Then, a roar broke from my chest, the moment his dick retreated from my slit, ready to push back inside me. Along with that sound an unknown strength took over my body and I pushed myself away from the wall, thrusting my back against Four’s chest and – remarkably – forcing him to stumble back.
I took a chance and flung around, placing my back against the door, staying in the blind spot of the cameras. Again I bared my teeth, but this time I felt fangs in my mouth. I knew that my eyes were glowing, probably for the first time really unrestrained, because Four stared at me in shock, frozen, with his pants down and his cock growing limp beneath my glare.
“I am your alpha’s mate!” I growled at him quite articulately and definitely threatening.
As Four still didn’t move and just blinked in confusion, I took the chance to pull up my pants, not taking my eyes off him, his eyes were the only thing stirring in his body.
“You’re a beta, and as your alpha’s mate, you will obey me,” I told him, fixing my waistband as if I had been the one fucking him. “Turn human, pull up your pants and come close.”
Four seemed to wake up from a trance and followed my orders in the exact sequence they were given. He became Daniel, got his clothes in order and stepped towards me, just into my hand’s reach. I struck out and slapped him across his face as hard as I could, claws out.
Daniel was smacked against the wall to his right and I did my best to cover my own surprise about how strong I actually was, by watching how blood ran from four gashes on his cheek. With luck there would be scars left.
Collecting himself he glared back at me now angrily.
“You know you deserved that!” I shouted out at him. “Get back here.”
Again, to my astonishment, he obeyed. So, as Jay’s mate I seemed to have the second if not the same rank in the pack. Still, I kept my cool and cleaned my hand on his t-shirt.
“You will not tell anyone about this,” I pointed circularly at my face. “Understood?”
Daniel nodded, gritting his teeth.
“You will tell everyone that you got hurt during combat training, if you fail to conceal your injury,” I ordered him.
Again, he nodded briefly.
“You will accept that I or Jay call you Daniel and you will meet me in human form from now on.”
Another nod.
“And,” I made a step towards him. “If you ever touch me again without my consent I myself will rip your frigging dick off and make you eat it.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“Good dog,” I spat at him, turned around and slapped my flat hand against the door.
“This session is over!” I shouted.
Day 244 - continuation
White looked at me as if he was waiting for something and I instantly froze and recalled he had given me ‘uniform’.
“Because, am I not your employee? Haven’t I proven myself to you?” I demanded and acted as sullen as I could bring myself to, all the while I imagined slitting his throat.
I turned around in order to uphold my pretense, because if White saw my face he would call me out. He was a madman, but an ingenious madman.
“It’s been three months!” I exclaimed and made a step away from him, but he grabbed my hands and stopped me.
I summoned all the self-control I had not to slap him.
“Yes, it’s been three months” – five down, three to go – “since you are working for me” – since I became pregnant – “and almost thirty-five days since you came to us” – was it already been that long? “Almost nine months.”
I turned back to him because I was surprised that he was even aware of that. But the way he looked at me surprised me even more, and appalled me, disgusted me. My body acted on its own, as it stepped back and pulled its hand free forcefully. What I saw was regret. Oh, hell, no, I wouldn’t feel pity for him, or anything else for that matter. He deserved nothing more than a heart of stone from me.
Even worse, he had moved our conversation away from my plan. I still needed three words from him, one number and two spoken in the alphabet they used to code airplanes. Now, I needed to improvise. Luckily, I still had two of the easiest ones to obtain left.
I again took time to answer, trying to ignore all the uncertain variables in the calculation I had made. We couldn’t trust Val, and because of that we couldn’t trust Peter, and Daniel’s cooperation relied solely on his obedience as our pack member. And then there were the other beasts Jay was currently ‘training’, who knew that I was his mate but barely ever had seen me.
But I couldn’t back out now. We had to break out or die trying, because I wouldn’t allow my child to grow up in prison, even if it meant ending up in another prison and breaking out again. That was what Jay and I had Val believe. I still couldn’t fathom that she had bought us surrendering to her suggestion. Austin sure as hell hadn’t, I had seen it in his eyes when we went through our initial plan for a final time. What I saw was that he wasn’t happy about Valerie Winter’s plan to get us to another location in order to ‘cure’ us.
“Meghan...” White spoke, ready to say something, but I broke him off, hoping that my voice sounded believably broken: “Which month is it anyway?”
He looked at me slightly taken aback and then strangely soft, but I knew his motivation behind his behavior, I hadn’t forgotten him groping me just minutes before.
“It’s November.”
“November,” I repeated, falsely downhearted.
Six down, two to go.
I made another pause, and rubbed my eyes to remove non-existent tears.
“Sir, I need to get back to Twenty,” I told him. “She will be agitated the whole day, if she doesn’t get at least thirty minutes of my time and then I have to go and meet Four.”
“Four?” He grabbed the stair rail and managed to pull himself onto his feet. “He’s not scheduled for today, because he’s in combat training with Lieutenant Flynn.”
