Rough hands grabbed my wrists, dragging them forward and strapping them tight together with a zip tie. Not even my fear of having my arms restrained was enough to bring me back to the present.
I’d been wrong. I’d thought nothing could be worse than the uncertainty. But this was worse. So much worse than not knowing. Tears squeezed from the corners of my eyes as the true weight of what I’d done suffocated me with its crushing force.
“Aw, don’t cry, honey.” Adrian’s hateful voice came from the front seat.
I opened my eyes reluctantly to see his blurry form leaning around to watch me.
“You lied,” I said stupidly. “You lied to me, and I believed you.”
He gave a careless shrug. “It was easy enough to feed you a story that you wanted to hear. And it got me whatIwanted, too—so, I’d call that a win-win scenario. Wouldn’t you?”
A taunting note entered his voice on the final sentence. I stared at him dully.
“What did it get you?” I asked, my voice as weak and raspy as though I’d managed to scream my lungs out earlier.
He snorted. “A mating to a rich alpha, that’s what. No more scrounging to make the rent between acting gigs. No more worrying about my safety every time I leave the apartment.”
With a deep ache pulsing in time with my heart, I thought about the pack I might have had. I wondered if Gage was still asleep, dreaming of that same thing.
“What are you going to do to me?” I asked, not really caring. It just... seemed like the sort of thing you should ask, in this situation.
One of the alphas flanking me in the back seat chuckled. His copper and lime scent assaulted me from one side, while diesel and pine hit me from the other.
“Oh,” Adrian said, “well... you clearly ratted me out to Knox’s gang, so I expect you’ll be made to disappear. But Enzo likes to get value out of people before he discards them. He sells, y’know, videos and stuff.”
I knew exactly what kind of videos those would be. And it should have horrified me... but my mind had already checked out. I was gone, just like I used to go away inside my own head after my father sold me to the traffickers. If anything, it struck me as kind of appropriate that I’d end up going full circle, finishing exactly where I’d started. I’d escaped the gangs once, but instead of making something of my freedom, I’d slowly turned into a monster.
It was like what the Buddhists believed, wasn’t it? If you don’t learn from your mistakes, you have to come back and do it all over again. Except this time, I didn’t have enough strength left to fight what was about to happen. Strength... will... it wasall gone. I was just an empty husk, sitting limply between my captors, staring at nothing.
I made no attempt to keep track of the route we took as we left the park. What would be the point? I’d learned what I needed to know, and now I was just...done. Things would happen to me that I couldn’t control, and then it would be over—and then I could finally rest.
If Knox died too, I wondered if we’d see each other somehow, afterward. I could try and apologize to him; explain how I’d been fooled and manipulated by someone who knew how to take advantage of my blindness about alphas. Would he forgive me? He’d seemed really nice when I’d talked to him, before—
Before I’d tried to murder him.
The SUV pulled up to an old warehouse. The alphas dragged me out of the back seat, hooking meaty hands under my arms and taking my full weight when my legs refused to do anything except hang there like limp noodles. Adrian pulled out a phone and lifted it to his ear.
“Hey, lover,” he said. “I’m just dropping off your present. Are the boys inside ready for her?”
There was a pause; I couldn’t hear whoever was on the other end.
Adrian’s nose scrunched up in distaste. “No, I’ll just drop her here and leave afterward. You know I don’t like to watch that kind of stuff, baby.”
Another pause. Then Adrian softened, his body adopting the appeasing openness that I’d always hated in omegas.
“I’ll come straight there, alpha,” he said, his tone growing flirtatious. “My mating bite hurtseverso much. I need your tongue on it. And your big, fat knot filling me up...”
I let my mind drift away again, feeling vaguely nauseated.
The call ended, and a finger and thumb gripped my chin harshly, tipping my face up until I was staring at Adrian’s cold features.
“You shouldn’t have snitched on me to your red-haired Viking,” he said. “If you’d just kept quiet, we might’ve forgotten about you. Goodbye, Jez.”
I mustered enough energy to spit in his face. The open-handed slap that rocked me an instant later was stronger than I would have guessed Adrian capable of.
“Drop her inside with the others, and let’s get the hell out of here,” he ordered, sounding coldly furious.
The alphas grunted acknowledgement and half-dragged, half-carried me inside the old, echoing building. The world swung in slow circles around me.
