Page 9

I listened and obeyed what Vasilis had to say. I hated myself for it. He was an Alpha who’d needed saving before. I couldn’t exactly take him seriously. Although if I knew he’d go running back to his family, I might have thought differently about it all. I wouldn’t have let him die on the family grounds, that would’ve been a PR nightmare for everyone, and then I probably would’ve been told I’d neglected the oath I’d made as a duty of care.

Pacing the room, I made myself useful and cleaned the mess I’d made. There was still some of the meat skewers on the tray, which were surprisingly tasty. I didn’t question the source of the meat because I hadn’t eaten in a while.

“Everyone is going to tell you that they told you so,” I mumbled aloud to myself. “They’re going to let everyone know that I did this to myself.” Assuming I made it out alive, my mother would definitely force me to work for the company, and maybe even force me to get my pilot’s license. “As long as I get everyone else out.” I didn’t mind the repercussions if it meant sticking to my words.

The door opened. I jumped to my feet in a panic, forgetting what I was supposed to do.

It was Vasilis, panting and pulling at the collar of his shirt. He eyes were big and bugging out, his lower lip trembling. He pushed himself against the wall and tried to undress.

“You’re having a panic attack,” I mumbled as I approached him. “Are you—ok?”

He shook his head.

I helped him undo the tight grip of the collar, seemingly constricting the flow of air in his throat. He continued to pant until he was nearly fully undressed and on his knees, like a dog about to throw up, his back arched up and down with each big breath he took.

“You need cold water,” I told him, as I kneeled beside him. His skin was dripping with sweat, collecting mostly in his jet black hair. “Splash yourself. And stop inhaling so deep. Slow, through pursed lips.”

He gestured to a crate of bottle water in the corner of the room. I hadn’t seen it pacing around earlier. It was almost disguised into the fabric of the room. I drenched him with an entire bottle, pouring it over his head and down his back.

“Sip some,” I said. “Did you—get bitten or something?”

“I—” he said, sucking in deeper breaths, even after I asked him not to. “I’m sorry.”

Scoffing, I backed up slightly. “Go on, I want to hear this. What would have you on your knees like a dry-heaving dog?”

“My brother.”

“Your brother, the one in charge of this, right?”

He nodded and rolled onto his back. “He’s not doing what I thought.”

I leaned over him so he could have a view of my face. “You think that’s news?” I asked. “I could’ve told you that this place is worse than you thought.”

“I just—” he screwed his eyes and poured the rest of the water over his face. “I thought we were building something. I thought we were making this place into an actual base.”

“What is it then?”

He looked me in the eyes and shook his head slightly. “They’re not going to send the omegas once they’ve been dosed several times, enough to mutate them. They’re going to breed them and create a generation of serpents with the Rotmor gene.”

I wasn’t quite as surprised by the news. I assumed something sinister was happening, more than what he’d already told me, which was still just as evil. “You were okay with them being used as fodder, what makes this different?”

He placed a hand on his chest. “I’m supposed to be—mating with them.”

“And why is that such a big deal?”

He took my hand and placed it on his chest over his racing heart, nearly strong enough to break through his ribcage. “I’ve never mated with anyone,” he said. “I don’t want to bring life into this world. I think it’s cruel.”

I burst into a fit of laughter. “You are not being serious, Vasilis. You are not a virgin. I’m sorry, but that’s just not something I can process. If you’re a virgin, than I’m in some near-death coma and this is all some weird fever dream I’ve made to process my impending death as my folks talk about turning off the machine.”

He smiled and shook his head. “This is real,” he said. “It’s a choice. I get urges, sometimes. All the time, actually.”

“Now that you mention it, it make sense why you never actually made a move on me,” I mused.

“You think I didn’t want to?”

“Oh, no, I knew you wanted to,” I told him. “I sometimes saw—whichever one was working get a little hard. I didn’t know there were two of them though.”

He shook his head, slowly catching his breath and heart rate resuming a normal pace. “You saw the tattoo, you wouldn’t have,” he said. “And as for that. It doesn’t matter, because I’m not fucking anyone. I refuse to. I don’t care what my brother says, I’m not going to sexual abuse those omegas.”

I cocked my head and looked at him dead in the eyes. “So, sexual abuse is where you draw the line. It’s nice to know that you actually do draw lines. But that doesn’t change the fact that you’re not the same person I saved, twice now.”

He lifted his head, almost colliding with mine. “I’ve saved you as well, remember that.”

“But did you have my life in your hands the way I had mine in yours?” I asked, pressing two fingers to the mark on his shoulder. I move to touch his chin, and the near his eye.

Vasilis touched my face, his soft touch like silk, caressed my temple. “That might be true, I haven’t stitched you up, but I’ve been able to stop that from ever needing to happen. But I’ve never noticed that mark before. What’s it from?”

“The crescent shape mark?” I asked, recalling the last time I saw it.

“Yeah.”

“My brother threw paper plane at me, except, it had metal on the nose of it. My mom thought he would blind someone with it. And he nearly did.”

He rubbed his thumb over the mark, as if rubbing it would remove it from my skin. “Thank you for calming me,” he said. “I’ve always hated being under my brother’s thumb, well, my family in general.”

“We bonded over that already,” I reminded him. “We’re both the youngest. We both have demanding families. We’re both—”

He craned his head up and kissed me. I leaned into it and accepted his tongue. We’d kissed before, but somehow, I didn’t recall it until he was kissing me now. Almost like he made me forget, almost like his tongue, coated in toxins were capable of that.

