Chapter 7
Bernard Dome
Bright. Too bright. The Red Room’s windows caught afternoon sun at an angle that turned every surface into fire.
Pupils contracting hard enough to hurt, Brenya’s eyes struggled to adjust, pattern-driven mind unable to resist cataloguing each beam cutting through glittering dust motes.
Seven distinct shafts. Three hit the lacquered floor directly.
Four bounced off the walls to create secondary illumination patterns.
The mathematics so beautiful she could not look away even as her retinas burned.
But there were other discomforts pinging to be recognized by a disoriented brain.
A deep, delicious ache seated in her core. Not pain… no.
The throb of something well used. Something still tender.
A moment of recognition sparked, Brenya slowly awakening from her fixation to a world that had metamorphosed into blinding brightness while she’d dreamed.
To a body that had been reborn. The blood-red austerity of the room too vivid, crimson blazing with an almost unnatural intensity.
Shining to the point her eyes watered, and she had to turn her face into the chest of the male she slept upon.
And when her nose was warmed by the rich scent of Beta deliciousness, the tickle of his chest hair on her lips, the hard definition of his body, her straining eyes found new patterns to obsess over.
Black marks twisting over his skin, bleeding their secrets together in sharp angles and soft curves.
A blink. Another blink. A growing tick tapped the back of her brain. A click, click, click that came in bursts, then retreated. An internal demand that she rebuild her nest. Survey what was needed and what was not.
Tidy a mess she couldn’t quite pin down.
Compulsion drew her twitching gaze away from the slumbering man, to run her eyes over each corner of their sleeping place, Brenya retreating from his arms.
Myriad pillows lay scattered, the story of how he’d fucked her told in splashes of color against the monochromatic Red Room’s monotony.
Until that moment, she’d never realized how colorful the fabrics of her nest had been. How the Beta had provided a rainbow. Different textiles, different textures.
And it wasn’t just the nest coming into focus, but the Red Room she had lived in for weeks. Only yesterday had it been nothing but a room painted red with a dark story and mysteries baked into the walls.
It must have been the excess light, but now half-blind with the brightness, Brenya could see the patchwork of the floor, and the furniture, and the paneled walls changing hues of red lacquer signifying an individual enemy of the state smeared here and there.
One victim’s blood tinted the bedposts deep crimson, while vermilion splattered across the adjacent wall.
The inlaid wooden floor was tinged claret with vivid scarlet accenting parquet tiles in alternating patterns.
Each a story of the violence committed by Bernard Dome’s founder.
It was disgusting.
Terrible.
A room that would never wash clean.
Yet beautiful. History right there.
Scared and ugly like her.
This was her room. Where she would build her nests. A room of betrayals, secrets, failures, and mistakes.
Stained.
Not three paces from the bed, Ancil had been slain. She could hear it, the echo of pulverized meat, the dirge of Jacques Bernard beating his closest friend to death—the sickening thuds, the grunts of pain, the begging as Ancil pleaded for his Commodore to stop.
What sounds had come from the other lives smeared here and there?
Wailing? The crack of bone?
If ghosts existed, Ancil was there, watching her. No doubt a snide smirk on his insufferable face. That had to be why the hairs on the back of her neck stood straight.
“Brenya?”
It was a soft call, a distant Alpha plea. Jacques Bernard, seeking space in her ticking skull. Reaching out, not with forced pleasure or disdain, but with a gentle call.
A cowed prowler pacing at some invisible line he could not easily cross. An anxious Alpha.
Jacques Bernard was apprehensive.
His loss of influence gnawed at him now that his bravado and violence had been beaten back.
“Mon chou… please.”
It seemed Jacques had learned something from his usurper. Now he knew what it was like to experience each sensation of his mate being well-fucked by another.
Now, he stroked instead of hammered, a feather-light tickle on her brain. “I love you.”
She snorted, surprised the sound had come out of her.
The tick, tick, tick in her skull grew with a vengeance. Almost loud enough to fully drown out Jacques’s plea. “You need me, Brenya. Only I can keep you safe from him.”
Pulling her knees under her chin, she began to rock, honey eyes zipping about the room, noting anything, anything that would keep her focus pinpoint and safe and make this feeling of him inexorably creeping nearer end.
