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I’m like an animal, not a person. An animal driven by instincts, fueled by its needs. Without the benefit of human intelligence or reason.
There’s no one outside my cell and I don’t spot a single camera trained on me, yet I glare through the bars like someone is there. Like someoneiswatching me.
I have never been so angry in my life. “I fucking hate him.”
“They are all pricks,” Resa says immediately. “Not the pricks you want to fuck. The ones you want to take a pair of scissors to. Rusty, blunt ones.”
Her voice is so perfectly vicious, I burst out laughing, even as my eyes fill with tears.
Resa smells like an omega and has the fury of an alpha. I don’t know what hell she’s been through, but she’s refused to let it cow her. So I laugh as I scrub away my tears. It’s laugh or cry and if I gave in to my need to cry, I’d crawl onto that flat, hard, and uncomfortable pallet and give up fighting.
And I intend to fight. I won’t win. Not against my instincts. Not against the blank-faced man in white who will come to get me for this auction.
But Iwillfight. Even knowing I will lose.
“They are, aren’t they?” I agree as I resume pacing, trying to ignore the way my skin is still burning from the inside out. Soon it will hurt. It will turn to agony if I don’t have an alpha’s knot inside me.
“Someone needs to invent a plague.” Resa glares outside of her cage. “One that wipes out all alphas from the face of the planet.”
I’m nodding my agreement when I stop.
Suddenly, I’m thinking of Rune marking off the line for omega territory because he guessed I needed it to feel safe. And I’m remembering Cian finding out my beloved little sister was still alive. And Kylian, who refused to knot me, even when I begged, and who slept on the floor outside my room because he wanted to make sure I was okay.
Three alphas who have kept every promise they’ve made to me when I hadn’t believed any alpha was capable of doing anything but hurting me.
I can’t wish a plague would wipe out all alphas from the face of the planet because it would wipe them out too, and I would hate for that to happen.
“Everleigh?” Resa says, watching me closely. “You—”
A door slams open. I whirl around.
The blank-faced man is back, and he did not come alone. Behind him, standing at his right shoulder and his left, are two passive-looking hulking men dressed in white. As if they knew to expect a fight.
I back away from my cage door, shaking my head as I look for a way out of this hell. “No. Leave me alone.”
My cage door swings open as I retreat until I hit the back of my cell. Resa is flinging insults at the men, an unceasing barrage of them, but I barely hear her. I’m a rat in a barrel, no place to run to and no place to hide.
The two men in white approach me. No matter how much I scream or struggle or fight, they grip one arm each and drag me from the room. Their touch is clinical. If they’re leaving any bruises behind, they neither notice nor care.
I’m just a thing to move.
Behind me, Resa is still screaming insults, and her voice only stops when the door between us slams shut.
I’m back in a white hallway. There are no windows, only closed doors up ahead. I dig my heels into the freezing concrete floors, but it makes not an ounce of difference. My captors are as deaf, blind, and dumb to screams and yells as they are to my desperate attempts to stop them.
The blank-faced man leads the way down the white hallway and to the one door on the left. He pushes it open, and the men pulling me along follow, dragging me inside.
It’s a dressing room and bathroom all rolled into one.
Four women stand in a line facing the door. Their disapproval bears an uncanny likeness to the three women Lawrence brought in to turn me from a girl from a gutter to his perfect omega.
They sweep their gazes up and down my body as if they were already mentally working out exactly what changes they need to make to improve me. From their compressed lips, those changes are many.
Dread forms in my gut as relief filters through my mind. The way they’re looking at me warns me of what’s coming. At least in the short term. Not the auction Resa warned me about, but a makeover so Lawrence can earn more money from me.
I’m so focused on the women, I miss the blank-faced man stepping up to my side. His icy fingers grip my chin and wrench my head up so we’re eye to eye.
His expression doesn’t change as he turns to the women and says, “You have one hour. She’s further along than I expected. Start with an ice bath.”
