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lotus

I END UPin the basement during the forced break that Striker makes us take.

I sit down in front of Acker, who is still groggy from the sedative we gave her. I rip the tape off her mouth, and she turns barely-focused eyes on me and laughs. “I can hear everything you’re saying up there, you know.”

I shrug at her.

“I hear you guys fucking, too,” she says with a sneer. “I hear you all begging each other for knots. I hear it all.”

“You want an apology?” I say. “Sorry that being kept captive is so noisy.”

She laughs again. “I’m touched that you don’t want me dead.”

“I do want you dead,” I tell her. “I do. But I want my mates to be safe and whole more than I want revenge against you.”

“Safe and whole,” she says in a sing-song voice. “What makes you think they weren’t safe and whole back in Cedar Falls? What makes you think you improved anything for my boys, my hounds?”

“Oh, you think that was good for them?” It’s my turn to laugh. “You’re losing your mind down here. What’s your first name, anyway?” I think. I remember I’ve heard it. “Debra, right?”

She grimaces.

“Anyone call you Debbie? You’re losing your mind down here, Debbie.”

“They’re mine,” she says to me in a low voice. “You know it and I know it. And you can all play little games. You can let them bite you, or you can let Knight bite them, or whatever it is youthink you can do with all that designation shit, but I am inside them in a way you’ll never be.”

I shouldn’t respond. But I suppose some part of me fears she’s right, and so I do. “You are not inside my mates, my alphas.”

“Mine,” she counters, angry. “My boys. My good boys. My hounds.”

I slap her.

She laughs. “You know it’s true.”

I slap her again. Hard. But when I draw blood, I think it’s less because I’m hitting her real hard and more because she’s had her mouth taped shut for days and nothing to eat and only minimal water and her lips are pretty cracked anyway.

Still.

I make her bleed.

And she just laughs.

It…

Suddenly, something in me switches on. Or off? I don’t know. But I remember being in that cube, the little space where I was trapped and I couldn’t think words, and I was trapped and alone, and just trying to bring home little soft things for my nest and they would take them from me, every night, while I slept.

And I lose it.

Like I used to lose it on the workers who’d try to make me use a fork or something. I just goatthis woman.

I hit her, and she’s tied up, so she can’t do much.

I take her by the shoulders and I began slamming her head into the pole that she’s tied to.

At first, she’s screaming that it hurts, and then I see that there’s blood on the pole, because I’mreallyslamming her into it.

And then she’s not screaming anymore but I’m still doing it, I’m still slamming her stupid, stupid head into that pole over and over again.

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