by D. J. Heart
Evan opens his eyes and ignores the way his body wants to tense up, relaxing into the strange alpha’s embrace as he looks around for something he can use to get free. When nothing in the office suggests itself, Evan feels a crashing weight of despair settling in over him.
How many omegas have been in this place, just like him, looking for a way to escape and not found it? Why would he manage what countless others have no doubt tried and failed to do?
“This is nice,” the alpha says, hand sliding over Evan’s stomach. His fingers are splayed wide, the tip of his pinky dipping beneath the waistband of Evan’s pants. The slight encroachment is somehow worse than if the alpha had just gone for it and shoved his hands down Evan’s pants.
Or maybe not, Evan thinks, hoping that this is the extent of his molestation. His eyes land on the phone, and he wonders what would happen if he picked it up and bashed it over the alpha’s head.
He’d probably just be startled, then mad, and then Evan’s feet would be ground beef. Not worth it.
Fuck he’s so stupid. It’s a phone! Peter and Chad both have phones, and Evan can call them. Except… Evan doesn’t know their numbers. Those had been programmed into his phone before he got it, the numbers themselves only showing up when he placed a call.
Closing his eyes, Evan desperately tries to remember the digits that flash across the screen every time he’s called Peter or Chad, but no matter how hard he tries, he can’t. He wants to cry. This is his second advantage. He has alphas on the outside that are looking for him. He doesn’t want to escape just to get away; he wants to escape to get home.
“Come on, bounce a little,” the alpha says, his voice rough. Evan almost sighs with relief. If the alpha was going to fuck him, he wouldn’t be wasting time with bouncing. It’s obvious that the man isn’t allowed to have sex with him, and he’s probably bending the rules pretty far just by doing this.
Not wanting to give himself away, Evan starts grinding his hips down on the alpha’s lap. It’s not a bounce, but it will get him off that much faster.
“Fuck yeah, knew you were a good boy the minute I saw you. So fucking sweet,” the alpha growls, pushing Evan down into his lap. The alpha comes with a grunt, in his pants like a loser, pushing Evan off his lap the minute his orgasm hits.
“Don’t want any of that on you,” he explains, Evan shocked by the rough way he’s been pushed to the floor.
“Let me just change real quick,” the alpha says, stripping fast and pulling on a pair of leather riding pants like Chad sometimes wears. He bundles his jeans up into a plastic bag, dropping it by his desk. The whole thing takes more than a minute, and if Evan could only remember Chad or Peter’s number, he could have called them. He might not have been able to say anything, but they would have understood.
He’s so fucking stupid. Why couldn’t he just have memorized two stupid numbers?
The alpha pulls up his zipper and shrugs on a matching jacket, taking his keys and the plastic bag, grabbing Evan’s arm and marching him back down to the room at a hurried pace. Evan feels like crying, his chance wasted.
“Be good tonight, no banging on the door or crying. Just sleep in your bed and eat your food when they bring it, do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Evan nods, dejected. The alpha squeezes his shoulder with affection, then pushes him through the door and locks it behind him.
Evan finds an empty bed, lying down on the bare mattress with a sense of hopelessness. All around him omegas in heat are groaning and moaning, trying to get some relief, the bright lights overhead making the idea of sleep seem impossible.
Still, Evan is exhausted. He rolls over onto his stomach, hiding his face in the crook of his arm, and falls into a restless sleep.
***
Chad stares at the screen of his laptop, not sure what to do. They’ve exhausted their connections to the criminal underworld and come up blank. They’ve probed omega rights groups—fringe and mainstream—and found nothing. They’ve checked dozens of airplanes and ships known to be used in omega smuggling without turning up a single omega. It’s like Evan has just disappeared.
Closing his laptop, Chad stares at the dent in the wall where Peter threw his phone after the insurance company called about filing a claim. They just don’t get it. Even Peter’s people, dedicated though they may be, think that Peter is losing it for expending all this time and energy to find an omega.
His phone rings, Aiden’s number flashing on the screen. Grimacing he picks up.
“What?” he asks, hostile. Aiden doesn’t answer right away.
“Hi, Chad. It’s Aiden,” Aiden says, as though Chad doesn’t have caller ID.
“I know, what do you want?”
“I heard about Evan. I’m sorry about that. I know how much you and Peter liked him.”
“What do you want, Aiden?” Chad demands. The last thing he wants to do is deal with Aiden on top of everything else.
“Peter isn’t answering his phone. Is he there?”
“No, he’s at the office. You can try him—"
The line goes dead, Aiden hanging up on him. Chad stares at his phone, huffing.
He gets off the couch and grabs his keys, deciding to go back to Tank Security headquarters. Peter had ordered him to go home and get some sleep, but the last thing he needs is to be away from his alpha and mate. They need to be together, and if Peter wants to force him to sleep, Evan will do it in Peter’s office where he can be ready in case he’s needed.
