by Addison Cain
If Leslie was right, if what they hoped lay in wait, it almost seemed too good to be true.
The woman knew her way, though once or twice she’d paused and listened to the dark. Both of them had crouched silent as the grave, but noise could be heard: the whining of buried pipes, the distant clank of metal. Not once did she seem unsure, but she was extremely cautious.
The crawl took less than an hour, though every passing minute felt like a lifetime.
One final turn in the path, and a pressurized door adorned with a crank wheel waited. The design was clever, one that would not be affected by electricity, or a lack thereof. The Callas family had exercised caution in the design of their home.
Not that it had saved them...
Between the two of them, the Beta straining and an Alpha small for her dynamic, they barely had the strength to turn the rusted crank. One would think it had been decades since a soul had used this passage by the way the gears stuck. It took the pair longer to unhinge that door than it had to manage the difficult path to it.
On the other side, once the portal swung in, waited more darkness, more dust, and stale air. When they stepped over that threshold, Leslie suggested they seal their entrance, whispering that should she be wrong, the airborne virus would have little chance to escape and potentially infect the population.
It seemed even darker on the other side of that terrifying door.
A shoddy flashlight between them, Leslie and Corday were forced to press themselves together in the confined space; both inhaled and exhaled air that might kill them. After ten ordinary minutes, Corday actually smiled.
Leslie smiled right back, reaching forward to embrace him in their triumph.
His clothing was still stained from his encounter with Senator Kantor’s corpse, he smelled vile and was laden with dust, but she didn’t seem to care. Leslie pressed closer, thanked him in repeated sweet whispers at his ear.
He could not help but hug her back. “Let’s remain vigilant. We still don’t know what waits inside.”
Enthusiastically, she pressed a kiss to his cheek, a happy tear running through the dirt on her own. “But there is no virus here. We’d both be coughing by now if there were.”
It was a victory Corday sorely needed.
The deeper they got into the mansion, with its private gardens and warmth, the more they realized this segment of the Dome was still intact. There were no cracks, no ice. Trees in the atriums bore fruit in the environment’s false summer.
Surrounded by thriving plant life, Corday reached for an orange, stared at the overripe fruit’s dimpled peel. At his feet were its rotting brothers, each one having been wasted with no one to tend the garden or gather the produce. In those fallen fruit, he saw a parody of the resistance, the waste of lost souls, and the foolishness of almost a year of inaction.
How many good men and women had died while Senator Kantor had been extolling caution?
They had only grown weaker...
Leslie claimed he’d known of this place. Why had the old man been so afraid of a door he must have recognized would not have led to the infection of civilians... not when it was underground and difficult to approach. Teams could have been sent, communication via radio established, and a cave-in organized should the volunteers fall ill with infection.
Walking through those silent, elegantly appointed rooms, Corday begin to feel the stirrings of anger towards the old man. Why had he been so afraid of this place?
Claire was also there in his thoughts, her timid smile and faith. How much more had she suffered because Senator Kantor had refused to open a single door?
Room by room, hall by hall, Corday and Leslie found more than fruit.
There were decomposed bodies that had sat so long in the heat, they had putrefied, then mummified. The elite Enforcer guard of the Premier, every last one of them lay dead. But, it was the way they had died that was most unnerving.
No virus had been there.
Not a single guard had drawn their weapons. Yet, many had broken necks, their heads completely turned around—as if one by one, a shadow had crept up upon them and laid them to waste.
Corday did not see one gunshot victim. This carnage had been done with bare hands.
The deeper they moved, the more obvious it became. Something very wrong had taken place here.
Shepherd, his Followers, had done this, and then they had shut it up.
Why?
Why seal up the Premier’s Sector? Why not make use of the arms, the food, the space, the warmth? Under the Dome, even Shepherd’s soldiers were suffering from the cold.
They found what might be an answer in the most prominent room in the mansion. With a view overlooking the icy mountains in the distance, sat a desk, a flag every citizen of Thólos had seen via COMscreen during Premier Callas mandatory weekly address to the population behind it. There was not a wall, a piece of furniture, or even a window that was not grimy with old, crusted blood spatter. What was left of Callas body was in pieces scattered all over the floor. Fingers, parts of an arm, segments of leg... his limbs had been splintered, ripped from his torso, and flung about. Even the ceiling held traces of mushed organs stuck to it.
Shriveled up innards coated the floor, lay tossed aside in the corners, the broken, splintered edges of exposed bone a testament to the rage of his killer.
Not two hours prior, Corday had imagined committing this very type of violence against Shepherd. Seeing it in person was extremely sobering.
He could not do this to another person...not even the man who’d murdered his people.
Leslie went to her knees near the fragmented and crushed skull of the man she claimed was preparing to make her his bride. “I knew he was dead, but this...”
Corday had watched her when her eyes roved over the scene in the safe house, seen how she’d looked at the lifeless body of her uncle... as if she didn’t understand what she saw. Her face had been blank, her eyes blinking slowly. Never had she cried.
It had been the shock, he was sure.
Now, there were tears on her face.
