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I didn’t want Vasilis to think he was about to be on the hook for whatever was going through his mind about my stomach right now. It was also a feeling, something about the bond we’d now cemented had his bound by an emotional tether. It wasn’t what I wanted, but something about me couldn’t not like it.

We laid in bed once it was over, staring at the light show on the ceiling from the lights, acting like we were in the lush tropics, which was far from where we actually were. I had to applaud him on being able to create this place and trick my mind.

“To answer your earlier question, I am on a suppressant,” I told him. “It’s an implant. It stops me from getting pregnant, but it doesn’t stop me from going into heat.” My stomach was still swollen from where I was full of his seed.

“I still don’t like that it’s in there,” he said, glancing at my stomach as if already carrying his child. “I don’t want to bring life into this world. Or, my family. You—you don’t know all the stuff I think they’ve done to me over the years.”

After seeing the scars on his body from taking care of him, and the way he was willing to die rather than be saved, it was actually very telling what his family had done to him. “I’m not going to pretend I do,” I said, even if my mind was always guessing at it. “But I need you to know that this is going to be flushed out of me, and I’m probably going to be in pain walking. I didn’t think you’d put both of them in there.”

He smirked for a second before it vanished, I got the feeling through that he was ashamed of his actions. He had no reason to be ashamed, what we’d done was partly my fault, I’d asked for it. Technically, my body had asked for it. I only sprung out into heat cycles like that when I felt an active attraction.

I reached out and touched his face, my thumb caressing his chin. “There’s nothing for you to be worried about. I’m not going to let it go any further than what we’ve already done.”

“Now, I feel like I should propose to you for what I’ve done to your body,” he said, placing his hand over mine. “I’m sorry.”

Staring into his eyes, he was slowly becoming the Vasilis I’d met and knew from ten years ago. His skin was a little more weathered, and his hair had a little more grays to it, only visible up this close. I wondered how much stress he’d gone through, and how much mind alteration his family had been forcing on him. “You don’t have to be sorry,” I said. “But you are going to have to show me where the bathroom is. I need to shower and to—”

“There are private bathrooms. I’ll—” he paused again, biting his tongue. “Can you shift like that?”

“No. But I can once it’s out of my system. It’s like when an omega who can shift falls pregnant, they can’t shift in that state. It’s considered foreign material,” I told him. “It’s something I wanted to study when I became a nurse. I wanted to go into research, but ethical stuff, not—” My stomach cramped, conscious of needing to flush out all Vasilis’s cum inside me. “Not the type of stuff you’re doing here. Those doctors who are experimenting.”

“They’re just here to make notes,” he said. “They’re not—” I felt his body drip cold as a new memory surfaced. It was strange to have someone else’s emotions connected to my own. I didn’t want it affecting what I knew to be true.

“Show me the bathroom,” I said, bolting upright in the bed. “This is going to come out of me.”

After Vasilis put one of his bathrobes on me, and got dressed quickly in one of his shirts, he opened the door and we walked out. Thankfully, there wasn’t anyone around to see. I was taken nearly halfway down one of the underground tubes before coming to a door and inside it, another place transformed to not look like the space I was supposed to be in. A bathroom with the same textured moss on the walls and spaces on the ground as if used like a bath mat.

“I don’t want you to stay here while I’m—you know.”

Vasilis looked me up and down. He sighed. “I have to stay,” he said. “If don’t, the room looks like it’s available, and someone else might come in. And I can’t wait outside for you.”

There wasn’t much choice for me then. “Fine, but you’ve got to close your eyes and maybe turn the shower on.”

“No, you only get five minutes in the shower,” he said. “We’re in the desert, these things are timed.”

“I guess that means you’re going to be showering with me then,” I said, holding the bathrobe against my stomach. The rumbles were becoming a little more than I could handle now.

“Not if you don’t want, I can wait, usually it resets itself after ten minutes,” he said. “I’m here to make sure you’re ok. I’ll plug my ears if you need to do your business. But for what it’s worth, I really don’t care. I’m—”

I understood. It was something non-verbal happening between us, and I knew it was a bond we weren’t able to break. At least, I hoped it was a bond, because now I trusted everything he had to say, even if his memories had been played with.

Vasilis stuck to his word, turning to face the door and plugging his ears while I used the toilet and felt like I was being used a suction cup to get rid of everything he’d tried implanting in me. The notion all of his little swimmers were just serpents caught me in a shiver.

Once my insides were empty, I was beginning to feel hunger, and I had no concept of the time. It could’ve been midnight, or eight in the morning. There was only so much my internal body clock could tell, but that was before I’d been bound to a bed and passed out unconscious from our newly attached bond.

We showered together, rubbing all of the dried cum out of his body hair was fun, even if it was a little painful for it. It felt like small tingles on my own body in the spaces he was being hurt. The shower cubby wasn’t built for two, but we made our best to squeeze ourselves inside it.

No words were exchanged in the quick shower, conscious of the time we had to get cleaned before the water would stop. Vasilis’s bursts of energetic thoughts increased my own panic, but it was fine.

I shifted once I was clean and Vasilis carried me in the pocket of the bathrobe as he wore it back to the room. Greeting several soldiers on the way. I made out some of their figures through the fabric, and I smelled them better than anything else, they were sour, like off milk or battery acid.

