His face had gone hard and stony again. “I won’t be long.”
And then heturned 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 alphadies!” 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 thedoor 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.
FIVE
Jez
I DIDN’T SLEEP. I DIDN’Tdare. As promised, Gage brought me up a pile of freshly laundered blankets and pillows, the recovered gun held securely pointed at me as he ordered me to stand where he could see me while he dumped them on the end of the bed. Then he made another trip, this time arriving with a massive double-decker sandwich, a pile of potato chips, and a bottle of orange soda balanced on a large plate.
I ignored all of it, being far too familiar with the head-games alphas played to keep captured omegas compliant... and the ease of slipping drugs into food and drink. God knew, I had plenty of personal experience with drugging people into helplessness, so I could do Very Bad Things to them afterward.
Once I was sure he wasn’t going to return a third time, I started a thorough search of my two-room prison. My head swam with a combination of exhaustion and soured adrenaline, and my stomach rumbled distractingly—trying to convince me that eatingjust one potato chipwould befine, wouldn’t it?
I went to the bathroom sink and drank tepid tap water from my cupped hands until my stomach stopped complaining so loudly. My search didn’t turn up much of anything useful. The bedroom area was large, but there was nothing in it, except the old metal-frame bed and a heavy wooden dresser.
I briefly considered trying to drag the bed frame over and use it to block the door. But that wouldn’t really help me at all. There were no windows, and no tools that could be used to break through the walls or roof. That door was the only way I’d be getting out of this place.
