Chapter 10
“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO HER?”
That voice….
Pressure built inside Brenya’s skull, the clicking metamorphosing into a hammering thud. A heartbeat in her brain.
“No. No. No. No.” The metronome of her resistance. Her refusal.
Around the Beta’s waist, her legs clung, squeezing. Nails sank into Jules’s skin, her desperation, her internal willingness to do anything Jules asked. Anything. If he would just take her back home.
To her nest.
“No. No.”
But Jules was walking onward, toward that distant bellowing nightmare.
“brING HER OUT. SHOW ME SHE IS UNHARMED!” The rhythmic slam of flesh against steel punctuated Jacques’s roar. Once. Twice. A third time. “I will rip this fucking Dome apart piece-by-piece if I have to!”
Each impact reverberated through the corridor, the sound of muscle and bone colliding with tungsten bars and amorphous metal.
A beast hurling itself at cage walls.
“I’ll break every bone in your body, Jules Havel, with my bare hands, and piss all over your corpse! Show me my mate!”
The desperation of the Alpha’s wail did things to Brenya, moving inside her like a serpent.
Summoned her.
Filled her with the urge to obey. A dreamlike haze. Her body weighed down with sand.
Nose stuffy from the sobbing, she sucked in a desperate deep breath.
But with that sip of air… that long drink of pheromone-laced oxygen, the room went fuzzy.
She shivered.
Her Alpha was there.
Calling to her louder than the banging in her brain.
Yanked on her leash.
Hard.
“That’s right. Breathe it in, Brenya.” Jules was so careful with how he held her.
Firm, unyielding, but composed. Measured.
Unconcerned by any pain she caused him from clinging to him or the bleeding bite wound in his shoulder.
Unreactive to the nearby presence of the other male.
To the threats. To the noise. His mind, his care, it was steady.
Focused only on her. His scent soft and enveloping.
“That is your Alpha. I am your Beta. You are our Omega. Inhale our scents. It will help. I have you.”
Instinctually, the way she gulped air was like a fish out of water. Her muscles going slack without permission, her brain fizzling through warbled thoughts until there was no thought left.
Mental silence. A hard reset.
“There you go. Yes. Feel that? You can relax into me. You don’t have to fight.”
Fight? She didn’t have any energy left to fight.
It had been fisted and fucked right out of her.
It had been wrestled on the floor and dressed in her history.
It had been carried down a hall while she’d bucked against the Beta like a maniac.
It had been crammed into an elevator with a killer and its soldiers.
Many soldiers.
Men dressed in black who’d surrounded them the second she’d been dragged from the Red Room. Who’d prevented her from grabbing onto fixtures in the hallway. Who would have frightened her if she’d had any brain capacity to measure them.
To really look at the level of male Jules surrounded himself with.
The worst of the worst.
Some huge, some slight, all very, very deadly. The kind of men who would have taken Greth where they could have lived like kings with any female of their choice, but chose to come to Bernard Dome in what could have been a death sentence.
Which still might be.
Men like Jules who’d had nothing to lose, as they had already lost it all in Thólos.
One of them watched her carefully—heavy, strange eye contact—speaking in a guttural tongue almost constantly to Jules as they marched down the hallway, pressed her into the elevator, moved with efficiency toward the prison.
Reporting on her in a language she could not understand.
Once even daring to touch, spreading open Brenya’s eyelids when she’d failed to respond to his clicks or snaps.
And Jules had allowed this. Allowed this stranger to force her eyes open and shine a bright light in them. Effectively blinding the Omega for over a minute as the males continued to communicate.
And it was that male, that stranger, who wiped the blood off of her face and lips while she was startled.
There was the sound of doors opening, of footsteps as the party traveled, the rush of blood in her ears… her litany of pleading growing softer as reality seemed less and less attainable.
“When I turn the corner, Jacques will see you, and he will calm.” Warming her back with slow strokes, Jules soothed her like a child. “It would be best if you walked in without being carried. Can I put you down?”
No.
No.
No.
But her feet were touching the ground, her gelatinous, spongy legs long past fatigue. Useless things that, if it weren’t for the Beta’s support, would have left Brenya’s ass on the floor.
She yawned. Blinked.
Light in the corridor flickered. Or… at least… her perception of it did.
It was a soft whisper between them, Brenya oddly woozy. “I don’t want to be here.”
“Me neither,” he said with a smile, the soft one Jules shared only with her. “But here we are, and it will get easier for both of us with practice.”