There wasn’t much I could say to him while I was my flying squirrel self. I enjoyed shrinking to such a size, but I hated how I didn’t have the ability to communicate with it, unless he was also like me, which wasn’t the case at all.

Back in the room, I regained my form, still damp from the shower and completely naked as I laid on the bed in a near fetal position.”What time is it?” I asked. “I feel like we’re running out of time to rescue everyone.”

“How are you feeling?” he asked in return. “It’s probably around two in the morning. I’d have to check. We don’t really keep time, only in the omega bays for the doctor’s records. They need it to make sure they’re being dosed at regular intervals.”

“Why aren’t—” my mind was being attacked by a haze of thoughts. “Why—” I could form the question. “Why aren’t you dosing them?”

Vasilis pulled the bathrobe off and placed it over me, sitting on the end of the bed. “The first dose has to come from me, or from a Vepres, it’s because it’s the most potent, and carried the most lethal part of the bite, the Rotmor.”

“But I don’t have it,” I said. “I don’t know if you’re telling me the truth, or if you don’t know the truth.”

He laid beside me, his body curving around mine as the big spoon. He cuddled me. “I really wish I had an answer to that,” he said. “I really wish I knew what the fuck was going on with me. I only know what I know.”

“I got rid of all the needles in the first omega room,” I said. “I got close to each one of them, hoping whatever I’ve done to you will rub off on them as well. I’m hoping it’s as simple as that.”

The truth was, we didn’t know why I wasn’t infected the same way they were. Vasilis was clueless too, I could feel it from him as I spoke about it. He didn’t know why I had that effect on him, but he also didn’t know a lot of things, admittedly.

“I know we’re going to get them out of here,” he whispered in my ear. “I just—I don’t know how. I feel like—”

Reaching around, I pulled Vasili’s arm to wrap around me. “I know how you feel.” At least I hoped I had it right. My interpretation of it was a feeling of pulling a film or mask away and having all of his raw nerve endings exposed to the elements. Luckily, I was a nurse practitioner, and I could tend all of his wounds, even the ones he couldn’t see.

“Tomorrow, we’ll make a move,” he said, as if he had any say in what I was going to do.

“As long as you know what I’m going to tell you,” I mumbled. “I’m not going to do anything to jeopardize those omegas.”

“I promise.”

“You might have promised me once before,” I said. “I’m not sure how much weight there is to a promise like that now.” And I really didn’t know how much stock to put in his promises, considering he might change at any moment. It was entirely possible that he wasn’t the same person when he wakes up again. “You still have that blood your brother gave you to drink?”

“It’s in a cup,” he said, moving his head to gesture to the stock of water bottles that was also being used as a laundry pile. “I don’t want you drinking from it.”

My mouth winced at the idea of consuming anything his older brother, and the so-called Apex of the syndicate had prepared for him to drink. “I’m thinking, the doctors here, they must be working from somewhere with medical equipment, and if we manage to go in there, we could see what it is inside that cup,” I said, eyeing it up. It was a white take out cup with its lid in tact. I’d seen vampires use them in some of their bespoke fast fooderies.

“I’m not taking you anywhere that dangerous,” he said, as if, again, he had a choice. He’d already committed himself to saving the omegas with me. Now, I needed to protect him, and see what was going on in that drink, as it could be the key to solving everything.

“Lucky for you, I don’t take up much room,” I said, shuffling around to meet his face again in the bed. “You’ll take me and the drink, and we’ll get them to leave.”

“How are we—”

I pressed my mouth against his, shutting him up with a kiss. It might’ve been a little harder to know he was the Alpha with his stream of anxious thoughts combating me whenever I had a great plan. “Trust me,” I said. “Your name and who you are has power.”

He smirked. “I’ve been told that my entire life,” he said. “It’s—it’s different coming from you.”

“And, if you’d have told me that when we first met, I wouldn’t have had a clue who you were.”

“Yes, but didn’t you say you knew who the syndicate were then?” he asked, his eyes seeming to glow a pearly yellow like a nightlight.

“Everyone had heard the Serpentine Syndicate,” I told him. “Especially when your family is looked at as prey, you have to know all about the people who could come through and snatch you out of your beds. That’s the stories I grew up hearing about.”

Vasilis kissed my forehead and pulled me into his arms, his strong arms. I didn’t think he knew the amount of strength he actually possessed. He’d potentially been softened over the years with whatever he’d been consuming, perhaps not to challenge his brother. “It was created as a way to protect us,” he said. “Nobody wants to fuck around with the snakes that had all these horror stories spoken about them. Do they?”

“You’ve got a point.”

“And for what it’s worth, I knew about your family, QuillAir was on the news a lot. It’s another reason why nobody can know you’re here. They’ll ransom you off, if they don’t all—” He screwed his eyes.

“Finish your thought,” I said. I knew the feeling behind it anyway. I just needed him to say it.

“All try and mate with you. My brother would. But we’re bonded. So, I think he’d do it to spite me for it.”

“We won’t let that happen. We can’t let it happen.”

“But it might,” he said. “There’s so much about this place I don’t know, and I’m not sure I’ll ever know.”

They’d really done a number on his head, screwed with how he saw the world, and all it took was the sympathy of his past to come back and let it be bitten for him to realize that everyone in his life had been lying to him.