I was the first to pull away from it. “This isn’t what I wanted. I didn’t come all the way out here for that. You know what I’m here to do.” I looked down his body and saw the thickening bulge in his boxers. My curiosity had already been satisfied by what it looked like, and it was less impressive knowing the bulge accounted for two dicks. “Do you want to help me now? Or are you going to let all those people you’ve taken from their families be raped until they produce offspring for the Syndicate?”

“I’ll help,” he said. “But you’re gonna need to change out of those clothes. And this isn’t a ploy for me to see you naked.”

“I know, you think I smell like an omega, and I do, because I am.”

“Besides that, you’re not gonna be able to go out like that either.”

Cocking my head, I wasn’t a mind reader like he was working under the assumption of. “How?”

“I’ll need to keep you close, so you’ll need to be in your shifted form, ideally. And probably inside my shirt.”

I pressed a finger to his forehead, forcing him back to the ground. “I don’t know what fantasy that is of yours, but I’ll only do it, if you make me another pinky promise. And this time, if you break it, I’ll scurry around your body, up your leg, and make a little burrow inside your ass.”

He laughed. “And you think I’m the one with weird fantasies.” He extended his pinky finger again for me. “I don’t agree with what my brother is doing anymore. I feel like I’ve been sleepwalking, brainwashed until you came back. Until—”

“Until what?”

“Until I inhaled you again,” he whispered, smacking his lips. “That’s when I started to feel different. I—”

I wrapped my pinky finger around his again. “I promise to help Soren escape with all the captive omegas,” I said. “Repeat.”

Vasilis’s eyes were rolling, almost like he wasn’t completely present in what we were talking about. “I promise to help you free them, even if it means my family will tear me apart, limb from limb.”

“Ok, maybe enough of that, you’ve still got a reputation here, I assume.”

On a shaking inhale of breath he nodded. “Possibly. I don’t know anymore.”

The urge to slap him was right there, but I was in nurse mode, trying to keep him calm, even if I knew that a sharp jolt to his body like a slap could’ve helped, it would probably escalate the situation with knowing how quick to anger he got.

“You’re going to have to get it together if we’re going to do anything,” I told him. “I’m being serious, Vasilis.” I squeezed his pinky around my pinky. “You’re gonna have to put whatever smug grin you had on when you first saw me, that Alpha look, like you were better than me. You’re gonna need that back if you’re going to get anywhere.”

Locking eyes with me, he smiled and nodded. “I think you might be right about that.”

“I’m always right.” I pulled my hand away. “Now, I don’t know this place like you, so how are we going to do this?” I stood and paced again. I’d tried doing the mental math about how big the room was, and how many people could possibly be housed in these places. I knew I could squeeze through some small and tight spaces, but this probably wasn’t the place for me to try and demonstrate those abilities. Not with every natural predator out there wanting to stomp me out and fry me up.

“We’ll have to wait for my brother to leave,” he said, trying to empty the bottle of water over himself, but he’d already done that. “He’ll brainwash me. He’ll—”

“Do I need to kick you like I’m rebooting an old computer?”

Vasilis chuckled. “You could try it.”

“I’m being serious. I need to know what needs to be done to you. You’re all over the place. So, do you need to be kicked? Slapped? Maybe even a punch? I could pull your hair even, but you might be into that.” I said behind him on the bed, my fingers running over the scratched marks I’d made in the fabric. “So, what’s it going to be?”

“I think I need to take a nap.” He huffed as he hauled himself on the bed, throwing down beside me. “There’s too much going on in my mind right now.”

“If that’s the case, why don’t I ask you some questions,” I said, with a view from his feet up, looking directly up the inside of his boxers. There was a natural curiosity to his anatomy, but I couldn’t get dickstracted now, especially not here, where it would be considering sleeping with the enemy.

“Go for it,” he said, letting out a yawn as he rested on the pillow. “I don’t know how much help I’ll be though. My entire life feels like a lie right now. I don’t even know how much of it was mine, or how much of it was what they made me believe.”

My brows wrinkled together. “See, I don’t get that. What do you mean?”

“It’s like—” He demonstrated with his hand out in front of his face, waving it. “Like I can see the world, but I’ve never been able to do what I wanted. Like my body has been under someone else’s control.”

I knew Alphas were big babies on the inside, but I didn’t peg them for being this dramatic about it. “Ok, and you’ve just figured that out now?”.

Screwing his toes and uncurling them in quick succession, he locked eyes with me again. “If you could understand what I mean, then it’s like my entire body was hijacked.”

“Ok, I guess I see why you’re getting bothered about the plans you’ve got for those omegas,” I grumbled. “You don’t want whatever happened with you to happen to them. You don’t want to co-opt someone else’s body for your plan. Huh?”

His breath continued to be shaky as he drew them in slowly. “But that’s the thing,” he said. “I wanted it. I—I wanted to see them hurt, to see them in pain. I—”

“Why?” The hard-hitting question. Why did people cause pain to others?

“Because I was told to,” he whispered. “I was told that they were getting what they asked for. I was told that it was my duty, my power.”A single tear shed. He wiped it away quickly. “The only different is—well, it’s you.”

I rolled my eyes. “I don’t know what you mean by that, but I’m not your savior. I’m just doing my job, and yeah, I am being a savior to them right now because they’re going through hell. It’s not right. And no, you’re not taking a nap.” I smacked his thigh.

“No, no, no, I don’t mean—I don’t mean that it’s you, I mean, it’s you, your scent. Your—”

“Spit it out then.”

He shook his head. “It’s not possible.”

“Go on.” I smacked him again. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“You’re immune to the venom,” he said. “It’s what I always smelled on you. Why I always thought you were special. You’re immune. You cut through it all.”