Taiga (Renegade Strangers #2)

Prologue

PROLOGUE

Seven

F our hundred and eighty-three claw marks on the wall.

One for every cursed day.

I hadn’t seen Two in that many days. Not since she and I were removed from the Guardian program in G Block. I didn’t know where they’d sent her. Hopefully anywhere but Experimentation. No one who went into E Block came out again.

Although, maybe E Block would have been a better fate than my hell.

R Block. Reproduction.

Known by the females stuck in here with me as Rape Block.

Four hundred and eighty-three claw marks on the wall.

One for every time my body had been violated in the name of science.

One for every time I’d knelt on the floor, leaned my chest against the bed and gritted my teeth as whichever one of the males they sent in rutted away at me.

The first several times, I’d bled. But my stupid, immortal body healed so fast that by the following day, I was deemed ‘fit’ for another try.

Four hundred and eighty-three claw marks on the wall.

One for every time I’d curled up on my bed, in my sterile white room, and waited for lights out, shaking and hating and refusing to cry.

One for every night of lying, staring at the ceiling, wishing I had something to do other than ‘try to get pregnant.’ What a waste of my talents. I’d been top of my team in G Block. They’d called me vicious. Ruthless. Bloodthirsty—in the best possible way. I’d been raised with the sole purpose of killing Pureblood Strangers. Until they decided to repurpose me.

Apparently my particular brand of vicious, ruthless, bloodthirsty, murderous hatred of Pures was something they needed to replicate. With my offspring.

Four hundred and eighty-three claw marks on the wall.

One for every time a male’s seed hadn’t taken. One for every single day I’d been made to wake up and do it all again. Made to listen to Agent Dawson’s spiel to whatever male was in my room that day.

No biting, no scratching, no touching except for penis going into vagina until completion. His completion. Not mine. Never mine.

One for every single rape.

Four hundred and eighty-three claw marks on the wall. And every day, the number grew by one.

The number of Operation agents I would murder in retribution.

Because what they were doing to me was worse by far than what the Pures could ever do. They deserved to die.

If I could just get the drugs out of my system, I could fully shift and kill them all.

Four hundred and eighty-three claw marks on the wall.

Today it would be four hundred and eighty-four.

The buzz of the lock disarming made me turn. It was too early for them to be calling us to the mess hall for breakfast. And it wasn’t an agent I recognized who strolled into my space as if he owned the place. And maybe he did. His uniform glittered with shiny metal badges, his hair was cropped close to his skull. His eyes were silver and gave nothing away.

“This the one?” he asked. Agent Dawson followed him in, tapping away on her tablet.

“Yes, sir. This is Seven.”

The man’s eyes roved over me, and I felt something I thought had been raped out of me. The creeping chill of apprehension.

“You were quite the fighter, back in G Block, by all reports,” he remarked, his tone bored, but his eyes taking in my strong, toned limbs. Immortality meant that even without daily exercise, without the fighting drills I used to do as a Guardian, my body remained strong and lean. It never changed, no matter how long I lay on my bed and plotted my revenge.

I didn’t bother to answer; just glared my fury back at him, my lip curling in a sneer.

The man chuckled as if he found me entertaining.

Another one of them to add to my kill list. If I ever managed to break out of this hell.

“Yes, take her to join the others,” he said to Dawson, who nodded, tapping away at her tablet. The man swept from the room, leaving Dawson standing in the doorway, eyeing me warily.

Just for fun, I gnashed my teeth at her. She flinched. My dark laughter rang hollow because while she might be weak, mortal, human, I was drugged to within an inch of my life. Just growing a single claw to mark the days was enough to leave me dizzy and weak for hours.

And she had the stick. The one that sent electricity coursing through my body. It did no permanent damage, but it hurt like hell and was strong enough to fling me into the far wall. Sometimes even knock me out cold. I was powerless against her.

She glanced towards the door as it swooshed open, and a medic appeared with a syringe on a tray.

“Dose her,” Dawson said, her voice flat. Her eyes flicked to me as I stood there, arms folded, staring them both down. There was no point in fighting it. They’d just use their sticks. Whatever they wanted to shove into my body, they did. I’d learned that in the worst possible way over the last four hundred and eighty-three days.

The medic jabbed me in the arm, and the world started fading.

One day , I thought as blackness crept into my vision. One day I’ll get free of your drugs, and I’ll kill you all.

T he smells came to me first when the blackness began to ease. The air smelled … fresher, thick with the scent of something that reminded me of the brown, dirty potatoes I had to peel when I was on kitchen duty. And underneath that, a salty tang that tickled my nostrils enough that I sneezed.

I opened my eyes, but there were no white walls. There were no walls at all. I scrambled upright, jostling against another body.

“Watch it! They’ve got us surrounded by sticks!” a male voice hissed.