Corday watched Leslie grieve over a man who had been one of the first true casualties of the breach, and wondered at the difference between her impassive, determined reaction to her uncle’s body and her silent tears seeing the old remains of the man she’d loved, ripped to shreds.
Something seemed strange in the behavior.
A loving uncle who had secreted her away so that even the resistance might not harm her, and Leslie Kantor would not even help in removing his body from the wall it was nailed to. Now this, her open weeping over a man she admittedly accepted as long dead, her fingertips tracing the sharp edges of his cracked skull.
“You must have loved him very much.” Corday took a deep breath and let a sigh past his lips. “After you left your parent’s safe room, why did you not come here first?”
Open apology in her wide china blue eyes, Leslie admitted, “I tried to. I could not turn the crank on the door with my strength alone.”
There had not been a single set of footprints in the corridor’s dust. If she had tried a few months ago, then the accumulating grime would have shown some trace of her tracks. She was lying.
Corday was unsure if it mattered, so he nodded as if he understood. “Of course.”
Hand to her knee, Leslie abandoned the bones of Premier Callas, and pressed her body to stand. “We found what we came for. Now, you and I must draw the resistance here.”
It was not going to be quite that simple. If they had been infiltrated, then Corday understood it would be an easy thing for Shepherd to learn of this new place. “If your plan is going to work, Shepherd cannot be allowed to believe the resistance perseveres. We have to let him believe we’ve given up.”
“Agreed.” Wiping her hands on her pants, Leslie offered a sad smile. “We must make him think we’ve failed. Let Shepherd believe the murder of my uncle broke our lines. The resistance as it is today will fade away. A new rebellion will rise
up in the shadows where our oppressor cannot see. He’ll never even know we were here.”
Looking out her window, Claire tried to focus on distant snow covered peaks. But there was a much brighter, far more tempting view sitting behind her. Fingertips cold on the glass, thread warm in her chest, she felt pulled in two directions.
The familiar rasp purred, “You are thinking of my shoulder. You wonder if I am in pain. Would you like to see it?”
She always wanted to see the place where she’d bit him, could hardly suppress the need to touch her fresh mark when he was near. But Claire didn’t answer, aware he was trying to tempt her from the view.
Her anxiety spiked with the understanding of how easily he could do it. Shepherd’s purr heightened, she calmed.
Rolling her neck, letting out a sigh, Claire gazed at nature. How ironic considering nature was twisting up her insides.
Drumming her fingers against the glass, debating available courses of action, Claire kept her eyes off the male.
When the enemy is relaxed, make them toil. When full, starve them. When settled, make them move. –Sun Tzu
The directive seemed simple enough, but over the last week, Claire kept catching herself enacting the opposite effect on Shepherd.
He was already toiling and weary; her presence relaxed him. The Alpha was starved for affection, so hungry for it he soaked it up like a man who had never known such a thing—greedy for any scrap at all. A soft pet here—Claire looking down to find her hand on him, unsure when or how it got there. A gentle smile there—her expression relaxed without her knowledge or intent. And all it seemed the Alpha wanted was to settle and be still with her.
She was slipping, failing, her resistance having been crushed by her own strategy to know him… or offered up to advance it. She was not sure which.
Perspective, to seek out her enemy’s weaknesses, that had been her goal. Having marked him and the subsequent blossoming of the link left Claire with a view so undiluted, no other person would ever see her Alpha as she could. Mission achieved.
She knew Shepherd.
What she found inside the man was so inundated in his makeup, she wondered if he even understood what it was—loneliness, emptiness calling for her to fill it.
When she mustered the courage to look, Claire could see his perceived selflessness. Shepherd wanted the world to be good because he had never known good, he had never lived it, and he could not fathom it outside of books and study. All Shepherd knew was that good was the opposite of the Undercroft, and that bad had to suffer in order for change to bloom.
He purred behind her. “Do not frown, little one.”
Seeing him past the hubris made it so very hard to resist giving him exactly what he wanted, especially when faced with the eagerness in which he offered himself and openly admired what he saw in her. Unless she stopped and drew back, unless she gave up her mission to open his eyes, she was going to feel... more than empathy or compassion.
Maybe she already did.
Claire had worried over it, fallen into brooding silences, and found herself more than once asking for the room with the window where she could seek distraction. Shepherd tended to comply with her vocalized desires, would sit with her as Claire did as she pleased—played the piano, stared out over her vast snowy landscape, painted in the sunlight—whatever she wanted. And he would remain attentive and watchful, his side of the bond wide open, Shepherd practically yanking on the link to draw her emotionally nearer.
He was the one making her toil, making her starve, and making her move. And all he had to do was sit there and wait as her own nature worked on her.
It wasn’t fair.
“Shepherd,” Claire said, turning mournful eyes away from the glass to glance at him over her shoulder. “I am tired.”
He knew she was not referring to physical exhaustion. “I know you are.”
“I’m not very good at this.”
“You are improving daily.”
She sighed, partially unconcerned they were discussing their long running personal war as if it were openly acknowledged between them. “Are you tired, Shepherd?”
