Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 65151 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 326(@200wpm)___ 261(@250wpm)___ 217(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 65151 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 326(@200wpm)___ 261(@250wpm)___ 217(@300wpm)
“Please. I am begging you to turn around.” This was not the voice of the man who’d raped her in broad daylight. This was not the voice of the beast who’d been screaming for blood only moments ago. “Brenya, for the love of all the Gods, face me. Show me what he’s done to you.”
Done to her? Jules had done plenty, but you’d never find those marks on her skin. No, he’d healed those.
“You can do this, Brenya.” Jules, her husband, her keeper, her Beta mate, the man who was teaching her how to survive the madness and the noise—who’d made her a living, walking bomb—coaxed her gently to turn. “Let your Alpha see your face.”
A face that was slightly different than it had been before. Fuller, her lower eyelid no longer dragged down by her scar.
Jules had repaired it… the same day he’d tucked the virus into her body.
And though Jacques was right there—within arm’s reach were there not glass and bars between them—and though he was drinking her down, she refused to look at him.
No, her nervous attention sought out the makings of an Alpha containment cell, studying where the bars met the wall, analyzing how amorphous metal glass fused into the structure. Seamless. No visible stress lines. Nothing that would have been a red flag to an engineering grunt as an unseen weakness.
And unlike the panel that had been used to craft Jules’s prison, this one did not have a hatch.
In fact, there were new techniques, Thólosian or Greth techniques, used here that she’d never considered for fusing the containment. That appeared superior to what she’d been taught.
That sparked a corner of her mind that had not been accessible for days… weeks. Months?
The analytical, cold-thinking mind based on action and utility.
Who recognized that it was perfect.
The prison was perfect.
The man inside would not be getting out… at least through the partition dividing cell from viewing space.
Yet there was access through another wall, inaccessible from this room. A solid door, the kind used for decontamination chambers. As for the walls, retrofitted concrete.
The room created for its prisoner was more luxurious than any dorm she’d shared, living happily in Beta Sector.
A bed with soft blankets, clean linens, recessed shelves for books. A toilet—an actual toilet—not just a bucket. A sink. A table with a white cloth.
An Alpha—a well-dressed man moving into her line of sight, so she’d have no choice but to acknowledge him.
Jacques Bernard, dressed in his finest breakfast jacket. Brocade and pomp and scent.
Male.
Enticing.
Waiting for her notice.
Knowing she could not resist indefinitely.
“Why is blood smeared all over her clothing?” This time, the imperious dictator reared its head, snarling at the Beta at her back. “What have you done to her?”
Brenya, eyes flaring, looked over the boogeyman of her nightmares and thought she might be sick.
The question was not what had been done to her. The question was what had been done to him.
His palms were splayed against the glass, fitting between sound bars, fingertips working to reach through the perforations that allowed scent to travel between his prison and her.
Each hand missing one finger.
Yet not the same finger on each side—the mutilation by design.
Pointer finger on the right. Ring finger on the left.
Why?
The stumps were pink on the ends, healing. And he was thinner, his fancy clothing hanging from his frame.
Beautiful face untouched. Why?
Why take the fingers and not the face?
Jacques had not been able to properly braid his flowing blonde hair short two digits, the plait messy, her fingers twitching to reach out and fix it as she had been trained.
Even so, ecstatic blue eyes glowed as he looked her over, as he pressed his whole self to the barrier and put his nose to the holes to suck in another breath of her, lip curling at the scent of fear, of dried slick, and of vast quantities of Beta cum.
“He raped you!” A snarl, matching the way the Alpha swung his head up toward the Beta standing at Brenya’s back.
“No.” One small word. That same word… again. Her new litany. “No. He didn’t.”
The play of rage, of disgust, over Jacques’s face. The hunger. It made her take a step back.
“You cut off his fingers…”
A warm pet down her spine from her husband, Brenya arching away from Jacques and into Jules’s touch as the Beta softly said, “He didn’t feel a thing, I assure you.”
But… “Why?”
A steadying grip came to her elbow, directing her toward the table she’d ignored. One set up flush against Jacques’s cell. “Breakfast. You need to eat. That’s why we are here, remember?”
No. That was not why they were there. They were there so she could smell her Alpha and be near him… so she could notice that one of his eyes was wrong, that it didn’t quite match.
Because it was glass.
Jules had taken Jacques’s left eye and replaced it with a false one.