Chapter 4
FOUR
Jez
“WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME?” I echoed, disbelieving. “What’s wrong with you, you sick fucker! Why the hell do you have kids with bruises all over their faces locked up in your creepy mega-mansion?”
But of course, I already knew why. I knew it all too well. It was the reason I was in this mess in the first place, after all. I just really, really hadn’t wanted to see it in person. Was Adrian’s eleven-year-old sister trapped in that room with the rest of them?
Gage’s expression closed off, the anger disappearing behind a stony mask. “Nothing to do with you. And they’re not locked—” He cut himself off with a sharp shake of the head, as though he’d just realized he was arguing with his prisoner. “Come on, move.”
We passed what looked like the main staircase, and ended up at the back of the house.
A second, much narrower set of stairs hugged the wall there.
I had a vague notion from reading Agatha Christie novels when I was a kid that some old houses had servant stairs, presumably so the rich owners didn’t have to see all the work being done to keep them pampered and comfortable.
The steep steps looked dangerous as hell, even without stiletto heels.
Clenching my jaw, I followed Gage halfway up, his hand around my wrist to keep me from bolting.
Then I stopped without warning, braced as best I could, and threw my whole weight backward in an attempt to engineer a hopefully fatal accident for my alpha captor.
Mind you, there was a decent chance that I’d get dragged along for the ride and end up breaking my neck as well. I just wasn’t sure that was any worse than the alternative, at this point.
Gage cursed and stumbled down a step before catching himself. The gun clattered from his grip, bouncing off the stairway and falling through the banister railings. It hit the floor below with a loud metallic crash.
We both froze for an instant, but it didn’t go off. Jammed onto the narrow step with my kidnapper, I snarled and tried to stomp his foot with my sharp heel. When that didn’t work, I tried kicking again.
“Jesus Christ!” Gage snapped, but instead of pushing me away, he hauled me close and bent down, lifting me over his shoulder as though I weighed nothing. “You got a death wish or something, woman?”
I shrieked in frustration, trying to hit and kick.
One shoe flew off as my foot hit the staircase railing, the sharp pain jolting through me.
Gage carried me upstairs, grumbling—completely unfazed by my struggles.
We went up two more flights, terminating in a tiny landing with a single doorway set in the wall.
Gage paused only long enough to open the door; then he squeezed through the doorway with me. Surprisingly, he managed not to knock any part of my body into the frame. On some deep level, I wondered why he’d bothered.
He tossed me down on a soft surface. I bounced, sneezing when a small cloud of dust rose around me, and scrambled upright.
It was a bed.
I tensed, but he’d already backed off, his bulk blocking the doorway.
A light clicked on, illuminating the room.
I whipped my head around, looking for an escape route.
.. for anything to use as a weapon. There were no windows, but there was a second door to my right.
I lunged for it, staggering with one shoe still on and the other foot bare.
The doorknob turned under my touch, opening onto a bathroom.
No windows here, either. A medicine cabinet with a mirror had been mounted over the sink. I grabbed it with both hands, trying to pull the mirror free. The little door came partway open, the hinges creaking and twisting—but the mirror didn’t budge.
I let out a choked cry of frustration.
“What are you doing?” Gage demanded from the bathroom doorway, in the bark of an alpha who was nearing the end of his tether.
I whirled on him. “Trying to break the glass, so I can slice the biggest shard across your fucking throat!” I yelled.
“Why?” he shot back, his voice rising. “Why did you try and kill Knox? Why are you doing this?”
“Because of the kids downstairs!” I shouted back at him, terrified and enraged in equal measure. “The ones who are ‘nothing to do with me’! Just like I’m ‘not something they need to worry about,’ apparently!”
He shook his head slowly. “You’re not making any sense. How could you even know—” Again, he cut himself off. He dragged a hand over his face and let out a slow sigh. “Never mind. Give me your other shoe.”
He held out his hand, palm up.
I knew what he was thinking—take the prisoner’s shoes so she couldn’t run away, in case she got loose.
Slowly, I bent over with a sneer and pulled off my remaining stiletto.
I straightened and stepped forward as though to hand it over.
At the last moment, I hauled back and swung with all my might, aiming for his face with the pointy end.
A hand closed around my wrist before I could blink; it was like slamming my arm into a brick wall. The stiletto heel came to an abrupt stop, inches from his eye. He wrestled my arm down and twisted the shoe free of my grip without a word.
Gage stepped back, putting space between us as I stood there, barefoot and disheveled, panting hard.
“I’ll bring you up some food,” he said in a monotone. “And, um, some pillows and blankets and stuff, so you can make a nest.”
I stared at him in disbelief.
A harsh, high-pitched bark of laughter tore free of my throat.
A nest? He was going to bring me stuff to make a nest? Inside the locked-up crazy-woman attic?
“Are you shitting me right now?” I demanded, hearing the hysterical edge return to my voice. I’d never had a nest in my entire fucking life. Not unless you counted cardboard and crumpled newspapers in an alley.
His face had gone hard and stony again. “I won’t be long.”
And then he turned his back on me. Feral rage bubbled up from someplace deep in my chest at his utter unconcern, moments after I’d done my best to put a knockoff Louboutin stiletto through his eye socket. I stomped after him.
"I hope your asshole of a pack alpha dies!” I yelled at him as he reached the door.
He froze, his broad shoulders stiffening.
.. but he didn’t turn around or say a word.
Instead, he continued through the door, closing it behind him.
A heavy click signified the lock engaging.
I stood there, trembling with fear and frustration, until the sound of his heavy footsteps on the stairs faded.
The knob on the inside of the door was completely blank; there wasn’t even a keyhole. It turned under my grip, but the door wouldn’t open. There must be some kind of lock or latch on the outside, where I couldn’t get to it.
I knew I should do a thorough search of the rooms, in case there was something useful hidden away. But as my adrenaline waned in the aftermath of the confrontation, it felt as though my body weighed a thousand pounds. My shaking knees didn’t want to keep me upright any longer.
I staggered over to the dusty bed and half-sat, half-fell.
My gaze slid down to my bare feet. Two toes missing on the left foot, and one toe on the right.
When he’d taken my shoes, Gage had no way of knowing that I’d once walked five miles barefoot through the snow. We all had. Some of us had even survived the trek.
I wriggled the toes that hadn’t succumbed to frostbite after that nightmarish flight through a winter forest. It wouldn’t be a lack of shoes that stopped me from running, if I was able to slip free from my captors.
But the looming size of that ‘if’ dwarfed me.
Inside my own head, I was still the badass vigilante I’d come to think of myself as being. A one-woman army, dishing out lethal justice to the evil-doers society didn’t care enough to punish.
That badass vigilante would find a way out, escaping heroically with the pack of innocent kids trapped downstairs. She would lead them safely back to civilization, where Adrian would rush forward and throw his arms around his little sister, weeping with gratitude for her return.
Unfortunately, while my head might still believe those things, my heart knew better.
Sometime during the course of the night, it had realized that the badass vigilante was a myth.
.. a stupid fabrication. I wasn’t an avenging assassin, utilizing my unique skillset to pass undetected while bringing much-needed justice to the oppressed.
I was a terrified twenty-one-year-old omega trapped in a remote mansion, right along with the rest of the starved and beaten omegas downstairs. In the year since I’d killed my friend’s would-be rapist with a table lamp to the skull, I’d been skating by on sheer luck, not any kind of real skill.
And now, my luck had run out.