Taking the elevator down to the garage, he hops on his bike and takes off.
***
Aiden’s kidnapping of Evan was meticulously planned and executed with the cool detachment of a professional operative. His assassination attempt on Chad, however, is not.
Aiden stares at the wreckage of Chad’s bike in the rear view mirror, the alpha lying unmoving a few feet away from the mangled heap of metal, a grin stretching his lips. He drives away, keeping to a route free of CCTV surveillance cameras. He parks the car where he knows it will be stolen and chopped up within the hour, inspecting the damage to his car with glee.
There was no way Chad made it through that alive.
Peter will be crushed, Chad had his claws in deep, but in time he’ll be better off. By the time Aiden gets his promotion to head up the USA division of Topgrunder, they’ll finally be able to be together. Feeling hopeful and light on his feet, Aiden walks until he’s in a slightly better neighborhood, hails a cab and goes home. He picks up his phone, counting the hours until Peter calls him in his time of need.
***
“Mr. Tank, there’s a call for you. It’s the hospital,” one of Dawn’s minions says, handing him the phone and retreating so fast you’d think he was emitting toxic fumes. Adrenaline surging, Peter takes the phone, the hope that Evan has been found making him feel lightheaded.
“This is Peter Tank,” he says, no nonsense.
“Mr. Tank, this is Dr. Vano from Mercy General Hospital. I’m calling about your mate, Chad Brand. He was involved in a motor vehicle accident and brought to the hospital about twenty minutes ago. We’re prepping him for surgery at the moment, but he’s conscious, and his injuries are not life-threatening.”
Peter grabs for his desk, leaning on it for support. The shit just keeps piling up.
“He’s going to be okay, right? That’s what you're saying?” he demands, heart pounding with fear.
“He’s stable though he has a collapsed lung and a few broken bones. In my experience, he should be okay, though I can’t promise you anything.”
“I’ll be right there,” Peter says, breathing a sigh of relief. He instructs Dawn to keep looking for Evan, calling his driver to meet him outside with the car. Peter doesn’t trust himself to drive in his current state.
When he gets to the hospital, Chad has already been taken to surgery, a nurse coming out to speak with him.
“Is he okay?” Peter demands. The nurse is unruffled by his aura of dominant alpha energy.
“He’s doing very well. We put in a drain for his lung, and the orthopedic surgeon is working on him as we speak.
Peter nods, relieved. He sits down in the hospital waiting room, the plastic chair hard and uncomfortable, and waits.
***
Evan is bored. It feels wrong to admit it, but he is. He should be scared, trying to escape… should be feeling anything but bored.
But there’s no helping it. Evan and the other omegas are locked in their depressing little room all day, only taken out in the morning to shower and eat, and then marched back to the room. With nothing to do, the fear dulls, and the panic recedes, unrelenting boredom taking their place.
The food is terrible. They get nothing but omega rations, and though Evan knows he’s getting all the calories and nutrients he needs, being fed only once a day means that he spends the night feeling his empty belly screaming for food.
He’d been warned at the center that his alphas might not feed him regular food. That omega rations were easy and cheap, and that he should be grateful no matter what. Evan thinks that if Peter and Chad had put him on omega rations, he would have accepted it and been grateful like he’s supposed to. But here? Where they don’t give a shit about him other than what they can stick in his hole? He’s not grateful at all.
His second night in the VIP room was completely uneventful, John nowhere in sight, and just as fruitless as the first. The alpha in charge of them all—Evan still doesn’t know his name—hadn’t taken him up to his office to cuddle, so even if he had remembered the phone numbers, it wouldn’t have helped.
Feeling restless, Evan pushes his body off the bed and trudges over to the sink, turning the faucet and bending down to drink. He considers using the toilet hidden by a screen from the rest of the room but decides not to. He looks to the door, wondering how long it will be before they’re all collected for the night’s use. With the lights always on, and no windows to speak of, Evan has no idea what time it is other than that they’re somewhere between morning showers and feeding, and the evening when the customers arrive.
Walking back to the bed that he’s claimed as his, trying to ignore the writhing omegas laid out around him, he lays down and buries his face in the mattress and hugs his arms around his head. It blocks out the light and some of the sound, and Evan lets himself daydream about what he would be doing if none of this had ever happened.
“Hey, mind if I sit?” a voice asks, Evan lifting his head to see a flushed omega standing at the foot of his bed. He nods, a little unsettled. This is the first time one of the other boys has so much as acknowledged his existence, much less spoken to him.
“Go ahead,” he says, the boy sitting down with what Evan thinks is supposed to be a smile. It looks more like a grimace, but Evan isn’t going to hold that against him. He’s in heat, and Evan knows that he must be hurting.
“Thanks,” the boy says. He pulls his legs into the lotus position, looking Evan over.
