Omega's Run (8 page)

I was frozen in place, fixed by the words now resonating inside my head like an echo through a dark cavern. Years? He had known about us for
years
? Why hadn’t the hunters come in force? Why hadn’t they picked us off a long time ago? What had kept them waiting for so damn long?

“How did you find us?” I asked, scarcely able to believe what I was hearing.

“How did you think your father managed to keep such a large territory for so long?” He shot back. “Did you really think that your pack was so feared that others wouldn’t try to encroach?

“Washington is a great territory the perfect location for your kind to hide in. There are many places in this country that have such remote wooded areas, but the others are all fiercely fought over. Areas of Colorado, Utah, and Montana wage a constant war to defend their borders. Bloody battles are fought to take and to keep those territories. Your pack hasn’t been involved in many of those battles to protect your borders, now have they?” His tone was mocking and I felt as if I had been hit over the head.

“The Nevada Pack,” I muttered, thinking of what Cruz had said back in Chicago.

“Father stopped protecting our borders a long time ago, didn’t he?” I demanded, suddenly furious. “He let you guys patrol around our territory and do the hunting for him. That way the pack was protected, and you got to pick off wolf-kind for your own purposes.”

He nodded, a slow grin stealing across his lips.

“Ahhhh, finally. Understanding dawns like the morning sun over the horizon,” he mocked. “It took you long enough. I’m really rather disappointed in you, Remus. You were supposed to be the clever one.”

“I couldn’t care less, Mathias. You’ve got some explaining to do. Why would you want to attack my pack now after protecting it for who knows how long?”

“The arrangement I had with your father, Declan, was no longer adequate.” He shrugged and started pacing back and forth on the other side of the bars, just out of reach of my long arms.

“When I first entered into the arrangement with Declan, the Northwest pack was attacked fairly frequently. There was a steady stream of new specimens for me to work with. But over the last few years, the other packs learned the futility of even attempting to encroach into the Washington Territory. My men did their jobs a little
too well
it seems. The rest of the packs of you rabid dogs were too scared to even try to go near Washington. I found my need for new specimens severely outweighed the supply available, things needed to change.”

“You sick fucking bastard,” I snarled. “You contacted Romulus. Didn’t you? I always thought
he
found
you
somehow but no, it was the other way around, wasn’t it? You reached out to him. You got in touch with him and offered to help remove our father as Alpha.” It was suddenly so painfully clear. The Hangman was well known for never leaving evidence behind except the damage to whatever body he’d dropped. He should never have left his weapon when he’d killed our father.

“Why did you leave the garrote?” I asked suddenly, and he blinked owlishly. “There’s no reason to do that unless you’re trying to draw attention to yourself. We knew it was going to be you. We arranged for you to meet with our father under a pretense of peace. No one else in the pack knew but us. So leaving your weapon... that was only to draw attention. Wasn’t it?” I frowned, turning over his actions in my mind. “You wanted to draw William’s attention. You wanted to force a fight for Alpha figuring we would kill him and eliminate that potential threat.”

He shook his head and I frowned again. “Your brother is little threat. Simply a minor roadblock in the grand scheme of things.”

“If it wasn’t about removing William from the table...” I felt feverish. My mind whirling faster than ever, struggling to piece together the puzzle that was Mathias Young. I considered what I knew about him. What the pack knew, and what I had discovered since first meeting him. Cold blooded was an apt description for the old man. Cold, methodical, precise, and manipulative. Manipulative to the nth degree. There hadn’t been a scale invented to measure the level of manipulative villainous shit this man was into…

“Chloe,” I blurted out before I could stop myself, just as the thought occurred to me. The fucked up horror of it blossoming in my mind, flickering to life like a tongue of flame licking at the edges of dry paper, ready to consume everything else.

“You’re doing something down here, capturing wolf-kind instead of killing them, but even you have to answer to someone. Even you have superiors. They don’t know what you’re doing, do they? And you were counting on William kidnapping your daughter. In fact you wanted him to kill her so you could garner sympathy from your superiors.”

