“I’ll break every bone in your body, Jules Havel, with my bare hands, and piss all over your corpse! Show me my mate!”
The desperation of the Alpha’s wail did things to Brenya, moving inside her like a serpent.
Summoned her.
Filled her with the urge to obey. A dreamlike haze. Her body weighed down with sand.
Nose stuffy from the sobbing, she sucked in a desperate deep breath.
But with that sip of air… that long drink of pheromone-laced oxygen, the room went fuzzy.
She shivered.
Her Alpha was there.
Calling to her louder than the banging in her brain.
Yanked on her leash.
Hard.
“That’s right. Breathe it in, Brenya.” Jules was so careful with how he held her. Firm, unyielding, but composed. Measured. Unconcerned by any pain she caused him from clinging to him or the bleeding bite wound in his shoulder. Unreactive to the nearby presence of the other male. To the threats. To the noise. His mind, his care, it was steady. Focused only on her. His scent soft and enveloping. “That is your Alpha. I am your Beta. You are our Omega. Inhale our scents. It will help. I have you.”
Instinctually, the way she gulped air was like a fish out of water. Her muscles going slack without permission, her brain fizzling through warbled thoughts until there was no thought left.
Mental silence. A hard reset.
“There you go. Yes. Feel that? You can relax into me. You don’t have to fight.”
Fight? She didn’t have any energy left to fight. It had been fisted and fucked right out of her. It had been wrestled on the floor and dressed in her history. It had been carried down a hall while she’d bucked against the Beta like a maniac. It had been crammed into an elevator with a killer and its soldiers.
Many soldiers.
Men dressed in black who’d surrounded them the second she’d been dragged from the Red Room. Who’d prevented her from grabbing onto fixtures in the hallway. Who would have frightened her if she’d had any brain capacity to measure them.
To really look at the level of male Jules surrounded himself with.
The worst of the worst.
Some huge, some slight, all very, very deadly. The kind of men who would have taken Greth where they could have lived like kings with any female of their choice, but chose to come to Bernard Dome in what could have been a death sentence.
Which still might be.
Men like Jules who’d had nothing to lose, as they had already lost it all in Thólos.
One of them watched her carefully—heavy, strange eye contact—speaking in a guttural tongue almost constantly to Jules as they marched down the hallway, pressed her into the elevator, moved with efficiency toward the prison.
Reporting on her in a language she could not understand.
Once even daring to touch, spreading open Brenya’s eyelids when she’d failed to respond to his clicks or snaps.
And Jules had allowed this. Allowed this stranger to force her eyes open and shine a bright light in them. Effectively blinding the Omega for over a minute as the males continued to communicate.
And it was that male, that stranger, who wiped the blood off of her face and lips while she was startled.
There was the sound of doors opening, of footsteps as the party traveled, the rush of blood in her ears… her litany of pleading growing softer as reality seemed less and less attainable.
“When I turn the corner, Jacques will see you, and he will calm.” Warming her back with slow strokes, Jules soothed her like a child. “It would be best if you walked in without being carried. Can I put you down?”
