Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Cell, ABO Facility
“Our morning routine starts with rigorous push-ups.” I narrow my eyes. “You will not disrespect me by seducing me out of your exercises again.”
“Would I do something like that?” Bird winds his arms, which have become much stronger over the last week, around my neck. He definitely would. We both know it. “I have a much more fun method of exercising. You’ll see.”
“You are not tonguing me and calling it an oral workout…I mean, again.”
“And they say romance is dead.” Bird chuckles.
Somehow, when he’s in this metal box of a cell with me, I feel like we’re flirting in a bar, and that’s something that I’ve never done with an Omega before.
He makes me hot and flustered; I didn’t know that I could be those things.
“As much as tonguing you in the mornings has become my favorite exercise, I wasn’t offering. This time.”
I push Bird away from me. “Then what are you offering?”
He twirls, and his hair swings around him in a black wave. “Dancing.”
I cross my arms. “Vetoed.”
Bird doesn’t stop spinning; he’s making me dizzy. “But it feels amazing.”
“I can’t dance. The bodyguard is there to watch and protect their pack at balls and not to dance the waltz.”
Bird allows himself to fall into my arms with a certainty I will catch him — and I do — that makes me smile.
The sweet idiot trusts me.
No one has before.
No one should.
Panting, Bird looks up at me through his long eyelashes with a wide smile. “Let me show you. I’m a good teacher.”
I wrinkle my nose. “What if I’m not a good student?”
“You’re some badass assassin, right?” He waggles his eyebrows. “Why would you think I want you to be good?”
Desire crashes through me at Bird’s easy acceptance of me…all of me.
When I drag the Omega hard against my chest, he moans. I can feel his hard cock through his thin cotton trousers against my stomach.
I take a deep breath of his sweet, vanilla scent.
Bird’s eyes widen. “You’re looking at me like you want to devour me.”
“I do, Little Bird.” My grin is dangerous. “There’s nowhere to run.”
He tilts up his chin. “Who’s running? We’re dancing.”
He adjusts my right hand, moving it onto his upper arm, before grasping my left in his. He raises it to eye level. Then he rests his own free hand on my shoulder blade.
I blink. “Do you remember that I said I watched at the courting balls? We’re in the wrong position. I’m the Alpha. I should be leading.”
Bird raises his eyebrows. “Who’s the teacher here? Now, just look over my left shoulder, take small steps, and follow me.”
I know the basic steps.
Dancing is like fighting. It’s choreographed, except it often seems to have ended with bleeding hearts, rather than bloody wounds.
Sometimes, the courting balls appeared to have more casualties than my mob missions.
“That’s it. You are good at this.” Bird turns with me around the tiny space of the cell. “Isn’t this more fun than push-ups?”
It is.
It’s fucking thrilling. And it is good exercise.
I don’t admit that.
Instead, I deftly change position, stealing the lead from my Omega.
“Hey, the student is rebelling.” Bird laughs, and it’s like birdsong inside the unnatural metal of the cell.
Then he rebels against his own instructions and abandons his position to press his lips to mine.
Startled, I stumble, hitting my back against the bars of the cell with a clank.
I grab my Omega around the back, holding him in place.
I deepen the kiss, entwining our tongues.
He tastes as sweet as he smells.
Bird whines, slamming his hands onto the bars. He cages me.
Finally, he pulls back.
Bird’s gray eyes are wide and desperate. “Ro, what the fuck are we going to do?”
Still panting with desire, I stare at him, confused. “What?”
Trembling, Bird traces down my cheek. “If those dickheads come for you again like they have twice now to take you…wherever they fuck they take you. Why won’t you tell me what they’re doing to you?
It’s tearing me apart not to know what’s happening.
I’m imagining a lot of terrible shit. Surely, it can’t be worse than anything I’m thinking, right? Please, tell me.”
I drop my gaze, imagining the fire in my veins.
Burning, burning, burning.
I bite the inside of my cheek, forcing myself not to show my fear.
I don’t want Bird to know how hard I am struggling to deal with being injected with Dr. Gill’s toxin.
How hard it’s becoming to resist it.
Although, I can’t walk after the experiments. I have been dragged back into the cell both times. So, Bird couldn’t exactly miss how much I was hurt.
He didn’t seem to find nursing me as hard as I’d found nursing him. In fact, it was like he’d done it many times before. I bet that he did in that hotel of his.
I twinged with territorial jealousy, thinking that he’d lain his soft hands on someone else’s fevered forehead before mine.
When they were so cool, however, I soon forgot my jealousy.
