Omega Force 01- Storm Force (12 page)

The pain woke her, seeping into her consciousness
with increasing insistence until she remembered. The fire. Michael’s face
twisted in hatred. The brand. The smell of burning flesh. Beginning to shift as
blackness fell across her vision like a curtain.

Mori opened heavy eyelids and took in
her surroundings — at least the ones visible without moving from her position curled
on her side atop a huge bed that seemed to take up most of the room. She was
naked and shivering with cold except for the hot, burning pain throbbing in the
center of her back. She’d wear that “B” the rest of her life; even a shifter
couldn’t heal a burn without scarring.

Nothing about the room was familiar.
Plain white walls. A scuffed-up oak dresser with no mirror but a small TV
sitting on top. A ladder-back chair. The twin-size bed. A single floor lamp
that cast an elongated shadow across the wooden floor. She angled her head to
look up without jostling her back and saw the sloped ceiling. An attic, then.

Moving cautiously to keep her back as
immobile as possible, Mori used her left arm to lever herself into a seated
position so she could check out the rest of the space. The room was small,
maybe ten-by-ten, with a dormer window through which she could see Michael’s
gardens, smothered in darkness now except for the decorative lights in the fountain.
Through an open doorway, she spotted a toilet and a small dressing table.

Still nighttime, but how long had she
been unconscious? Not long enough to have healed much, judging by the pain.

She needed clothes. A shirt would be
excruciating against her back, but being naked in Michael Benedict’s attic was
high on her list of vulnerability-inducing activities. And she was tired of
feeling vulnerable. She’d come here prepared to give Michael what he wanted. In
order to keep everyone safe, she’d been willing to live a half-life, to do the
duty that had been drilled into her since birth.

He’d thrown it back in her face, and had
gone too far in doing so.

Mori wasn’t accustomed to rage, had
spent her life learning to avoid it. So it took her a few moments to identify
the chest-tightening sensation, like her heart and lungs had grown so massive
they threatened to explode from the confines of her ribcage. Like the air in
the room had grown so thick she couldn’t inhale. Like the beast inside her
ached to escape, and to kill.

She had to get out of here. She’d find
Kell somehow and warn him about Michael, even if it meant revealing the
existence of her kind. Once Kell was safely away from them, she’d figure out a
way to stop Michael.

She scanned the room, looking for
clothes. There were no closets. Mori pulled out each drawer of the smaller
dresser in turn, but all were empty.

She noticed a few stairs leading
downward in a nook cut into one corner of the room, with a door at the bottom.
Easing down them, trying to avoid the creak of old wood, she turned the knob
and found it locked.
Damn it, Michael
.

“You might as well come back up the
stairs, Emory.”

Michael’s drawl came from behind her.
How had she missed seeing him? Goose bumps dotted Mori’s skin as she turned and
climbed the four steps back into the room. Looking around in confusion, her
gaze finally lit on the TV screen — not a television, but a monitor. Michael’s
face filled the rectangle in all his arrogant glory.

For the first time, Mori noticed the red
dots glowing in the far corner of the ceiling. In all the corners. Cameras.

“You son of a bitch.” She walked to the
bed and jerked the thin, brown-plaid spread off it, wrapping it around her like
an oversize bath towel, letting it hang a little lower in back to keep it from
pressing on the burn.

“Might as well not cover it up,
sweetheart. I saw it all last night. Who do you think carried you to your new
room?”

Mori’s heart raced, and her face heated.
God, had he raped her while she was unconscious? Planted his precious seed
inside her just to prove she had no say in it?

Michael laughed, and his teeth gleamed
on the monitor. “I can see what you’re thinking, but don’t worry. I want you
awake when I fuck you. I want you to know who it is that’s fucking you, and
why. It’s time you remember who I am, little girl, and that this isn’t about
you and your precious feelings.”

“I don’t want—”

The words fizzled in her throat. He
didn’t care what she wanted. Probably never had, although he’d at least
pretended for a while. She’d kept thinking she could work out a deal with him,
hoping he could see the situation from her standpoint and figure out a
compromise.

