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)
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?”
No.
No.
No.
But her feet were touching the ground, her gelatinous, spongy legs long past fatigue. Useless things that, if it weren’t for the Beta’s support, would have left Brenya’s ass on the floor.
She yawned. Blinked.
Light in the corridor flickered. Or… at least… her perception of it did.
It was a soft whisper between them, Brenya oddly woozy. “I don’t want to be here.”
“Me neither,” he said with a smile, the soft one Jules shared only with her. “But here we are, and it will get easier for both of us with practice.”
In her distraction, her muddled thinking, her inability to properly stand, Jules slowly began to back her into a room.
One where a seething male was imprisoned.
In Jacques’s care, the Alpha had fed her too much wine on occasion. That too had muddled her thoughts in the same way, leaving Brenya a slurring ragdoll.
“He’s going to kill you, Jules. You know that, right? One of these days, he’ll kill you, and he’ll take me back. He’ll make me have babies. He’ll make me suck his cock. He’ll make me sad and—”
“Shh, no, my love.” The words so certain, the foundation she could build on if only she would listen. Jules speaking louder so the Alpha behind her might hear. “If he kills me, he’d be killing you too. He knows that.”
Shaking her head, hardly noticing that they were moving, that he was slowly, cautiously backing her into a room that smelled like everything she’d ever needed in life.
Leading her confused, malfunctioning brain deeper into danger… danger who asked a velvet question. “Don’t you want babies, Brenya?”
Alpha presence slipped down her spine like the blade of a guillotine, severing her from the drug-like daze Alpha pheromones were having on her, pulling her back into harsh, skull-crushing reality.
Her back met a wall of glass.
An Alpha inhaling deeply at her back was not a hallucination. She heard how it rasped through something small and hollow, felt the pull of wind at her hair.
Whites of her eyes showing, she tried to push away and scream, but Jules held her flush, his body pressing hers to Jacques’s containment, his voice in her ear as the Alpha sniffed and sniffed and sniffed through tiny holes in the glass.
“Let him smell. He needs it as much as you do.”
She was breathing too fast, too shallow. Vision sharpened, softened, sharpened.
There was a rattle in her breast.
Alpha purr distorted by perforated glass. Impotent. Off pitch. Strange.
Because Jacques could not reach her with more than his breath.
He was right there behind her, no doubt pressed up to the glass like she was, but he couldn’t reach her.
Jules had promised.
Jules, who was not purring. Who didn’t pollute her thoughts or the air with his demands… unlike Jacques.
“Mon chou, please look at me. I need to see that you’re well.” The Alpha’s voice cracked. Never had Brenya heard the mighty Jacques’s voice crack. Never had he displayed desperation… not like this.
He sounded… hurt.
Not offended. Not arrogant. Not retaliatory.
Not anymore.
Not now that she was in his line of sight.