I groaned, burrowing under the blanket that he tucked around me. Then I luxuriated in the rare care of someone stripping and washing me with a gentleness that made me feel something.
In my delirious state, I wasn’t sure what.
Yet it sparked something in the numbness of my chest.
I arched into the sensation of the wet cloth, which it was now Bird’s turn to use to clean the sweat off me, while he kept up a sunny conversation to distract me.
I allowed his voice to wash over me soothingly.
He talked about a game that he would play with his Omega sister, Grace, where they pretended that they were Robin Hood and his Merry Men. He may only have been trying to keep my mind off the pain. But my lips still curled up that my Omega had always dreamed of being an outlaw.
Lucky for him. Now, he’s part of my pack, he is one.
“Ro?” Bird presses a light kiss to my lips, before feathering them, desperate and fearful across my chin and then my jaw. “Please? It hurts worse to be kept in the dark. I hate lies.”
Wow, the Omega has fangs.
I wince like he’s just torn my throat out with them.
I’m keeping secrets from him, aren’t I? But if I tell him the truth, will he hate me?
“What’s wrong?” Bird scans my face.
I shutter my expression, before taking a deep breath.
Bird has been so happy and relaxed trapped in here with me, as if being with me in this cell — finding his scent match — is a vacation.
Or possibly, his heaven, after the death he suffered at that fucking hotel.
It kills me to be the one to remind him that this is actually hell.
I gently push him back from me. “This facility is not only where they lock up Rogues like us. It’s also where they test experiments on them.”
Bird blanches. “And that’s what they’ve been doing on you? Treating you like a fucking lab rat?”
I nod. “Op is trying to develop a poison that will kill anyone with abnormal pheromones or with the ability to bear kids like us.”
Bird stumbles back.
The shock on his face is followed by a type of bleakness that simply looks wrong on him.
“Like us? As if we shouldn’t even have been born?
Our pheromones are different; they’re not abnormal.
What right does anyone have to decide who lives and who dies?
What pheromones should exist?” A righteous fury blazes in Bird’s eyes. “How do we stop them?”
A slow grin spreads across my face. “Right question.”
I am blocking the camera in the hallway with my back.
There are no guards in the hallway.
We’re safe.
I reach for the scruff of Bird’s neck and yank him close enough to whisper into his ear, “They plan to burn us. Want to burn them down instead?”
“Fuck, yeah.”
Our gleaming gazes meet.
“We escape first. But we’ll be chased,” I warn. “The Hunters are a deadly pack of killers.”
“Aren’t you?”
My grin becomes more dangerous. “As long as we’re on the same page. I intend to hunt them back.”
“And me?”
“I’ll protect you.” I tighten my hold on Bird’s neck. “Will you become part of my pack? My bonded Omega in my new Rogue pack?”
It’s forbidden.
I no longer give a fuck about this society’s rules, however, not after what it’s done to Rogues. Once we run, we’ll be outside of any law.
Bird bursts out purring.
That’s answer enough.
Yet I need it in words.
When I shake Bird, he chokes out a laugh.
“Hey, impatient,” he struggles to say. “Lucky I’m over the elite courting with gifts bullshit.
I’m finding your whole hunt and kill, while being manhandled, vibe sexy.
I’ve craved to become your bonded Omega from the moment that I woke up to find my Alpha scent match trying to care for me, despite them obviously not having a clue how to.
Hey, don’t scowl. You threw the cloth in my face. ”
“I wish I had a cloth now. I’d do it again.”
“Vicious.”
“It’s how you love me.”
“Yeah, I do.” Bird’s gaze softens.
I reward him with a kiss. “Good Omega.”
“My bad Alpha.” From his lips, it’s nothing but praise.
“I have already memorized most of the facility’s layout.
” I explain the plot for our escape in between stealing kisses from Bird’s plush lips.
“The warden hasn’t turned the pheromone blockers back on because he believes that you are still weaker than you are.
We need to keep up that pretense. That means I can use my Rogue Power.
They have become too relaxed around me because I haven’t fought back.
They have given up breaking me with other torture methods; they keep separating us, using hurting you as a threat over me instead.
Foolishly, it means that their security protocols are lax. ”
“How?”
“Like the fact that they only change the codes on their doors weekly. And I memorize them. Also, like the fact that I have already stolen the key to the facility’s side door from Greco.
The idiot must have thought that he lost the key and was too frightened for his job, or possibly too frightened of the warden, to report it.
Sleight of hand is a clever trick. The key is hidden in the tear that I made the first day I arrived here in the bottom of the rubber mattress. ”
I hid the key in the rip that marked my first day of captivity.