He didn’t move. He didn’t blink or shift his weight. His breathing remained exactly the same. But somehow I knew I had hit the nail on the head. His lack of a response, his total stillness was telling in and of itself.

“You are some piece of work,” I breathed, shaking my head in shock. “You would sacrifice your own
daughter
just to advance whatever fucking agenda it is that you’ve got going on? You sick fuck!”

Alright, I’ll admit that I lost my temper a bit there. I surged forward rolling to my feet and lunging across the cell to hit the bars with a loud crash. A moment later the door burst open and the guards rushed in, rifles aimed at me but they didn’t fire as Mathias calmly held up a hand toward them.

“What the fuck is wrong with you!?” I roared and shook the gate as hard as I could. The metal creaked and groaned under the force and the guards shifted nervously.

“You call me a fucking animal but you would just throw her to the unknown like that? Like any other pawn on your fucking chess board!”

He took a step forward, his face showing nothing and just as I reached through the bars to try to grab him the pain hit me again. My body stiffened and jerked and I hit the ground muscles locking in spasm, uncontrollable, and I went down like a felled tree.

My teeth ground together and I pissed myself as I lost all control over my body. Pain screamed through my injured leg and I was pretty sure that the half-assed healed wound in it tore open during the spastic seizure created by the two leads buried in my chest. Mathias held a professional grade Taser, likely with some modifications to it, in his hand. He held down the trigger, pumping who knew how many volts of electricity through my body for what felt like hours rather than mere seconds.

When he finally let up, all I could do was lie there and twitch, glaring at him with an impotent rage that stoked the fires of the beast within me. The wolf didn’t like not being able to sink its teeth into our tormentor, and I agreed with it whole heartedly.

Since my banishment from the pack, I had survived only because I didn’t have anything better to do really. However, as of that moment, I found a new reason to survive. I vowed to myself that one day, one day soon, if I could help it, I would tear Mathias Young’s throat out with my own teeth – human or wolf, it didn’t matter so much right then. I’d take either, so long as I got it done. This fucker needed to die. For father, for Rom, for William and even for little Chloe, but especially for me.

“Glare all you like, Kid,” he rumbled in that deep basso voice of his. Forget that I was at least a century older than he was.

“You’re caught. And you’re not getting out of here. I have plans for you. Do you have any idea how long I’ve been trying to capture a Blood Born with your level of control? You’re right. Things haven’t gone exactly according to plan, but I can say that this might be even better in serving my cause.”

He leaned down until he was crouching close to the bars on the other side of the cage. So close, I could have easily killed him, but when I tried to move he pulled the trigger on the Taser again and sent a surge of agony running through my body that left sparkles flitting through my vision and put me in a state of barely hanging on to consciousness.

“You’re right, Chloe was never supposed to survive,” he whispered. “You fucking dogs can’t even kill one little bitch right. I shouldn’t have expected anything more from a useless fucking animal like your lunatic brother. He was much more open to the idea of being the new Alpha and letting me take the weaker members of your pack for my experiments. Now, with William as the Alpha, I will have to take different measures when it comes to finding new test subjects. You, hmm, you are just the beginning.”

I snarled and tried to say something but I must have bitten my tongue when I was spazzing because all that happened was some blood leaked from my mouth. I wasn’t able to get out anything more than a garbled gurgling sound before he smiled brightly at me and pulled the trigger on the Taser again.

This time he didn’t let up until I blacked out.

***

I jerked awake, my eyes snapping open only for me to groan and close them again against the bright, searing light that beamed down on me from overhead. I felt cold metal around my chest, arms, waist, and across my thighs and ankles. I was strapped down pretty solid… not that I wouldn’t be able to tear my way free. Few were the restraints truly capable of holding me if I didn’t want to be held.

“Before you decide to tear yourself loose from there, I would like to warn you; any attempt to do so will end badly for you.”

“Why is that?” I asked of the disembodied voice.

