious aroma struck my senses. I wavered in indecision in front of the crumbling packhouse. Where did I even start with this place?
Then, I focused on what used to be the front door. That sister-in-law of mine certainly packed a punch. I shook my head and carefully walked inside with my Beta, Lance in tow.
Much like my younger brother, we chose our closest friends for the roles of our Betas. They needed to be the most trusted person to an Alpha, and who better to fill that role than a best friend since childhood?
Mind linking the five warriors I brought with us to search for any straggling wolves, or bodies to be burned or buried, based on the notes from the people we brought from Nicholas’ pack earlier, I proceeded toward the Alpha’s office.
We wanted to respect their wishes. To my surprise, only a handful of wolves took off on their own, choosing to be rogues, including Nicholas’ Beta, Luke.
Stacking another box on top of three others after a few hours of collecting paperwork from the office and piling them into those boxes to be sorted through later, I sighed and stretched my limbs. The boxes contained items, such as banking information and accounts filled with millions of dollars.
Once we completed the accounting, we would distribute the funds to the pack families equitably.
Whispers and literal complaints had already filtered to us about the lower-ranked wolves being forced into exorbitant taxes, tariffs, and penalties that stole away most of their hard-earned money. This pack was a disgrace. How blind had we been?
Cracking my neck and running my hand through my dark brown hair, I began to wonder about the other punishments these people endured, so I headed downstairs to check out the prison area.
We likely needed to get many of these wolves into therapy, but I wanted to know what we were dealing with and what atrocities he doled out.
Half of these people would be a part of my pack. They were essentially already my pack members, minus the formal ceremony to be held next week.
The stench of decay slapped me in the face, and I gagged reflexively. What the fuck!? Rounding the corner, I screeched to a halt when I saw the broken, twisted body of a woman. I sniffed the air above the mangled corpse. Witch. The identifiable smell clung to her body.
Leaning against the rock wall of the eerily 1800s version of a dungeon, I mind-linked Lance.
‘Lance, can you send some warriors down to the dungeon to get rid of a body? It reeks down here, and I don’t think I’ll be able to detect anything else under this fog of dead witch funk.’
‘On it, Alpha!’ he chuckled.
‘I’m glad you find this funny. You know what, you can join them.’ I smirked to myself.
‘That’s cold, bro.’ The humor was no longer in his voice. That’s more like it.
‘Yep, as cold as this decomposing body. Chop chop.’ I stifled a laugh at what my friend was about to endure.
It’s not the worst thing I’ve made him do, like pretending to be me when I snuck out of the house as a teenager. He would just sleep in my bed.
He had the same build as me and dark hair, but his mom was Spanish, so his skin tone was darker than mine. However, the room was dark, so I thought the plan was failproof.
Little did I know that Tammy, a stalker omega, would sneak into my room and relentlessly grope him as he pretended to be asleep. He spent the whole night shifting and rolling away from the rapey girl. It was like “fighting an octopus,” he told me the next day.
Though the imagery made me chuckle, I reported it immediately, resulting in her banishment from the packhouse for a year.
I asked him why he didn’t just kick her out, and the damn loyal fool said he didn’t want me to be caught. I never asked him to do that again.
My whole purpose for this plot was to hook up with a hot cheerleader from high school, but I had been grounded for stealing my dad’s car the weekend before to get with another girl.
Okay, I was kind of a slut in high school. With the title of future Alpha and an ego the size of Mount Everest, scoring proved effortless and also brought in attention I hadn’t counted on, like Tammy.
A whistling of wind drew my attention to the windows of the first few cells I came across. They were approximately 10 feet by 10 feet, relatively large, and likely intended for long-term stays.
The storm windows were broken in a couple of the cells. Large enough for a body to get through if there was an emergency, but also senseless, as there were bars covering them from the outside.
I rolled my eyes until I noticed the silver poles by one of the windows were no longer present. Well, that wasn’t true. My gaze shifted downward to where they now rested, on the floor of the cell littered with glass. Huh, I hummed in curiosity before I remembered Parker and her outburst earlier. This had to be her doing, I thought to myself.
Lance and a couple of warriors arrived, and once they removed the body, amidst his bitching and moaning and gagging, the smell lingered but was tolerable.
A more pungent smell of blood drew me to a door down the hall, and I popped it open. In the middle of the room, bolted to the cement floor was a chair.
It resembled a dental chair, but shit, it had stirrups like a gynecological table. Sick fuck! I doubted they weren’t giving fucking birth or seeing patients in the dungeon.
A side table against the wall was littered with sharp cutting utensils, dirty with rust and blood. Dear Goddess. Whoever they tortured, they had no intention of keeping them alive.
I stormed out and returned to the cells to investigate more closely.
Strolling down the row of five cells, Parker’s scent hit me in the first cell. The cell bars seemed to be newer and made of iron, not silver.
Fuck! He knew. My mouth dropped. He wasn’t a threat anymore, but if he knew, who else did by now? That’s something I definitely needed to report to my brother.
The first two cells, one of which belonged to Parker, were wide open, unlike the remaining three, which were still sealed shut. I pressed my forehead to the cell that my little Faye sister had been held in and soaked in the scene before me.
A thin mattress lay on the floor, covered in urine and probably shit and blood from the nasty stains splotched across it. No blanket, sheets, or pillows were present.
Blood stained the floor, but it was hard to discern whose blood was whose, so many different scents intermingled down here. Beau would lose his shit when he finds out about this place. Hopefully, Parker wasn’t in that torture room.
I moved into the second cell, the one with the loose silver bars on the ground, careful not to touch the silver-laced bars as I passed through the open door. I smelled faintly charred flesh, so I maneuvered my eyes back to the silver frame of the door. Flesh still clung to it.
That had to hurt like a bitch. There wasn’t even a mattress in this cell, and it was clear that a resident had been here, based on the skin stuck to the cage.
Not even a thin, feces-coated blanket or pillow; no one would want to touch that, but they thought the lack of such items was an additional punishment. I couldn’t decide if that was worse.
What possible ‘crime’ had this particular wolf committed? Knowing Nicholas, a she-wolf didn’t fuck him willingly, if it was a woman, or maybe they stole food. Shit. Perhaps they were late for work.
I spun on my heels to leave this hellhole and load up the car in preparation for the drive back when I noticed something that caught the light under the damaged window.
The shiny thing rested under a broken shard of glass, but the setting sun streamed a ray of light just right to draw my eye. Sifting through the sharp debris, I finally grasped the culprit between my fingers.
Sighing in disappointment when it dawned on me, I clung to a regular old patch of wolf fur, and I released the fur, about to let it float away free, when I caught it back in my hand.
Two separate yet equally powerful reactions slammed into me simultaneously. First, I realized it was silver hair, and second, cherry blossoms invaded my nostrils.
My mate! And my mate was a silver wolf. The emotions that raged and overwhelmed me couldn’t be contained. Exploding into my wolf, I bolted from the house into the woods. Steele and I had to run to escape everything raining down on me, which felt like bats pounding me over the head.
Steele howled, and I blocked out my Beta, who gave chase and tried to mind-link me. I had to get away from that place before I killed something or someone.