Seven down, one to go and the frigging drug was already wearing off. Curse you Valerie Winters.
“No, Sir,” I gave back and tried to keep my cool. “He had his first team exercise as second in command.”
White was startled, then confused and then wobbling. I could see realization dawning on his face. Not because I was lying but because I was right and his perfect mind had been wrong. I could either try to get that last word from him right now, hoping that he was still too dazed, or try to play innocent.
“Are you feeling better?” I chose quickly to stay true to the act I had pulled off for the last three months. “Would you like to come with me and watch? It’s getting easier for her day by day.”
I smiled at him proudly and encouragingly. My hand was reached out for him to take and secure his step. It was written all over his face that he was undoubtedly sure that someone had drugged him, but he didn’t connect it with bumping into me and being invited to watch Nina’s shifting exercise with me, yet.
White was on the hook, took my hand and followed me back into Nina’s cage and even let go of me when I pulled away.
When she heard us enter Nina was immediately on her feet and approached the bars cautiously, her glance jumping between White and me. I wasn’t sure if he was able to notice it, but her eyes lingered longer on me than on him, which meant she was worried.
“When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.”
When I heard Clay Severin quote those lines I instantly froze, in every meaning of the word. I stopped in my tracks and I could feel the heat leaving my body like a bird set free. This was the quote from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet which I had wanted to recite before Val’s drug kicked in and ruined everything.
I had received an unabridged copy of the play just two weeks ago from White himself, because I asked for some Shakespeare, hoping t
hat in his sadistic mind he would think of just that play and of course he did. Just this morning I had repeated those lines over and over again to memorize them. I had left my bookmark on that page.
Then, I heard the clicking sound of a trigger pulled back and slowly turned around to look at White. The work of the drug was still written all over his face just as was the very same anger from before.
He was pointing a gun at me. Why hadn’t I smelled it? Why hadn’t Nina smelled it and warned me?
“Come on Twenty, show your trick and shift,” White ordered not taking his eyes off me.
She did as he asked and stood still, hands lifted.
“All you ever wanted to read was either medical books or Jane Austen and the other ladies, and all of a sudden it was Shakespeare. I gave you only one book and you were satisfied,” White explained, slightly. “It was confusing, but I believed you were being grateful for the little things I gave to you and not asking for more. I actually believed you.”
He sounded hurt, I didn’t care; all I wanted was to find a way out of this situation. I could act shocked and try to convince him that he was being paranoid, because I just knew he was. A man in his position had to be, but a true paranoid would never accept that he was wrong. And of course, he wasn’t. Yet, I still needed him to say ‘Romeo’.
I still hadn’t put my hands up and I wasn’t sure if he would allow me to move at all.
“You know I can’t kill you, Meghan,” he said. “But I can keep you apart and I can hurt your friends. Did you enjoy your time with Four when the gate was down?”
“Was it really your order?” I asked softly. “Or were you...?”
“Overruled?” He cut me off. “Kept in the dark? Betrayed? Yes. It had been my intention to give you to Four if your sessions with Ten wouldn’t have the result that was hoped for, but no. It was the official plan to keep you two together for a year, especially if it was promising, and it was. You were pregnant twice.”
“Who ordered it?” I demanded to know.
“What does it concern you?” White asked. “Now I will have to handle the mess you made, Meghan, which means our time working together is over. I will give you to Four, and if your precious Ten wants to make sure that you stay alive and well, he will do everything I tell him to.”
I remembered what Jay wrote about doing everything in his power to keep me safe. But what White just said meant that I wouldn’t be safe, because he knew that Four was volatile, he had no idea that he had submitted to me. And if Four got the order from White to rape me, he would do it. No matter if he obeyed my orders now or not. No matter my threat, no matter that I was some sort of beast. I had no idea if I was stronger than him, or not, I had never sparred with him as I had with Nina.
“Just say it,” I told him. “Say why you gave me exactly that book. Why that play?”
“You mean Romeo and Juliet?” He mused and I actually couldn’t believe that he wasn’t cautious about that code. “You know why, because your love for each other will be your undoing.”
November, Foxtrot, Tango, Romeo, Two, Four, Uniform, Three; that was the code I had needed him to say, not in that order but at least those words.
“You don’t have the entire code, Meghan,” he explained victorious; he was even faster expected. “It’s a twelve figure code. And you don’t have all of them.”
White made a step closer to me, but not enough that I could grab the gun, how Nina had taught me, and disarm him, still I brought my hands up and swallowed, hard.
“You can come with me, calmly, or I will have to shoot her,” White spoke coolly and aimed the gun at Nina. “You can be a good girl and we can finish what we started, before I toss you into the cage, and revoke every single privilege I have ever given you, and you’ll end up right where you started, just without my protection this time; unless you will give me some privileges.”
