Reborn (Alpha's Claim Book 3) (4 page)

He’d seen it with his own eyes. Leslie Kantor was right.

Access to the Premier’s Sector had not been a straightforward turn of a knob or a shifting bookcase hidden in the library of some neighboring house. In order to reach the second entrance, there was a series of tunnels, ladders—an ant farm sandwiched above the Undercroft and below the city’s foundation. From the look of them, those dusty, unused crawlspaces had been untouched for years.

Shepherd’s men had not left boot prints in the dirt; they had not unsettled the cobwebs.

Was that because they knew the virus lay at the end of the path? Or, could it be that the tyrant did not know of this secret passage?

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.