Now, too late, it finally hit her. She’d
been thinking of Michael as a powerful man, but still reasonable. He wasn’t
reasonable, because he’d never had to learn the art of compromise. He was the
alpha of the Dire Wolves and fully aware none of the other males could
challenge him, much less the females, whose role in traditional Dire society
had never been more than shadows of their mates. Michael held all the cards and
always had. To see him as a modern man capable of empathy and reason had been a
serious error on her part.

“Very good. You realize it now, don’t you,
Emory? What you want simply doesn’t matter. So sit down, and I’ll tell you what
your life is going to look like — at least for the next twenty years or so.”

Her mind settled into a numb paralysis,
incapable of complete thoughts. Only snippets of what-ifs and snatches of
things she might have done differently. Thoughts she couldn’t articulate, which
he wouldn’t want to hear even if she could put them into words. Mori shuffled
to the bed and sat on the edge, facing the monitor.

“First, forget about trying to escape.
The window is unbreakable and bolted shut. The door is reinforced steel. The
walls, floor, and ceiling have been soundproofed. Welcome to your new home.”

Mori blinked, her gaze shifting to the
staircase. How long had he been planning this? Had he planned to keep her this
way all along and simply used the marriage as bait? “You can’t keep me here
forever.”

“Not forever. Only until you beg me to
come to you and fuck you. And I mean beg. Hands and knees. Naked. Hmm…” He
smiled. “Makes a pretty picture.”

What was he smoking? He could leave her
here for the rest of her life — and Dires had very long lives — and she would never
let him touch her. “You’re delusional, Michael. Sick and delusional.”

Michael laughed. “Oh, you’ll beg. You
might be able to shift to stay warmer, but you can’t do without food forever.
If you’re stubborn enough to think you’ll let yourself starve, I’ll strap you
down and feed you intravenously, just enough to stay alive, but not enough to
rid you of the hunger. And in case you find some other way to try and kill
yourself, don’t forget the cameras. Your every move will be monitored day and
night.”

Mori had only thought things couldn’t
get worse. The room took on a distant quality, remote and detached. The voice
coming from numb lips didn’t even sound like hers. “What else?”

“Once you’ve given in and I’ve fucked
you better than you deserve — and you’ve thanked me for it properly — you can have
clothes and regular meals, as long as you continue to cooperate. When you’re
pregnant, you might be allowed onto the grounds occasionally. With guards, of
course. After the child is born, we’ll repeat the process until you’re no
longer of use to me for breeding. Then I don’t care what the fuck you do.”

The children. She could hate Michael,
but she would love her children, and they had to be protected. They’d need her
influence in their lives to make sure they grew up to be good and strong, maybe
with Gus Chastaine’s heart and his gentle wielding of power. He would be
horrified to know what kind of man his successor as the Dire alpha had turned
out to be. She’d wager he never saw this side of his neighbor.

Her optimism was crushed with Michael’s
next words. “My real fiancée, Leslie, will be moving in to assume the role of
the children’s mother. Although human, she knows what we are and why I can’t
have children with her. You’ll never see them after they’re weaned, of course.
We’ll come up with a suitable story about their birth mother.”

Mori was on her feet before she realized
it, charging toward the nearest corner and shouting at the camera. “You can’t
do this. My parents—”

“Your parents recently deposited a check
for five million dollars. Last I heard, they’d decided to put the Quad-D on the
market. They’re deeply ashamed that their daughter, who could have been the
jewel of the new generation of Dires, has turned out to be such a
disappointment. You have no one but me, Emory.”

Tears pricked the back of Mori’s eyes,
but she refused to cry in front of Michael. He’d enjoy it too much.

“But I will allow you one visit.”

Mori frowned up at the camera’s glowing
red eye and turned to face the monitor. Michael had a particularly unpleasant
smile on his face, even for him. If he thought she’d want to see either of her
parents after they’d literally sold her, he was—

Oh God.

Michael held up a familiar shirt. Kell’s
olive-green tee with RANGERS stamped across the front.
“Recognize this?”

