Deadly Alphas (The Hounds Duet #1)

1

lotus

THERE ARE NO surprises in my daily routine.

I wake up in the morning in my little cube of a room. It is not like a nest, not at all like a nest, but it is small, like a nest should be.

I take things, sometimes, soft things, small things, good things, to bring back to the cube room, but they always find them. They don’t try to take them from me, not anymore, but the things disappear, anyway. I think they take them when I sleep.

Before, they took them from me when I was awake, and I fought. They stopped. But my things disappear anyway.

I don’t know why I fought. I don’t know much of anything anymore. I know that I am different from them—the people in the white coats who come and go in the place where I live. I know this because they make noises with their mouths, sounds to each other, and these noises have meanings. I remember…

No.

Sometimes, I have something like a memory, but I can’t quite grasp it. I think, once, a long time ago, maybe, I was like them. I made meaningful noises with my mouth to communicate to other people. I could do that, and I could do other things, too. And I think, then, I did not live in this place, either. I think maybe I had a proper nest somewhere, a soft place full of good things, and no one came and took my nesting materials in the night.

But the real problem is that I can’t think.

Everything is really just emotion and instinct, want and color, physical sensations and reaction. There is nothing else, just a vague sensation there used to be something more and another sensation, like being underwater, like struggling to get to the surface, like being held down, like drowning, only long and slow and torturous.

Anyway, there are no surprises.

When there are surprises, it frightens me. I lash out. I am fierce and strong, even if I am small. I have hurt them, raked my claws across their faces, latched my teeth into their thumbs, screamed like a banshee in their faces. They are wary of me.

Each day goes like this: I wake up. One of the people in the white coats is there, making soothing noises at me out of their mouths, and they have brought me food. The food is on some plastic tray and there are utensils there, and sometimes, the people in the white coats try to force me to hold a fork and to put the food in my mouth that way.

Sometimes, depending on how I am feeling, I let them.

But I would rather just use my hands and mouth to get the food into me, instead of making it so complicated.

I don’t like it here. Especially if I have found something very nice and soft for my cube, something that might have made it a real nest and I have awakened this morning to find it missing, as usual, as always. Where does it go?

When that happens, I lash out. I use the forks as weapons, stabbing into their arms or necks or clavicles. I have drawn blood more than once.

So, often they do not do anything more than leave the food and go out of the cube and lock the door.

Then, I eat.

After this, time passes, and I spend it trying to get out of the cube.

Every day, I do the same things. I climb on the bed and inspect the place where the ceiling meets the wall. I go to the door and look at the latch and the handle and try to understand how it works, how it opens, how to get out .

Then, there is another meal. More food, another tray, more soothing noises from their mouths. They usually stay during this meal, because after this meal, I am taken out of the cube for some time.

They take me to rooms where they attach things to my skin, things that have wires that go to beeping screens covered in numbers and blinking lights. They stick me with needles and put me inside machines that scan me all over.

I cooperate with these things because I have come to understand that if I do what they like, they will let me go outside.

There is a courtyard there, with a square of grass, a box of flowers, some trees inside little stone circles. It is the only time I feel sane.

I need the time in the courtyard.

So, I let them do whatever they need to do to me, and then I get to go outside.

If I fight or lash out or stab people with forks or claw at their faces and shriek…

Well, then, they leave me in the cube until the last meal, and they never take me out, and there are no trees and no grass and no flowers. And worst of all. No sky.

I don’t know what the soft things are that I find for my nest. I don’t know their names. They are bits of clothing, bits of bedding, bits of soft pieces of grass and flowers and leaves. Nice things.

They always disappear.

I am not happy here. It is not a nice place. It is cold and square here, and everything is too flat.

I know it is wrong, somehow.

I know it.

But when I have those bits of not-memories, almost memories, I know that I have never been in a good place, not really, that I have never had a nest. The only difference is that it never used to bother me.

One day, he is there.

Alpha.

I know this straightaway, just as I know when I scent him that he is one of mine. He belongs to me and I belong to him. And yet, here he is, in one of the white coats, bringing me the food, looking me over, just like them .

He scents me too.

He doesn’t like the scent of me, though.

His scent goes bright and full of tension and worry. He leaves the cube right away.

I don’t see him again for many, many days. I don’t know how many, but it is a very long time. During this time, it is all the same, my routine, my days.

Three meals, tests in the afternoon, then a stretch outside in the courtyard, then back to my cube with all the bits for my nest I have managed to secret away, only for them to disappear overnight after I sleep. (And no, I cannot stay awake. I have tried, but I can never keep my eyes open. I think it is something they give to me. It may be in the food. I tried not eating it once, though, and they came and wrestled me down and put more needles in me.)

