by Odessa Lynne
Chapter 5
He fell back asleep after that, ass still full but his pants pulled up and comfortable with Trey shielding him from the view of the depths of the dark cave behind him while warming Brendan’s back and chest with his arms.
When he woke, it was to thick fog and the sheeting sound of a waterfall somewhere to the outside of the cave entrance. The rain had obviously lasted a while and the water was draining away from somewhere upstream.
He rolled over to find himself alone, but by the time he sat up and started to pull his boot back onto his socked foot, Trey had walked under the overhang, another pouch in hand.
“I had four,” he said. “I expect my people will find us today. If not, we’ll have to hunt something for our next meal.”
“Okay.” Brendan finished retying his bootlace. His ass twinged a little when he moved, but nothing too bad, although he definitely wanted to get off to himself for a few minutes as soon as possible. He also needed to piss. He raked his hair back from his forehead and watched Trey hunker in front of him.
“How do you feel?” Trey asked.
“Like I’ve been fucked,” Brendan said, but he gave Trey a small smile and took the pouch without complaining. He’d eaten it yesterday, no sense whining about something he couldn’t change.
Trey brushed his knuckles against Brendan’s cheek. “If I thought it was safe, I would fuck you again before we leave here, but it isn’t. You’re appealing like this.”
“That’s okay. I probably need some recovery time. I thought—” Brendan shook his head. “I thought I’d done it before, but this part doesn’t feel that familiar.” Brendan scooped out some of the food and stuck it in his mouth. Like yesterday, he tried to swallow before too much of the flavor stuck to his tongue.
“You won’t find many things that feel completely familiar to you. The drugs are powerful.”
Brendan glanced quickly at Trey. “Drugs?”
“I told you yesterday you were a criminal. You are. Your memory loss is the effect of powerful memory blocking drugs. Your punishment for your crimes. A second chance at the behest of the Diviners.”
The Diviners again, whoever they were. He’d thought about this last night, before drifting off again and he’d come up with a scenario that might explain his current situation.
“You said treason, so does that mean I was some kind of spy or something—”
“Treason wasn’t your only crime.”
Brendan’s breath hitched. He watched Trey carefully. “What other crimes?”
“Theft. Murder.”
“No. That can’t be right.” He could hear the disbelief in his voice, almost as if he were listening to someone else speak. He didn’t feel like a murderer. He couldn’t imagine what would drive him to kill someone—unless—unless—
Self-defense. That had to be it. Trey was mistaken. He just didn’t know the whole story. That was all.
But Trey stared at him as if he knew what Brendan was thinking.
“Memory blocking drugs aren’t the only drugs we have available,” Trey said. “You admitted to every one of your crimes in front of my people. You admitted to planning—and leading—more than one raid that resulted in the deaths of innocents.”
“Then—if I’m such an asshole, such a bad guy, then how could you want to protect me? Or—fuck. Fuck. You had sex with me.” Brendan’s last swallow of food felt like it was lodged in his esophagus. “You fucked me to get back at me, didn’t you? You’re making me pay for my crimes by making me pay for protection with my ass.”
A rumble started in Trey’s chest, low and powerful. He dropped forward out of his crouch to kneel in front of Brendan. He clasped the sides of Brendan’s face between his hands and wouldn’t let Brendan turn his head away. “That’s not our way. I did not fuck you to punish you. You took as much pleasure from our fucking as I did.”
“I—” Brendan licked his bottom lip and a cloying sweetness left over from his last finger full of food met his tongue. “You’re right,” he finally admitted. “I did. You know I did.”
Trey released Brendan and sat back on the ground beside him, legs stretched out. He picked a small black beetle off Brendan’s knee that Brendan hadn’t noticed and set it on the ground beside Brendan. “You’ve been given a gift from the universe. A chance at a better fate. The you who sits here now with me, you aren’t him.” Said as if him were someone who utterly disgusted Trey, and the notion sent a shiver down Brendan’s spine.