In her distraction, her muddled thinking, her inability to properly stand, Jules slowly began to back her into a room.
One where a seething male was imprisoned.
In Jacques’s care, the Alpha had fed her too much wine on occasion. That too had muddled her thoughts in the same way, leaving Brenya a slurring ragdoll.
“He’s going to kill you, Jules. You know that, right? One of these days, he’ll kill you, and he’ll take me back. He’ll make me have babies. He’ll make me suck his cock. He’ll make me sad and—”
“Shh, no, my love.” The words so certain, the foundation she could build on if only she would listen. Jules speaking louder so the Alpha behind her might hear. “If he kills me, he’d be killing you too. He knows that.”
Shaking her head, hardly noticing that they were moving, that he was slowly, cautiously backing her into a room that smelled like everything she’d ever needed in life.
Leading her confused, malfunctioning brain deeper into danger… danger who asked a velvet question. “Don’t you want babies, Brenya?”
Alpha presence slipped down her spine like the blade of a guillotine, severing her from the drug-like daze Alpha pheromones were having on her, pulling her back into harsh, skull-crushing reality.
Her back met a wall of glass.
An Alpha inhaling deeply at her back was not a hallucination. She heard how it rasped through something small and hollow, felt the pull of wind at her hair.
Whites of her eyes showing, she tried to push away and scream, but Jules held her flush, his body pressing hers to Jacques’s containment, his voice in her ear as the Alpha sniffed and sniffed and sniffed through tiny holes in the glass.
“Let him smell. He needs it as much as you do.”
She was breathing too fast, too shallow. Vision sharpened, softened, sharpened.
There was a rattle in her breast.
Alpha purr distorted by perforated glass. Impotent. Off pitch. Strange.
Because Jacques could not reach her with more than his breath.
He was right there behind her, no doubt pressed up to the glass like she was, but he couldn’t reach her.
Jules had promised.
Jules, who was not purring. Who didn’t pollute her thoughts or the air with his demands… unlike Jacques.
“Mon chou, please look at me. I need to see that you’re well.” The Alpha’s voice cracked. Never had Brenya heard the mighty Jacques’s voice crack. Never had he displayed desperation… not like this.
He sounded… hurt.
Not offended. Not arrogant. Not retaliatory.
Not anymore.
Not now that she was in his line of sight.
“Please. I am begging you to turn around.” This was not the voice of the man who’d raped her in broad daylight. This was not the voice of the beast who’d been screaming for blood only moments ago. “Brenya, for the love of all the Gods, face me. Show me what he’s done to you.”
Done to her? Jules had done plenty, but you’d never find those marks on her skin. No, he’d healed those.
“You can do this, Brenya.” Jules, her husband, her keeper, her Beta mate, the man who was teaching her how to survive the madness and the noise—who’d made her a living, walking bomb—coaxed her gently to turn. “Let your Alpha see your face.”
A face that was slightly different than it had been before. Fuller, her lower eyelid no longer dragged down by her scar.
Jules had repaired it… the same day he’d tucked the virus into her body.
And though Jacques was right there—within arm’s reach were there not glass and bars between them—and though he was drinking her down, she refused to look at him.
No, her nervous attention sought out the makings of an Alpha containment cell, studying where the bars met the wall, analyzing how amorphous metal glass fused into the structure.
Seamless. No visible stress lines. Nothing that would have been a red flag to an engineering grunt as an unseen weakness.
And unlike the panel that had been used to craft Jules’s prison, this one did not have a hatch.
In fact, there were new techniques, Thólosian or Greth techniques, used here that she’d never considered for fusing the containment. That appeared superior to what she’d been taught.
That sparked a corner of her mind that had not been accessible for days… weeks. Months?
The analytical, cold-thinking mind based on action and utility.
Who recognized that it was perfect.
The prison was perfect.
The man inside would not be getting out… at least through the partition dividing cell from viewing space.
Yet there was access through another wall, inaccessible from this room. A solid door, the kind used for decontamination chambers. As for the walls, retrofitted concrete.
The room created for its prisoner was more luxurious than any dorm she’d shared, living happily in Beta Sector.
A bed with soft blankets, clean linens, recessed shelves for books. A toilet—an actual toilet—not just a bucket. A sink. A table with a white cloth.
An Alpha—a well-dressed man moving into her line of sight, so she’d have no choice but to acknowledge him.