A chill stole across Mori’s chest, and
she wrapped the bedspread around her more tightly. “Stay away from Jack Kelly.
He has no part in it.”

Michael sniffed the shirt. “I can still
scent him on it even though you were wearing it, which will help me track Mr.
Kellison
.
Oh, don’t look surprised. A simple call to his apartment manager, claiming to
be a potential employer, told me everything I needed to know. Humans are quite
careless with their information.”

Mori’s anger rose again. “There’s
nothing to know other than that he’s a veteran. He’s out of work. He’s injured.
Forget about him.”

Michael leaned toward his camera, his
face filling the monitor. “Look at you, all filled with righteous indignation.
It’s the first time today I’ve seen you look like anything but a scared rabbit.
Kellison knows too much, and it’s only a matter of time before we find him in
whatever hole you two were using as a hideout. The cab driver won’t be hard to
find. So I can kill your soldier in front of you or torture him to control you.
I haven’t decided which.”

“Look, Michael, let’s talk about this.”
She’d agree to anything if he’d leave Kell out of it. “Please. We can work
something out where nobody gets hurt and you get what you want.” She’d get on
her damn hands and knees and beg him now if he wanted.

“Too late for talk, Emory.” Michael made
a show of holding his arm up to his face and looking at his watch. “I have an
early meeting in only a few hours. Enjoy the rest of your evening and your day
tomorrow. Travis and the rest of my staff will be watching, so behave yourself.
Tomorrow night, if you’re hungry enough to beg or I have Kellison in hand,
we’ll talk again.”

“But—”

The screen went black.

After a glance at the nearest camera,
Mori dragged the ladder-back chair in front of the window and sat, staring out
at the part of the gardens illuminated by the fountain. She’d never liked them,
and now she realized why. They were beautiful, no denying that, but they
reminded Mori of her mother. Like Celia Chastaine, the gardens were elegant but
had no life or spark of warmth to them. Even the areas meant to look like wild
growth were constrained by hard edges, and should they try to escape their
brick and stone prisons, they would be pruned mercilessly.

The irony of the comparison wasn’t lost
on her. Mori was being pruned.

She let her mind wander and ended up
thinking about her grandfather, who’d been the Dire alpha until his death when
she was fourteen. Had he known about the agreement between her parents and
Michael? She wanted to think not, but he probably had. Gus would have known
Michael would be his successor, just as they all had. The entire Dire
population that remained — about thirty of them total — had banded together in
Texas under the gentle force of Gus’s personality.

Her grandfather had known she was the
only female Dire at her birth. Maybe he’d hoped she’d grow to love Michael. Or
maybe he’d thought another girl would be born in the Dire population, to offer
them all a better choice than procreate or perish.

She’d adored Gus Chastaine, that much
she knew, and something he’d said more than once came back to her. Vividly, she
remembered standing next to a fence, admiring a new stallion he’d bought, black
with a snow-white star on its muzzle. That horse had a mind of its own, full of
spit and spirit.

Starlight had kicked or bitten half the
hands on the ranch, including Gus, and yet her grandfather had refused to use
harsh techniques to break him into submission. “You have to let a wild thing
come to you when he wants to and not force him,” he’d said. “Force him, and
he’ll either lose his spirit or he’ll bide his time, and then rise up and take
you out the first chance he gets.”

Those seemed to be her choices now as
well. Mori was being forced to submit. She could get on her hands and knees and
beg, grasping whatever moments she could out of the next twenty years. Or she
could bide her time, think things through, and fight.

She wasn’t an alpha. She’d spent her
whole life in the Dire structure, where little was expected of the women who’d
all grown up in her mother’s generation. But thanks to her mother’s lack of
maternal skills, she’d been on her own enough to know women had options.

She might not be an alpha male, but if
she was going to survive, she had to act like one. Fake it till she made it.

Only, how did she do that?

Mori rose from the chair, glared at each
of the four cameras in turn, and walked back to the bed. Besides her
bedspread-turned-cape, there was a single pillow and a thin sheet. Michael
wasn’t kidding when he’d said she’d have to shift to stay warm.