Blinking, my eyes adjusted to the dimness. The male looked tense, his eyes darting. There were others with us, still laying prone or beginning to stir. And beyond them, sticks, surrounding us. Bars on a cage. I glanced up. They were above us as well.

“Are they active?” I asked the male. He scoffed.

“You going to test them out? Because I’m sure as shit not going to.”

He had a point. No one who wasn’t crazy would take that risk. The sticks were hell.

“Where are we?” I muttered. My eyes had adjusted to the … night? Was this what night was like? Not quite dark and full of shadows. “Are we … outside?”

The male grunted, which I assumed was him admitting he had no clue. Past the sticks rose enormous, shadowy shapes. Tall and straight, with claw-like protrusions that branched out.

“Trees!” I gasped, reaching forward. A hand clamped down on my shoulder, dragging me back.

“Are you fucking insane?” the male growled. I’d completely forgotten about the sticks.

“We’re outside !” I insisted, wrenching my shoulder out of his grasp.

“Shut up!” A man appeared outside the cage. He had a rifle strapped over his black-clad shoulder, and he wore a grim expression on his face. An agent.

As I watched, more of them filed into the space around the cage, lining up in rows.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“None of your fucking business, half-breed!” the agent snarled back. And then all of them were snapping to attention, and I peered past them. If I could just shift my eyes … just my eyes, so I could see better in the dark. But I was stuck in human form, and my eyes had never seen anything but bright, artificial light. This … nighttime was straining them.

Even trying to shift them made my head throb. Still drugged. They’d never missed a dose, not since they took me out of G Block and put me in Rape Block. Can’t have the vessels shifting and slashing their rapists’ heads off.

“They’ll arrive very soon. And when they do, we need to show them what we’ve made.” The voice was the same commanding, calm, dead voice of the man who had come into my cell. He looked up, and for a second, his eyes met mine, and the look in them sent chills coasting over my skin.

I hated that human.

“It will be interesting to see how our hybrids react when the Strangers arrive.”

Strangers. A growl started low in my throat, heat flooding my body. They’d brought us somewhere with Pures, and they had us drugged and locked up in a cage of sticks? We may as well be live sacrifices!

Every single one of them needed to die. The Pures, with their filthy ways, yes. But the agents would be first.

A scuffle beyond the orderly lines of agents made me flick my head up, peering past them into the dim light. I could vaguely make out a clearing. A woman cried to my left. A man muttered urgently to her.

“You promised me!” a male voice roared from the clearing. I could see him now, a broad, shirtless back, black hair. He was holding something … someone.

“Turn around, Roman, and let us see her. We need to be assured she is unharmed,” the leader of the agents said in that dead voice.

“She’s a fucking immortal, of course she’s unharmed!”

The male beside me growled low in his throat, and the others, awake now, stood up, careful not to touch the sticks as we watched on from our spot behind the agents.

“Why have they brought us here?” a female whispered beside me as the argument between the leader—I thought I heard someone call him Baxter—and this Roman fellow continued.

“I don’t know,” I replied. There were too many unfamiliar voices, sounds … smells. It was overwhelming.

Somewhere among the agents, a woman called out, “Blaire, sweetie, are you okay?” Another voice answered, garbled by the shuffling of the lines of agents between us and the dark-haired Roman in the center of the clearing and whoever, or whatever, he was holding.

Roman’s body rippled, changed. A Shifter. A Pure Stranger.

I snarled out my hatred, ignored as an argument began among the agent ranks. I inhaled, and my vision blurred.

Mine.

The word echoed in my head, but I had no idea what it meant. I sniffed again, and something deep inside me roared to life. Something primal … possessive. The ache of it filled my body, and I felt something I hadn’t felt in four hundred and eighty-four days.

The tingle of impending shift.

A woman screamed. Guns were cocked. A shot rang out.

The smell of blood filled my nostrils.

Mine!

I screamed. Again and again, I screamed. As if that bullet had buried itself in me.

The burn of a stick. I fell to the floor of the cage, rocked by agonizing spasms. One of the agents had zapped me through the bars.

Something was wrong. That blood … that scent … they’d hurt someone.

Mine!

There was more commotion in the clearing, but nothing made sense. My twitching body, these raging feelings inside my ribs. I had to get out. I had to get to him.

I staggered to my feet.

Screamed again.

Let me out of this fucking cage!

I threw myself at the bars. Sparks flew. My body jolted with pain, and I flew backward.

“What the fuck are you doing?” one of the others hissed. I rolled onto my stomach, the pain from the zap fading into a buzz along my skin.

“Shit!” an agent nearby hissed. The sting of an injection and the tingling subsided, nausea flooding me in its wake. I fell to my knees, vomiting. Everything in me screamed to get up, to break free. To take what was Mine and run.

But they’d just drugged me again. And my rage was impotent in the face of their drugs.

But for just a moment, it had felt like I might be able to break free. And it had something to do with the smell of blood.

Not just any blood. My blood.

Mine.