There were cracks in the paneling, small areas that could use buffing… the flowers on the table, a single white petal having fallen.
That petal held her unblinking attention as if it were the lifeline.
Theoretically, she knew those flowers had been there for days; she’d cataloged them when they had arrived.
But now they were there. She could pay attention to the stems, the wilting leaves, the over-bloomed camellias bursting apart, telling a story of what they had been through in their time on that table.
Compelling her to pay attention to more than information and statistics. The tick, tick, tick and Jacques Bernard shoved aside if she conceded that, if appreciated, the flowers were pretty.
And they were there, because Jules had put them there. On the table, beside her nest.
For her.
And she had never paid any attention to them. Why would she?
Why wouldn’t she?
In the overbright light, with her brain snapping in her skull and Jacques barking from his cell, she learned that she liked and disliked various details about the room.
Had opinions.
For the first time.
Which felt awkward and unnecessary. The opposite of how she’d been raised.
Sudden fascination with the wood-carved canopy overhead stole her attention next. Not because it was beautifully constructed, not because the patterns were mesmerizing, but because it was wood.
Wood. More precious than gold.
Where the universe was littered with gold, wood only existed on a single planet, having developed through eons of evolution of plant life.
Wood that was even more precious under the Dome, as nature had been abandoned so humanity could survive the Red Consumption. Fruit trees in her city existed to produce. The delicate ecosystem that kept them all alive was not reliant on nature, but on filters, manmade machines, and careful control.
Wood could not be recycled in the way gold could be melted down and made into a fork that pretentious Commodores used to stab fine fish. Once crafted and polished and perfected, wood was in its final form.
Brenya’s nest was entombed in blood-soaked wood, and it felt like home in a way the lavish, sparkling quarters Jacques Bernard had kept her in never had.
It was safe from Jacques, even as he crept nearer and nearer.
And Jules….
A sigh passed her lips to peer down upon the Beta. Sprawled, taking up every bit of mussed nest he could stake a claim to. A gentle rise and fall of his chest, his expression unguarded.
In sleep, Jules transformed into something he was not.
Tender, peaceful.
The lie of harmlessness in the softness of his drowsing expression.
Now, she could stare all she wished. Now, she could see that face as more than a collection of individual features.
This was her mate.
The man with the swirling marks over his flesh was hers.
Click. Click. Click!
That single thought, and a sense of ownership, slipped out like a runny egg to cook on her malfunctioning brain.
And sizzled.
“Brenya?”
In fascinated wonder, she drank Jules down. The line of his nose, the light sprinkling of chest hair, the muscles that rippled over his hard stomach, the perfection of his Da’rin.
There were stories and secrets, darker than the history of the blood-soaked Red Room, in that man. Old scars that looked so vicious she wondered how he had survived the wounds that made them.
The inky ocean of his darkest thoughts rippled.
Delicately, Brenya pressed her nose to his skin once more, breathing deep just to savor. Like the newfound details of the Red Room, Jules’s scent had grown more layered and far too appealing.
Musk, strength, a delicious blend that left her mouth watering.
Pulsating, his sea moved languidly around her thoughts, indulgent in her attention. Even in his dreams, his mind was vigilant of her shores.
Soft. Steady. Dangerous.
The strangest feeling came over her, one she had no name for and met with curious concern.
He’d manipulated her on every possible level. In the dark, he’d coerced her to…
…to make love.
He’d assured she’d participated, with the threat of Jacques lurking in every shadow. Rewarded her with pleasure for every moment of pure attention. Reminded her that if she slipped, a cruel, angry Alpha was waiting… and that Jacques Bernard would not be so kind.
Jules Havel had been honest in the deceit he’d wielded so easily against a female so unwitting. He conquered her, and he’d done it without violence.
It was chilling. Should have sent her scuttling away to hide from such a beast. But his machinations had succeeded—their bond, her alien sense of attachment and strange, warm sentiment, had carved its way deep into her bones.
So long as he was with her, she now knew the nest was safe.
The macabre room around her? It was home.
The Beta’s body was her shelter. His avarice and evil beautiful when he wielded them to keep her secure.
Leaving Brenya unsure how indignant she should be.