“No problem,” Evan says, mirroring the other omega’s position and studying him in return. He’s slight and pretty, skin pale and smooth under the flush of heat, with big, amber eyes that remind Evan of honey.
“So, sucks to be here, right?” the omega says, startling a laugh out of Evan.
“Yeah,” he agrees, the truth of the words lodging a lump in his throat.
“I’m Trick,” the omega says, holding out his hand.
Evan takes it, shaking his hand and giving his own name, “Evan.”
“So how did you end up here, Evan?” Trick folds his hands and holds them in his lap.
“I don’t know. I was out with my alpha, and then he fell down, and then I fainted and woke up here,” Evan says, still not sure what had happened. Why someone would steal him.
“That’s fucked up,” Trick says. “They should have just told you what they were doing, not fucked with your head like that. Alphas are assholes.”
“What do you mean?” he asks, not following.
“Your alphas,” Trick says, leaning forward with a contemptuous look on his face. “They shouldn’t have engineered a whole thing just so that they wouldn’t have to tell you that they were selling you.”
“They didn’t sell me!” Evan exclaims, startled that Trick would even suggest such a thing. Then again, Trick doesn’t know Peter and Chad. “Somebody took me.”
Trick’s look is pitying, but he doesn’t contradict Evan.
“They didn’t,” Evan insists, for some reason needing Trick to believe him.
“It’s okay. My alpha said that I was just going to the doctor, but after he dropped me off, he just never came back. You’d be surprised how many alphas don’t have the guts to tell an omega that they’re going to sell them.”
Evan holds his tongue, Trick’s bitterness not something he wants to get tangled up in. He knows the truth, and that will have to do.
“How long have you been here?” he asks, morbid curiosity getting the better of him.
“I have no idea,” Trick laughs. He glances at the door, a frown marring his face. “A month, maybe? It’s hard to keep track of the time. I went into heat after four days, though. I know that. Are you feeling it yet?”
Evan shakes his head. He knows that it could hit him at any minute. When Chad had left, and Peter had been ignoring him, it had taken almost a week for his heat to set in, but this situation is vastly more stressful. It could be any minute.
He doesn’t have much time.
“You shouldn’t try to run away,” Trick says, suddenly out of the blue.
“What?” Evan asks, startled. Has Trick noticed something about his behavior that gives his intentions away? Something that the alpha in charge might notice, too?
“You think that you were taken—that your alphas want you back. You want to escape. I would too if I thought I had somewhere to go. I’m just saying, if your alphas are looking for you, you should trust that they’ll find you. Trying to escape is just going to get you hurt.”
Evan tries to control his breathing, chest heaving as he stumbles over his denial. “I’m not… I wouldn’t—"
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to tattle. I’m just saying, you don’t want to end up like Bo over there.” Trick nods towards the other side of the room, though Evan doesn’t turn his head to look. He doesn’t want the reminder of what he’s risking.
“I won’t,” Evan says, hoping that it’s true. Trick says nothing.
They move on to other, safer subjects, Trick fighting to stay coherent and lucid with a determination Evan admires. Though when the alpha in charge comes to collect them, leading them out in small groups, Evan’s determination to escape is stronger than ever.
He’s not going to end up like Trick, bitter and waiting for his heat to kill him. He’s not.
***
Chad wakes up with no idea what happened, his body numb and mind feeling like it’s stuffed with cotton.
“Hey, you’re awake,” Peter says from somewhere to his left. Chad turns his head, Peter coming into view. His mate looks tired and haggard, but the smile on his face is bright like the fucking sun. Chad loves him so much.
“What happened?” he asks, looking down at his body. There’s a tube sticking out of his chest, connected to a weird machine, and his right arm is in a cast. Peter takes his hand, squeezing his fingers.
“You were in an accident. Someone rammed into you while you were waiting at a red light,” Peter says, reaching out and stroking his hair. The touch feels amazing. Chad closes his eyes.
“Did we find Evan yet?” he asks, opening his eyes. Peter’s expression is grim, and he shakes his head no. Chad wants to cry.
“We’re still looking,” Peter assures him. He threads his fingers through Chad’s hair, the touch gentle and loving, and before Chad can even try to fight it, he’s asleep.
***
Peter watches over Chad, making sure he’s okay, before taking his temporary replacement phone out of his pocket and calling Dawn.
“Still noth
ing,” she says in lieu of a greeting. Peter appreciates her refusal to dance around the bush.
“Keep at it,” he orders, feeling tired. He wonders what he’ll do if they don’t find him. Chad would be devastated, never forgiving himself, and Peter would have to spend the rest of his life knowing that he’d failed both his mates. He doesn’t even want to think about what Evan might be going through.
“Richard Cruz owes us a favor, doesn’t he?” Dawn asks, voice hesitant.