He didn’t know what to say to that. He was … himself. That was all he knew.
Brendan finished off what was left of the food in the pouch and thought about what little he had started to understand of himself and Trey.
“I’m more than my memories,” Brendan said, conviction carrying his words. “I’m missing something important here but I know that. I’m more than a collection of memories.”
Trey scowled at him, his expression dark and forbidding. “The core of us exists with or without our memories, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be irrevocably changed before it’s time for you to choose.” Trey’s voice lowered, turning softer, the dark look fading from his face. “You will not choose to be him.”
A plea? The thought caught Brendan off-guard. Trey didn’t ask; he ordered and demanded. Brendan sighed. “I still don’t understand. Choose. Choose what?”
Trey caught Brendan’s wrist and tugged. Brendan dropped the empty pouch and scrambled to catch himself on the uneven ground with his other hand. His fingers splayed wide. Trey palmed Brendan’s chin and the touch offered leverage that helped keep Brendan from outright falling into Trey’s lap.
“To submit to my rule,” Trey said. “When you submit, I will claim you to mate for as long as I want you.” Trey’s gaze raked over Brendan’s body and a shiver raced across Brendan’s skin. “And I do want you. I’ve wanted you from the moment your rich, intoxicating smell first hit my senses. But you would never have willingly submitted to my rule as you were. That’s what I meant when I said I would have demanded something from you that you wouldn’t give. You have no right to deny me as First Alpha unless you are willing to fight. If you choose to fight after your memories are returned to you—”
Trey released Brendan’s chin and drew a line with his claw-tipped forefinger across Brendan’s throat, leaving behind a tingling streak of skin in his wake.
“—you won’t win. You’ll die at the end of my claws. But it will be your choice.”
Brendan shuddered. “That’s not a choice.” His voice came out breathy, his protest weak. He was having trouble taking a deep breath with Trey’s claw lingering in the dip at the base of Brendan’s throat.
“We’re a forgiving people,” Trey continued, “but forgiveness has to be asked for and earned. Your submission is the only way to earn forgiveness for your crimes.”
As soon as Trey drew his finger away, Brendan exhaled harshly and pushed away from Trey. Trey let him go, dropping his hold on Brendan’s wrist.
“That’s not fair,” Brendan said, louder, a little of his backbone reasserting itself now that he had space to breathe. “I don’t remember any of those things you say I did. How can you hold me responsible for what I don’t remember doing?”
“You’ll remember everything before you have to make your choice,” Trey said, pushing to his feet with the flex of strong, lean muscle. “You’ll remember what came before and what came after, and you’ll choose your fate.”
Brendan scrambled up after Trey awkwardly. “I don’t like it,” he said. “It’s not fair and it’s not right. You’ll kill me if I don’t submit? Fine, I submit. I submit right now. Take me, fuck me, use me. I don’t care. I’m not going to die for something I don’t even remember. Fuck that. I submit.”
Trey stared at him with burning eyes. “That’s not how it works. You’re not going to run away from what you’ve done by hiding behind a drug for the rest of your life. You’ll face your crimes and regret them and submit to me, or you’ll die.”
<
br /> “I already fucking regret them!” Brendan said, too loud, too hoarse. “I’m not a killer. I’m not. There has to be some kind of—”
Trey took hold of Brendan’s arm, roughly, jerking him forward a few steps closer. “Do you know how it felt to walk up to you during my heat and realize I wanted you so badly that I was willing to overlook everything you’d done, that I was ready to ignore every single one of my people that you’d harmed with your reckless, cruel, and unforgiving actions? I nearly killed one of my pack to get to you and I would have regretted that until the day I die. All because of a chemical reaction to your scent. Not to you. Not to who you were or what you thought or what lay in your heart. To nothing but the scent of a human. But fate comes, whether or not we’re ready.”
“That’s not my fault,” Brendan said.