I just looked at him, my face blank, giving him no expression to read and interpret. All the time I didn’t really believe that White would have any sexual drive at all. He was married and in love with his work and his success. Just like him I had tried to calculate every possibility, every outcome, every obstacle that could and would stand in our way to freedom, but this wasn’t one of them.
Now, seeing how he looked at me, I knew which kind of privilege came to his mind, everything that wouldn’t get me pregnant, but would give him relaxation and relief.
“Not even when hell freezes over, Clay,” I told him.
Hearing his name he instinctively brought his gun to my face. Briefly his eyes became tiny slits until he realized that I had played him.
“It’s true that your master code has twelve,” I continued, slowly lowering my hands while talking. “And the compound master code includes yours and another four figures depending on the order the master system is executing. Luckily, the ones we need have all been spoken by you already. I knew you would only focus on me, once you would scent that something was off, because you thought that I would be the only one smart enough to try. And of course you wouldn’t trust Doctor Winters either.”
Listening to me talking about how I really, actually played him, the great mastermind himself, the hand that held his gun slightly lowered, yet not enough.
“Peter.” It was all he said, slightly incredulously.
“Did you really think the day he gives up on you would never come?” I asked him, tilting my head slightly, behaving as if the lethal weapon wasn’t even there.
My true intention was to burn the bridges his little half-brother had crossed, so that White wouldn’t allow him to cross them back; because, honestly, Peter was like a flag in the wind.
“You almost lost him once assigning him to me, didn’t you notice that?” I shook my head slightly, “And no, it’s not what you think right now, he never ever laid one finger on me again. But I don’t expect you to understand.”
“Who else?” White asked demandingly, but all I was interested in was at which angle the barrel of his gun was pointing at me; it was still not low enough.
“What difference does it make?” I teased him with indifference.
His expression changed from analyzing to anger, and I knew I would see down that barrel again, in a second, but right then and there, he lowered just enough for me to beast out while jumping forward, grab the gun with my left, while smacking his face with the back of my right, and use the momentum to twirl around and stand in front of him, back to human and with his gun pointed at him.
“What difference does it make, tell me, Clay?” I repeated with a challenging smile. “You can come with me now, or die.”
White wasn’t shocked, or upset; he just looked at me with utter betrayal written in every cell of his body. As if he thought that I would owe him anything. All I did owe him was a gruesome death.
“We’re ready, mission control,” I said loud and clear when I was sure that White wouldn’t talk to me, and the moment I finished speaking the lights went out and all locks snapped open with a snapping, metallic sound.
For the man in front of me, it was pitch black darkness, because Austin disabled the black light that usually would come to life when code ‘black’ was activated. Unlike code ‘red’, which was a complete shutdown of the compound, and for which White had assumed we needed his master code, code black meant ‘uncontainable breach’, which meant that a hostile or unknown force had been able to enter the third level.
Austin had found this command by accident as he was hacking into White’s files. Severin was told to activate code black and that it would set all beasts marked as ‘active’ free in order to get rid of the problem. Needless to say that Austin had marked every single beast in the system as ‘active’.
With a rattling sound the gate of Nina’s cage removed and set her free. She instantly headed for White and smashed him against the wall behind to him.
All beasts, including myself, had night and heat vision, and I could watch her walking towards him and throw him against the wall. In that mome
nt I wasn’t completely sure if I wanted her to kill him, but I didn’t do anything to stop her, either. She wasn’t my subordinate, she was my friend, and maybe even the best friend I ever had. And if she really wanted to make him her punching ball for all the pain, abuse and rage inside of her, so be it.
But Nina stopped, grabbed him by the collar of his lab coat and button-down shirt and dragged him along with her, stepping to my side.
While I looked down at him being knocked down I realized not only that Nina had made sure that my secret was still a secret, but that I was utterly disappointed that this man was still breathing. I felt this choking urge to get my claws out and drag them along his throat, slicing through arteries, sinews and gristle, just to watch his blood spilling from his body like a waterspout fountain. But he wasn’t worth loosing that human part of me, was he?
“Let’s go,” Nina said, smiling at me excitedly with her beautiful human face and I mirrored her expression honestly and nodded in agreement.
When I set up all of this I had planned for her to guide me through the darkness, but now she didn’t have to, because just nine days ago, after having a lot of troubles with my sight and headaches, I suddenly woke up at night and was confused about the green light flooding the room.
So, instead of grabbing my hand Nina winked at me and gestured for me to lead the way. I couldn’t help but chuckle and started moving. We didn’t have much time until the whole compound would automatically go on complete shutdown in order to imprison the presumed intruders with beasts on their tails.
What happened now was just as gruesome, but inevitable and necessary. On that we had agreed at least. With all beasts set free they would go on a rampage, probably on a literal killing spree, taking down each and every guilty person in this place, which was literally everyone. Staying clear of guilty actions and doing nothing were just as bad, and I couldn’t bring up the sympathy they needed to be saved, or rather spared, by me.
The Beast In Us (The Beast And Me Book 3) Page 17