Lounging back in the comfortable chair like a king on his throne, he shook his head. “No. I am the opposite.”
Narrowing her eyes, Claire fought the overwhelming urge to kick him in the shin. Feeling the need to knock him down a peg, she coolly reminded, “On the ice, I told you an apology would not make any difference.” Squaring to face him, feeling something unpleasant surge in her gut, she tried to make him toil, starve, and move. “I want one now.”
He was somewhat surprised, slowly standing from his chair, towering over her.
When it seemed he was only going to loom, Claire chose to walk away, but Shepherd began to lower and the anger all but fell off her face.
He got on his knees.
They were almost eye to eye when Shepherd said, “Claire O’Donnell, I am sorry.”
“Gods dammit,” Clare snarled under her breath, moving past him to flop back into the oversized chair, confident she’d lost another battle.
Swiveling, he faced her and leaned over, caging her with his arms. “Did I not grovel properly?”
A slight tick came to the corner of her lips. “Would you have knelt on the ice?”
He shifted enough that his torso parted her knees. Shepherd smiled at her while he warned wickedly, “Little one, you are in my chair.”
“What happened to the whole Shepherd philosophy of take what you want? I wanted it, I took it. It’s my chair now,” Claire quipped. A second later, she realized she was practically flirting.
Confusion weakened her smirk.
Shepherd started purring, his big hands kneading the muscles atop her thighs.
Closing her eyes and leaning back, Claire let out a shaky breath. “Maryanne was right. I have it better than everyone else in Thólos. I am kept warm. I eat great food. You have created an alternate reality for me filled with distractions, including time with my friend whom I know you dislike, and pictures of the people I care about so I won’t worry over them.”
Shepherd grunted. “You did not make a point in your statement.”
Dark lashes lifted and Claire looked at the man whose face hovered so near her own. “Do you have any idea how hard it is for an Omega to ignore the call of her Alpha? It’s torture. It physically makes one feel as if their skin is peeling off. Then there is the fear, not only of the searching mate but of oneself. You hear things... there are tactile hallucinations. Your mind rebels against your wishes. You become powerless.”
Heartbreak lay in her eyes. “The first time I escaped I would have sworn you were watching me from every shadow. I woke screaming each night. Every time you weren’t there, I felt betrayed, even though I had run from you. My second lapse of freedom, I wandered Thólos and felt nothing. There was no pain, there were no dreams. I was empty—that in its own way was hell. But, day in and day out, I was searching for something, and every day I would get a little closer to the Citadel.” Claire shook her head as the truth had only just dawned on her. “I did not even realize that until now.”
Shepherd’s eyes were glowing as he soaked in every word like it was vital, so still it would have frightened her in the early days.
Claire touched a slightly puckered scar on his cheek. “I cannot paint this expression. That right there is the enigma, isn’t it?”
Shepherd wrapped his arms around her waist, pulling her to the end of the seat so their bodies could be flush. “Tell me more, little one. I want to hear more.”
There was one more thing she could say that would affect him.
“I can’t live like this.” She studied his eyes, trying to capture the image in her mind. “I need to go outside. I need to taste fresh air.”
“No.” Shepherd let her go, stood, and moved away, dismissing the conversation, leaving her disappointed and awkward.
Already pulling out the handcuff, he waited near the door, silently signaling their time in the
room was at an end.
“I give you my word I won’t try to escape,” she offered softly, seeing his head fractionally turn her way at the confession. “There are too many lives at stake.”
Cocking his head, he asked, “Is that the only reason you would stay?”
All warfare is based on deception. –Sun Tzu
Fisting her hands in her skirt, Claire stood and went to him so he might chain her. “No, it’s not the only reason.”
Shepherd watched her hold out her wrist for him, the man reached out a hand to ever so softly run the back of his fingers over her delicate skin.
While she stood obediently, he spoke again, pocketing the handcuff and leaving her arm free. “You are asking for my trust when you have not earned it.”
Claire did not so much as blink an eye. “You ask me for the same thing daily.”
Chapter 3
His Omega’s cheeks were pink and lovely from her exertion trying to match his larger steps, but it was the flatness of her eyes Shepherd did not like. They turned another corner, walking down the hall that led to his quarters, no soul in sight, as he had ordered all his men to vacate the halls so his Omega would be left alone.
There was no handcuff between them, an act Shepherd felt deserved a great reward, but Claire seemed to not recognize his generosity on the topic. She’d hardly even looked around, not that there was much to see.
She was so unhappy...
His mate reminded him of a fish in a bowl, staring vacantly at a world she would never be able to breathe in. It was clear from her end of the link that there was no pleasure in it for her, that the walk was unwelcome—that she felt more trapped without the chain than she had felt for weeks locked away in his den.
He wondered if she was punishing herself again, if that was what made her cling to his arm when she was miserable. Or, if it was some test. Shepherd did not ask. Instead he stayed close, looking over his domain, measuring what might be a threat, what waited around every corner, observing those stark halls in a tactical way she never could.
But this walk was not working. He pulled her another direction, and punched a code into a steel door. It opened, and though there was no sky or view, icy wind blasted their way.