“You wouldn’t have submitted anyway,” Trey said. “And I would have fought for the right to mate with you, to claim you as a heat mate. I would have killed you.”
“Then—” Brendan started, meaning to ask what stopped you.
But Trey tightened his grip and growled in his face, “I’m not finished. I would have regretted killing you just as much as I would have regretted killing any of my people, because we value life. We prefer peace to discord. But maybe it would have been best.”
Brendan’s heart might as well have stopped beating in that moment because all he was aware of was Trey’s fiery gaze and his clawed fingers on his arm and the breath he couldn’t seem to get out of his chest.
“Why’d you have to fuck me, then?” he said. “Why couldn’t you just wait until after I have to choose?”
Trey’s gaze lingered hotly on him. “Because I am Alpha and you are here.”
Oh.
A warm body, then. That’s all.
Brendan tugged against Trey’s hold on his arm. Trey released him and Brendan staggered back a few feet.
“More than half of everything you say doesn’t make any sense to me. I don’t understand what the hell’s going on here, and—” Brendan looked down, not even sure what he wanted to say. He kicked a half-buried pine cone loose from the ground and wished he could reconcile the two versions of Trey he’d seen, the guy who claimed to be willing to protect Brendan with his life, and the guy willing to end Brendan if he made the wrong choice.
He pushed the heels of his hands against his eyes, growling out his frustration through his teeth. He straightened and faced Trey again. “I don’t know what to do. You scare the hell out of me. But somehow I still thought it was a good idea to let you fuck me. I must be an idiot.”
Trey’s brow furrowed over his vibrant eyes, something like a frown on his face. “I won’t hurt you.”
Brendan laughed, a humorless crack of sound. “Not two minutes ago, you threatened to kill me if I don’t submit to your rule.”
“I’m First Alpha. You either submit willingly or I make you submit.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“That’s our way. My people have already found me worthy of being First Alpha. You’ll submit or you’ll fight to defy my rule.” Trey’s eyes flickered over Brendan’s length. “You’re human. You won’t survive a fight.”
“Then your way is just an excuse to kill me!”
“Quiet,” Trey snapped. “Yelling could give away our position.”
Brendan clamped his mouth shut and gritted his teeth.
“Just know,” Trey said, eyes meeting Brendan’s in an unwavering stare, “if we wanted an excuse to kill you, the Diviners wouldn’t have given you this chance to choose your fate. I would have demanded you submit as soon as we’d questioned you, and you would have died at my hand then and there.”
Brendan opened his mouth.
Trey shook his head. “No more. We have to leave here. Our pursuers won’t stop hunting us until we’re out of these woods. It’s too dangerous to linger.”
Brendan took a step back. He needed to think—no, he needed his memories back, is what the fuck he needed. He still had so many unanswered questions, but he could tell by the look on Trey’s face that this conversation was over. His bladder was screaming at him to take a piss, and he had other issues besides that to take care of before they took off on another hike.
He pointed back over his shoulder with his thumb. “I need a few minutes.”
Trey’s gaze flickered over him and he nodded. “Go. But stay close.”
Brendan walked off into the woods, his progress impeded by the brace on his foot. His thighs ached faintly, the muscles sore from yesterday’s walk—and possibly other activities.
Sex. Just thinking about it made his blood go south. He really was an idiot.
The trees closed around him, the damp fog insulating him from the rest of the world he couldn’t remember. Why did his other self—the man Trey had described him to be—why did he hate Trey and his people so much that he would murder them?
Did he have some kind of justification for his actions or was he just a sick bastard who enjoyed hurting people?
He didn’t believe that. If he was a sick bastard, he would’ve felt some kind of pleasure when he’d learned what kind of man he appeared to be. But he hadn’t. He felt disgust and horror, and a deep-seated desire for every single thing Trey had said about him to be a lie.