“Because, you’re wearing a collar that will deliver a rather hefty electrical charge, should the man across the room over there press the button on the remote he’s holding. I’ve told him to go ahead and hold the button down for as long as he likes if you so much as even twitch.”

As soon as she said something about it I realized I could feel the collar around my neck. Thick and bulky, a metal contact, warm from my body heat, resting just over the pulse point in my neck. I really didn’t want to find out what would happen if the dude sent a jolt through there. Even my healing might not be up to the job to fix that much juice to the brain.

I squinted my eyes and turned my head, just about the only part of me that I could actually move, to look at the bitch standing next to me. She was kinda hot, honestly. Tall, leggy, blonde; wearing a smart blouse and one of those business type skirts that made a guy want to bend her over the nearest desk. She wore the smart little secretary’s number up under a white coat, like the kind doctors and scientists wear.

“Ya know,” I muttered hoarsely and paused for a moment to clear my throat. “I always did kind of have a medical fetish. Be gentle Doc, I bruise easy.” She smiled and laughed, a deep throaty kind of laugh that made you unable to think of much else but sex.

“Mathias did warn me that you had an... unconventional sense of humor,” she said. “But, strangely appropriate in this case, I guess you could say.”

“Why for, Doc? You gonna wrap those pretty lips of yours around my cock?”

She shook her head, a mocking rendition of a regretful expression on her face.

“Oh no,” she said. “As fine a physical specimen as you may be, I won’t be
personally
acquiring your semen.”

I blinked. Really not the answer I was expecting to hear. Semen? What the fuck was going on. I lifted my head as best I could and looked around the room. It looked like your average medical suite at just about any hospital. In the corner was the guard she’d mentioned, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest and in his hand, a slim silver remote control. He looked extremely bored with the entire goings on.

As flippant as I tried to be, it was all I could do to hold my shit together. I did
not
like hospitals or hospital settings or needles or doctors or... you get the idea. The strange fluttering in my chest told me just how much I didn’t like it. The fear that I rarely felt clawed at the back of my mind.

I was strapped down to one of those tables they use with the stirrups on it. You know, the kind for women when they’re getting their lady bits checked out. Not a position I ever thought I’d find myself in, that’s for sure.

My legs were spread wide, feet strapped into the stirrups and I was as naked as the day I slithered out. I couldn’t see past the metal chains across my chest but I could feel something stuck to the skin around my groin. The slick caress of wires or cords draped across my leg. The looker of a lady doctor came around to stand between my legs and smiled brightly, adjusting her latex gloves. She held up a silver probe of some kind and lubed it up.

“Might want to breathe. This can be a little uncomfortable if you’re not used to it.” She wheeled over a stool and dropped out of sight. I growled and she laughed.

“Need I remind you my friend stands at the ready to fry all your synapses? I don’t really need you alive for this part. Sperm is viable up to three days after expulsion or death. Did you know that?” she spread my ass cheek to one side and pressed the wand thing in her hand at my back door. I snarled and something was shoved inside my ass.

That fear I was feeling? Yeah it ratcheted up a few more notches and I knew I was starting to look a little wild around the eyes when the deranged hottie stood back up and moved next to me. I tried, I really did, but I couldn’t force the emotion back any further than I already was.

Sweat was starting to stand out on my face and chest and I fought the urge to wrench at my restraints. I wasn’t sure what would be worse, whatever she had planned or the electricity that would course through my neck if the guard decided to play ‘Ooo, ooo, ooo what does this button do?’

“So what exactly is the plan here, Sweetheart?” I asked, unable to keep the nervousness out of my voice no matter how I tried. Honestly, I didn’t give a fuck. Yeah, it’d just give them more satisfaction to know that I was scared but fuck it, I was honestly
scared
and there’s no hiding that.

“Well, you’re a ‘Blood Born’ mongrel. And Mathias wants to examine all aspects of your physiology. We’ve already taken samples of your blood, hair, urine, even some spinal fluid while you were out.” Was this bitch for real? When she’d said blood born she’d made a face like she’d smelled something bad along with little finger quotes in the air with her latex gloves before stripping them off and donning another pair.