Chapter Eleven
Rafe
"Rafael Borrero, this is Sky," Colt hesitated and it was an easy guess that he hadn't yet gotten around to learning the Omega's surname. After all, from the little I’d been told and the pictures that I'd seen, it seemed they'd skipped the trip up shit creek for a full-scale crap cruise.
"Lind," Sky offered. "Skylar Lind is my full name, but I've always been called Sky."
"Nice to meet you, Sky," I said quietly, taking a moment to study him. He was pale, even against the stark white of the hospital bedding, but he didn't really seem to match the description that Colt had given Clint to pass on to me.
I'd been expecting a small, slender Omega and the man I was looking at – or, I corrected myself silently, the newly created shifter I was looking at – was definitely scary-skinny, but looked to me like he'd be pretty close to Colby's size and stature once he'd been fattened up. Not as muscular, of course, but definitely closer in size to my Omega than, say, Levi or Spencer.
I was much more concerned about his scent. I could smell a werewolf – two, actually – but I wasn't getting any hint of Omega.
"I'm sure that Colt explained that I'm with the COPSD?"
"Yeah," Sky flashed a questioning look at Colt. "But he never explained why you would be interested in the case when the bastard isn't messing with shifters, just humans."
"Well," I said slowly, careful not to look at Colt. "We are pretty sure that the ringleader, Cal, is also connected to another lab where they were abusing shifters. So, you see, the cases are related."
"Oh."
"I know you're not quite at full strength," I said, trying to stay low key, "but it would really help if you could tell us what they did to you."
Sky swallowed. "How much?"
"All of it," Colt answered for me. "All the way back to how you ended up in that place."
Sky stared out the window on the far wall for several minutes, worrying his bottom lip with his teeth. He finally exhaled heavily and looked back to me with a nod. "Yeah. Sure."
"How I ended up there isn't really much of a story," Sky started. "You know humans aren't exactly fans of the holdover gene." When I raised my brow, he explained. "The Omega gene. Humans call it the holdover gene because it has mostly been eradicated."
"Okay." I scribbled in my notepad. "Go ahead."
"When I presented, they handed me over to an orphanage up in New Jersey. Doctor Murphy picked me up there a few months later and put me to work cleaning up his labs. After a while, he started training me as a sort of assistant. I've been there since."
Sky accepted the water that Colt handed him and took a swallow before continuing. "Anyway, it was never exactly a good place, but things started to get crazier there when Cal started hanging around." He hesitated. "Are you familiar with CRISPR technology?"
"I've heard of it, but only recently," I replied. "I don't know a lot about it."
"Okay. It's basically a layman's way of manipulating DNA. You can buy a kit online with no experience or training." Sky drew in a breath. "Cal and Dr. Murphy are trying to create some kind of mutant super-shifter race using it."
Colt and I exchanged a look.
"Anyway, Cal had this female Omega that he dragged around – Christy or something – and they used her eggs to implant all the DNA crap that they cooked up." He shrugged. "Anyway, I guess something happened to her and they started collecting Omegas to get eggs from. The embryos rarely took, and only a few lived long enough to actually be implanted in a carrier. My last job was to monitor the nursery pods that they used to gestate up to the implant date, but one of Cal's guards caught me trying to log onto a computer that I didn't belong on."
Sky accepted more water from Colt. "Anyway, Cal decided to make an example of me. He had them cut me open so they could take what they wanted and then changed my position to prostitute for as long as I could work."
"As long as you could work?" I repeated, frowning. "What did that mean?"
"The wire in your mouth," Colt guessed with a scowl.
Sky nodded. "To keep me from asking the customers for help or telling them what was going on, they threaded a razor wire through my mouth and connected it to my cheeks." He touched a still healing scar on his left cheek where I was guessing Doc had removed the bolt. "If I tried to open my mouth more than enough to drink, the wire sliced into my tongue."
"Which meant you couldn't eat," I guessed, disgusted. "They were going to work you until you starved."
"What a fucking prick," Colt growled.
I turned back to Sky. "So what? You didn't die fast enough, so they just randomly decided to kill you?"