During this time, sometimes, I scent him, here and there, when I am outside of the cube. I know he is there. When I scent him, I cannot help but react to his scent.

It makes me purr. It makes me run to wherever I can find it. It makes me rub into it. Sometimes, it makes me present.

I never do that here, never.

I don’t go into heat, either, but it hurts not going into heat. I feel it, when it is close, and then it doesn’t happen, probably because of something they give me, either in the food or the needles, and then, the heat is just a dull ache that works its way through my bones and my limbs, a long, slow pain that echoes through me like my not-memories.

I am an omega.

Or at least, I used to be.

Now…

Now, I am this.

They always seem to dislike it when I present or purr over his scent. They talk over me to each other, their voices going up and up, higher and higher, and somehow, I know, they are confused by my behavior, even if I can’t understand what the noises they make mean anymore.

Anyway, days and days pass, and then he is back, my alpha, my own alpha, whose scent is like home. It is deep and rich and spicy and comforting, a very male scent, a good scent, and I am happy to see him again, in spite of myself, because I sense that if he is in the white coats, he is not really my alpha, but an enemy. I know they are holding me captive. I know this place is wrong.

But he opens the door to the cube for me and I go with him, easily enough.

He takes me outside, but not to the courtyard, to a strange outside place. It is dark and chilly outside, and the sky is overhead, dotted with perfect bright stars, but the ground underneath is not grass, but hard and strange. There are little white lines painted all over it, parallel to each other. Strange, hulking machines with wheels are parked between some of the lines.

He puts me in one of the wheeled-machines, in the back of it. He straps me in with a belt that goes over my lap and over my chest, and then he gets in the front.

It comes on, and it frightens me. There is loud music and blinking lights in the front. The machine smells like fire and smoke when it goes.

I whimper back there, bucking against the belt, trying to get free. Eventually, I manage it, scrabbling at the place where he fastened it until it bursts off me. Then, I launch myself at my alpha, moaning at him as best I can, begging him not to do this to me, to be my nice, good alpha.

He stops the wheeled-machine and gets in the back of it with me, and for a while, it is better, because he puts his hands on me. He pants and makes guttural noises, pressing his body into mine, putting his mouth against my temple and against my shoulder and against the hollow of my throat.

His scent floods the car, and mine rises to meet it.

But he is desperate also, and there is something else in the way he smells. He smells like shame.

And then, something odd happens. He makes a noise, and I recognize it as familiar. “Lotus,” he says. He says, “No, Lotus, no, we can’t do this.” But I don’t understand the other parts of it, just the “Lotus” part.

I know, suddenly, that this familiar noise is what they call me. It is my name.

Not my other name, from before, but the name I was given here, in the bad place with the white coats.

Lotus.

I am Lotus.

He does not touch me for nearly as long as I would like.

Instead, he makes the machine go again, though he lets me sit in the front next to him and he keeps one hand on my thigh, rubbing me up and down in a mesmerizingly soothing motion. His scent is all over me now, because he rubbed himself against me before, put his hands and mouth on me, marked me again and again…

It is nicer with his scent.

He takes me to another place of cubes, but it is not like the place we have come from. It is smaller and it is less hard and cold and square. There is carpet on the floors and blankets on soft furniture. There are other people there, two women, but they are not alphas or omegas, and I can scent that.

They make noises at each other for some time, my alpha and these people, and I can hear the desperation and shame going back and forth between them. Eventually, they put me in a cube.

It is a better cube than the cube from before.

It has a soft bed with many, many pillows and lots of soft blankets, some so soft that I spent long, long moments rubbing my cheek against them, rubbing my nose against them, rubbing my forehead…

It is a good room.

But my alpha is gone now. I wake in the morning, the women try to communicate with me, and I am happy to be away from the bad place and this place is softer and better. But it is unfamiliar and I am worried.

At first, the cube is open. I spend my time whining around the cube, and when I find the latch on the door—this one is a knob—I turn it and it opens and I can go out of my cube, into other cubes in the place.

I find my way out, all the way out, into the outdoors. There is a lot more grass here, a long stretch of grass that goes all the way to something like the strange, hard black parking lot outside the bad place. The wheeled-machines go on that hard blackness, but I don’t know this until I get right up to it and one almost runs into me.

The women in the house make shrieking noises and come after me.

After that, the door to the cube is locked.

It is still better here.

But it is not good .

Maybe there is a place, a place between good and bad, not-good and not-bad, and if that is the case, that is what this place is.

I want somewhere good, a good place, with a nest, and my alpha.

I want it with a desire that seems to burst inside me. I never wanted like this before, in the cold, square place.

He’ll come back, won’t he?

My alpha?

He must come back.

Except, he doesn’t come back.

They come instead.