12
The show was over, Jules sitting back in his chair and unbuttoning the top button of his bloodied black shirt. Rolling up his shirtsleeves, crossing his ankle over his knee. Smirking.
Diabolical.
Making himself comfortable.
“It feels different.” Running his fingers through his short, dark hair, Jules hummed, thinking of his Brenya. “This consuming desire I have for that female. IlovedRebecca from the moment I saw her, and built my life around that woman. Every choice tailored to what she might need or crave. Before I shot her in the face”—said with nonchalance, Jules reaching for his water glass to take a sip—“I believed nothing could eclipse what I felt for my first wife. But one look at Brenya and I feltmore.”
Pacing the length of his cage, the overturned table ignored, Jacques froze. “What the fuck did you just say?”
Jules observed him for a beat, giving space for the horror to grow.“I said I shot Rebecca in the face.”
And this, this, scared the Alpha in a way no other of Jules’s torments had.
There was shock in Jacques’s expression, quickly hidden, veiled fear Bernard Alphas were not allowed to know. The kind of fear beaten out of boys until they became men like him. “You lie.”
“It’s scary, isn’t it?” Jules tipped his head a fraction, inviting an answer. “Tell me, Jacques Bernard, what could drive a man like me to kill the woman he loved? To see her on her knees, begging for mercy… and I give it to her?”
“You can’t hurt Brenya! I made sure of that when I let you inside her. I won that day!” But he wasn’t so sure. Jacques Bernard was doubting, fidgeting with his sleeve, as he added, “Sick as you are, youcan’thurt my female.”
“But think back. Think of the bruises you gave her. The way you ripped her vagina with your cock and that machine. The pain she felt when you sodomized her. You hurt her every day, and we are operating under the same bond.” To emphasize the point, Jules tapped the table. “So, yes, Icouldhurt her.”
Rushing the glass, Jacques pounded his fist on it once, shouting, “What do you want? What other thing could you possibly want? You have the Dome. You have my female. You have my fucking eye!”
Jules leaned forward on his elbow, voice softening the way men do when coaxing children to guess a riddle. “Tell me, Jacques Bernard, what could drive a man like me to kill the woman he loved? A man who had broken out of an inescapable prison to rescue her from an Alpha very much like you. To see her on her knees, weeping, and to point my gun at her face and pull the trigger?
“A man like you? You’re a fucking psychopath!”
“Maybe.” Jules mimed the recoil of a pistol with two fingers, no longer smiling. No longer anything. “Or maybe I gave hermercy, like I said. Because if I had wanted to be cruel… I would have left her living. Ihadto pull that trigger, or I was going to become a monster.”
Another snort from the Alpha, Jacques righting his chair, taking a seat to mirror Jules’s posture as if that might him comfortable. “Get to the point.”
“What I did to Thólos was a masterpiece of suffering. Endless, constant pain.” Jules narrowed his eyes slightly, tone even and confident. “Children left to rot on the streets while the rest ate each other alive. I spared Rebecca that. I would spare Brenya that as well.”
Jacques blinked once, his mind refusing to believe such a thing. “You’re telling me that if there is civil war, you will kill our mate?”
This amused Jules, the man offering a single chuckle as he cocked his head and stared with those far too vibrant eyes. “Boy, you cannot conceive of what war truly is. You don’t know how to lead troops or inspire. Without the ability to hand out favors, you are powerless—only the Bernard name that can be used by others to promote their personal agendas. Factions form and break by the hour in Central. To think you can manage a war against me is as foolish as believing you could control me with a pair-bond.”
“You have no support. You lack the numbers and fluency of Bernard Dome.” Paired with a vicious, mean little smirk, Jacques called his bluff. “You may have Brenya, for now. But you will not harm her.”
“It is sweet that you maintain hope. You won’t for much longer.”
A sharp breath escaped Jacques, half outrage and half disbelief. “I will get out of here. And when I do, I will make sure you never touch her again!”
“In the Undercroft, for a long time, I held on to hope, though a friend swore to me that I would learn the banality of such selfishness. Hope, he said, was a fool’s prerogative. Nothing more than a mental trick—an argument with reality. A delusion. A weakness where we pretend to live in a fantasized future and not the present. The present does not have to be comfortable. For many, it never will be. My waking hours were torment. And though your cell is pure luxury, you won’t be comfortable ever again. Just like you’ll never have the use of your missing fingers or your right eye.” Folding his hands, Jules kept his gaze riveted on the angry Alpha. “But I doubted this man. He had never lived a life beyond prison. He had never felt the sun. He had never had a wife or children.
“When my Omega wife had been taken and I had been dumped in the dark, I suspected my boys were dead. To pair-bond a female who’s already a mother, the children must first be removed. And I grieved them, doing things to survive that shamed the man I told myself I was. Eating the flesh of men, licking the walls for moisture. Feeling the touch of unwelcome hands. All in darkness so pitch I could see nothing. I could only listen to the sounds of screams. But I hoped… one day I might escape that pit and find my beautiful wife. Where I would beg her for forgiveness for not being able to protect her from a dangerous man. Imagining the darkest things happening to her, because they were happening to me.
“I fantasized often in those first years about how she smelled, what it would feel like to hold her in my arms again. Hope ate me up from the inside, as it’s eating you up right now. I was tireless in my efforts to return to her. Rebecca… my sweet Rebecca… sheneededme.”
Jacques gave a soft laugh that held no actual amusement. “And what? You escaped to find her happily mated? Of courseyou did! Beta-Omega pairings are unnatural. Grotesque. She was rescued from you, Havel.”
“Alphas can force a great deal of compliance. That is true. Powerful men don’t ask, do they? They just take what they want. Perhaps out in the street, before a gathering crowd, while a frightened girl is screaming and bleeding and torn. Or in Rebecca’s case, it had been in the safety of her own home. Estrus was induced, and Kantor raped her. The last thing my boys saw was their mother violated by the city’s beloved hero. Senator Kantor, the people’s man. Jacques Bernard, Commodore. So many parallels.”
“And this is where you tell me you enjoy this? The torment, the scalpel?” Glaring at his jailer through the bars, Jacques narrowed his eyes. “Why did you kill Rebecca? It wasn’t because she was happy.”
“Imagine a man who’s felt sunlight on his skin for the first time in fourteen years. And itburns. Imagine how that pain fed the cancerous hope—insurmountable odds overcome. What ego. Imagine what he had done to escape an inescapable prison, to return to his wife—the wife he had cherished, loved, suffered for—and for her to see him and run.
