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“What are you doing to him?” I asked when Deimos went to check on my medical officer’s monitor.
“He’s providing the first samples from a pureblood. We need to see if the reuptake inhibitors you produce are more potent,” he said absentmindedly while tapping a few things on the monitor’s interface. He then turned to look at me with an almost malicious grin. “We’re making you immune to your own serotonin.”
“Leave him be,” I ground through my teeth. “If you need to experiment on someone, do it on me, not him.”
He chuckled and looked at me as if I had said something dumb. “Oh, but we will, Jakar… You’re a Berserker, which isexactlywhat we needed. You are far too valuable to damage yet. Orin here is older, and therefore expendable. He is providing the samples we started testing on Baldur,” he added, waiving at my unconscious captain. “And the serum we’ve been deriving from the old man is exceeding expectations. Imagine how much more potent yours will be? Here, check this out…”
I watched helplessly as he picked up a small vial from one of the cooling units on the counter. He placed it in a hypospray and prowled towards me.
“Don’t worry, it won’t hurt.”
Even though it was pointless, I fought against my restraints in an instinctive need to protect myself from the inevitable. He pressed the syringe against the side of my neck. A discreet hissing sound accompanied the slight burning sensation of the serum entering my body.
“See? It wasn’t so bad,” Deimos said, as if addressing a child throwing a tantrum. “With the hybrids’ serum, we normally have to wait a couple of minutes for the effects to kick in. More importantly, we had the bad surprise of discovering it didn’t work too well on purebloods. Your crew either mostly resisted our compulsion or its effect faded in minutes. But the effects of the serum from our dear Orin not only activate in about thirty seconds, they work like a charm on purebloods. Let’s do a little test, shall we?”
Aside from the initial burn of the injection—a standard phenomenon with hyposprays—I didn’t feel any different. Surely, he was mistaken?
Deimos’s face lost its taunting edge, and his eyes began to glow as they bore into mine. “Tell me truthfully, Jakar Keran. What is your greatest fear?”
The unnatural vibration of his voice struck me like a boulder to the chest. My skin tingled, my blood pressure dropped, and a wave of dizziness crashed over me. Simultaneously, my lips parted with a will of their own. Horrified, I battled to still my tongue, but I had no control over it. At the back of my eyes, a prickling sensation quickly grew in painful intensity the more I tried to resist.
“I fear that I can never live up to my father’s greatness and, therefore, that I will fail Braxia and its people, both purebloods and hybrids. I fear that I will bring shame to House Xeldar.”
Each word felt like a scorching hot blade was lacerating my tongue. To hear myself speak aloud—to my enemy no less—of the bone-deep fears that plagued me from birth wounded me worse than the sharpest sword could. At the same time, it fanned the hatred burning in my gut for that vermin. I would make him pay a thousandfold.
His sympathetic smile only enraged me further.
“Then you can put those fears to rest, Jakar Keran. You have not failed Braxia. Your sacrifice, your imminent death will ensure the prosperity and glory of Braxia. So you see, you have fulfilled your destiny.”
Without another word, Deimos turned around and walked out of the room. For the first time in my existence, I felt defeated as despair clouded whatever will and clear thinking I still possessed.
Chapter 18
Dawn
Ipaced around the room restlessly, a million thoughts battling each other for dominance while an intense fear ate away at me. After forcing us to watch what felt like hours of propaganda videos, the Sarenians had allowed the men to leave but not me. I couldn’t even beg the others to take me with them, because Deimos had ordered me to remain silent and follow obediently.
Over the years, I had seen and heard a lot of messed up stuff. But never had I felt so helpless, so violated to my core. When people spoke of mind control I always wondered what it would be like to attempt to resist it. Never in a million years could I have anticipated this. It reminded me of those nightmares when you were running and the ground beneath you turned into quicksand. The more you tried to free yourself from it, the deeper and the faster you sank.
One thing I quickly learned was to stop resisting the compulsion. Just thinking about it reawakened the painful pressure behind my eyes. It would radiate and gradually increase into sharp, stabbing sensations inside my brain. I didn’t lose myself. My thoughts still belonged to me, but whatever command had been given to me dictated my actions. The real problem began once Deimos ordered us to focus on the propaganda and assimilate the message.
Even now, I could feel that poison, insidious, lurking at the back of my head. My conscious mind knew better, but a seed of hatred had been planted and was trying to take root. Merely thinking of a pureblood suddenly gave me an icky feeling I never felt before. Unlike the hybrids I had cared for over the years at the shelter, I had personally never been abused by the purebloods.
But why did they keep me?
That question kept replaying in my head above the cacophony of confusion that raged within. The frightened part of me couldn’t stop dredging up all the horror stories spread about what Sarenian males did to females unlucky enough to fall prey to them. The fool who had attacked Grace in public, only meters away from her then master, the obscenely rich Anton Aldriss—formerly Anton Myers—had lent credence to their reputation of being ruthless and single-minded predators.
The more rational part of me tried hard to cast out such paranoid thoughts. Technically, I was Keran’s concubine. They could try to use me to emotionally blackmail him. The hybrids also greatly cared about me. Deimos could try to force them to stay in line with threats of harming me if they didn’t comply. The fact that they demanded we drink that wretched juice at least once a day told me the effects wore off. Maybe they’d been instructed not to speak of anything that had happened here or else they would be responsible for what befell me.
Then again, maybe it was none of the above.
I glanced around the room he had taken me to. Under different circumstances, I would have felt flattered by the spacious layout of these personal quarters. While it didn’t exactly qualify as luxurious, I couldn’t complain about the comfort level it provided. Judging by its size, including a two-person table—which could also serve as a work desk—a small sitting area with a loveseat, and even a basic replicator, this room would have been reserved to at least an officer. That I hadn’t been thrown inside a cell, brought to a lab, or tossed into the most cramped quarters they had, gave me hope that whatever their plans for me, they wouldn’t be too horrible.
A quick exploration of the room—including the private en suite hygiene room—revealed nothing that I could potentially use as a weapon. Although I had expected it, my shoulders slouched nonetheless in disappointment.
Not for the first time, I berated myself for insisting on participating in this meeting. I should have listened to Keran. His gut had told him repeatedly that this was a bad idea. In my stubbornness, I had attributed it to him being overprotective. And yet, I genuinely believed that we had taken every possible precaution so that we could face whatever would come our way.
But no one could have anticipated mind control would work on us.