He exhaled roughly and dropped his pants down his thighs to take care of business. When he squatted, he thought for a moment he was going to fall over on his ass because of the damned brace on his foot. He caught his balance with his hand on the ground.
The dark, thick lines of a tattoo on his thigh caught his eye. He traced the outline, an abstract design of black ink covering an area as large as his hand. Under his fingertips he felt ridges, almost like welts. He stared and traced the raised skin. The tattoo hid scars, thick and deep.
He hadn’t done more than take a piss yesterday so he’d never noticed, and last night, when his pants had been down, the cave had been so dark he couldn’t make out anything.
He dropped to his knees and lifted his shirt, looking over the rest of his body. He found another set of scars, thinner, near his hip, and one final long scar that ran from the back of his knee up to the crease of his groin.
Nothing noticeable above the waist that he could find. He tried not to let the roiling in his stomach grow. He didn’t know what they meant, and they might not mean anything.
He gave himself a few seconds just to breathe before he finished what he came to do and then yanked his pants up, fastened the fly, and dusted the wet leaves and twigs off his knees. The denim had soaked through but it would dry soon enough.
Despite the warmth in the air, he felt chilled to the bone.
He didn’t linger.
Chapter 6
They walked for what seemed like forever before Trey allowed Brendan to stop for a rest. They’d just started walking again down into a tree-lined hollow with a thin creek at the bottom when Brendan heard a gunshot in the distance.
He jerked, then looked around, trying to pinpoint which direction the sound came from but the echo in the hollow confused him.
Trey reacted quickly and pushed him to the ground, right into the middle of a patch of briars. Brendan hissed when one of the vines tore along his arm and drew blood, then Trey’s weight crushed him into the damp, musty earth that covered the forest floor.
He grunted and clenched his hands against the ground. He wasn’t going anywhere with Trey’s weight dead center on his back.
He turned his head to the side and spoke in a quiet whisper, “Is it them?”
Trey lifted himself a scant inch off Brendan and put his mouth to Brendan’s ear. Warm breath caused goose bumps to rise on Brendan’s skin. “Humans. The brush is thick enough they won’t find us if we’re quiet.”
Humans.
“How do you know?”
“Smell, sound. The others hunting us are much more cautious and they won’t be using guns.”
Brendan eased his head around so he could get a look in the opposite direct
ion. His chin scraped over the blunt edge of a rock and a leaf tickled the corner of his mouth. The smell of earthy decay filled his nostrils and already the damp of the forest floor seeped through his t-shirt, cool against his chest and abdomen.
But Trey’s body gave off a great deal of heat, and his hips had settled right over Brendan’s ass. He took a shallow breath—about all he could manage with Trey’s weight bearing down on him—and tried to make his ridiculous hard-on go away.
Right now wasn’t the time to be thinking of cocks and asses, even if he could feel the soft bulge where Trey’s cock pressed against the crack of his ass through his jeans.
He needed a distraction. He strained to hear anything that would take his mind off his body’s reaction to Trey’s closeness.
A thrashing through the woods…
Voices getting louder…
“I know I saw something,” he heard, faint and far away. He had to concentrate to put the sounds together into words that meant anything because the voices were coming from so far away.
“Those binoculars are a piece of shit. I don’t know why you’re still trying to use them.”
“They work fine.”
“Let me see them.”
A loud crack echoed through the woods.
“You asshole! You better be planning to replace those or I’m gonna put a bullet in your—”
Whatever the guy had been about to say ended on a yelp. Brendan heard more cursing and finally a breathless sounding, “Yeah, yeah, yeah… You tell that to Jay.”
Had he missed something?
“Jay can get the fuck off my back is what he can do. I don’t listen to him. I only take orders from—”
Trey’s breath gusted hot and moist right into Brendan’s ear, and Brendan lost his focus on the conversation. A tingle raced across his neck and down his spine.
“Humans squabble too much,” Trey said.
“Who are they?” Brendan asked.