by Lizzy Bequin
He stumbles toward me and falls to his knees. His left hand clasps his temple. His right hand, I see, is still holding the tracking device that made Amrita so understandably upset. When I walk toward him, he looks up at me with tears streaming down his face.
My fingers, still a bit numb and clumsy from the drugs, clench around the collar of his shirt and yank him to his feet.
“You drugged me,” I growl. I’m angry at him, but I’m even more annoyed at myself for falling for his trick. “You shouldn’t have done that Reese. I could have protected Amrita. Now they’ve got her.”
He shakes his head, blinking back his tears. He’s not scared of me at all, and he’s not apologetic either. There’s only one thing on his mind, and that’s his daughter.
“You’ve got to help me,” he cries, and the abject desperation in his voice stabs my heart.
In a sudden flash I realize that we want the same thing—to make Amrita safe. Meanwhile, in our obsession with making her safe, we’ve both been butting heads with each other, and we’ve led Amrita right into the clutches of the people that want to take her from us.
“You’ve got to help me,” he sobs again.
“No,” I say, giving him a stiff shake to snap him out of his crying. “You’re the one who’s got to help me, Doc.”
He gives me a slightly perplexed look, as I release his collar and put my hand on his shoulder.
“You’ve still got that tracking device. That’s our only chance of finding her now. So how do we use it?”
CHAPTER 23: AMRITA
What is this place?
After the men captured me from Conway’s cabin and stuffed me into one of their vehicles, they covered my head with a dark sack so I couldn’t see anything. We drove for several hours, most of it in silence, except for a few radio communications that I didn’t understand since they were in some kind of code.
At last we parked, and I was ushered down a series of hallways. I was stripped of my clothes and pricked with needles as they gave me injections and drew blood samples from me. After that, I was locked into some kind of reclining medical chair with stirrups, my limbs securely strapped into place before they finally removed the sack from my head.
I almost wish they had left it on. This place is terrifying.
It looks like some kind of futuristic amphitheater. The chair that I’m strapped into is situated slightly off center in a brightly lit circular space. There is another similar but empty chair across from me, and a strange, blinking device in between, its surface sprouting with all kinds of cables and tubes.
Doctors and technicians dressed in pale green medical scrubs and matching surgeon’s caps are bustling around me, checking and relaying information about the other machines and monitors connected to electrodes on my naked body.
A metal stairway along the wall curves up to a balcony with large windows all around, and behind the glass, even more doctors and scientists are busily checking devices and monitors.
“Where am I?” I ask a doctor as she rushes past.
But she doesn’t respond. It’s like she doesn’t even hear me at all.
“What are you going to do to me? I ask another doctor, a guy this time, as he taps something into a keyboard next to my chair. he doesn’t answer either, but simply hurries off to check something on the weird device crouching in the middle of the room.
I might as well be invisible. None of them are even glancing at me. It’s like I’m not even a person—I’m just a little lab rat as far as they’re concerned.
Nausea twists my stomach, and tears well in the corners of my eyes. I feel sick, scared, and most of all enraged. If these bastards are going to experiment on me, I’m going to make them at least acknowledge my freaking existence.
“Somebody answer me!” I scream at the top of my lungs, my tendons and muscles tightening against the straps holding me into my chair.
All of the doctors jump, startled by my sudden outburst. They turn toward me, slightly perplexed expressions on their faces, as if they can’t imagine why I would possibly be distressed.
An old man appears at the railing of the balcony above. A much taller, much bulkier dark-haired man dressed in a black suit and sunglasses stands beside him like a body guard.
“Professor, get over here” the old man demands over his shoulder. “The Omega is throwing a hissy fit.”
A hissy fit? I think to myself. Asshole, I’ve been abducted for the second time this week, and now I’m strapped in a medical chair against my will in a lab that looks like something from a sci-fi movie. Excuse me for being a little upset.
The doctors, apparently not at all concerned about me, go back about their business of checking and fiddling with the devices. Meanwhile the man who spoke from the balcony begins to descend the stairs, his bodyguard following close behind.
He’s an old man, his skin wrinkled and liver-spotted. He’s almost completely bald except for the thin crescent of white hair that edges the back of his skull. But despite his obvious old age, he carries himself upright, his chest puffed out.
His face is clean shaven and nondescript, but somehow he seems vaguely familiar. Have I seen him before?
He’s not dressed as a doctor, but instead he is wearing a long green gown similar to what a hospital patient would wear. However, he carries himself with an attitude of arrogance that makes it clear he’s in charge here.
I catch a whiff of the scent drifting off the massive bodyguard. I detect a similar signature to the one I smelled on both Conway and Kruger. He’s an Alpha.
“Professor,” the old man yells again, slightly annoyed. “Did you hear me? I said get out here.”
“Coming, Mr. Driscoll,” a thin, crackling voice calls from the balcony, the speaker hidden somewhere out of my line of vision.
Driscoll? Damon Driscoll? Oh my God, it really is him. The head of Omicron Corporation. I’ve seen his picture a few times on TV and online. But what the hell is he doing here? I knew that Omicron was involved in this somehow, because Conway told me so, but I didn’t expect to find myself the captive of the chairman and CEO.
“Well hurry up, Professor, will you?” Mr. Driscoll snaps at the unseen man.
My surprise at seeing Damon Driscoll in the flesh is soon wiped away by a feeling of horror as the other man, the one who answered him from the background, approaches the railing of the balcony above.
I let out a sharp gasp of shock at what I see staring at me from above. It takes me a moment to realize that I’m looking at a man. His chin barely reaches above the edge of the metal rail, and as he begins to move around the balcony, I realize he is confined to an electronic wheel chair.
His bald head and gaunt face are horribly disfigured my scars. The skin is covered in grotesque whorls that must be the result of horrible burns, but there are also four parallel scars like claw marks running over one eye socket and up his scalp, and that eye has been replaced with some kind of bionic device that telescopes in and out like a camera lense as he focuses on me. A hideous grin twists the lipless hole of his mouth.
“Ah yes, there she is,” he hisses, as he rolls around the edge of the upper gallery. “Our little Omega. Don’t be frightened my dear.”
His voice is thick with malice and does nothing at all to put me at ease.
“What do you want from me?” I ask, struggling to disguise the tremor in my voice.
My eyes are darting back and forth between Mr. Driscoll, who is making his way toward the empty chair across from me and the disfigured man on the balcony that he called the professor.
Is this the same professor that my father told us about? But Dad said the professor was killed by the Alphas at the Facility. While the man in the wheelchair is not dead, he’s obviously survived some kind of horrible attack. But how?
“Why have you kidnapped me?” I ask again.
The professor answers me in that awful, reptilian voice. Actually, he doesn’t answer, but instead asks a question of his own.
“How much
did your father—your foster father I should say—tell you about your origins, little Omega?”
I don’t like the way he keeps calling me that. It makes me feel like some animal whose only purpose is breeding. But I’m a human being.
“He told me about the Facility,” I answer, nearly choking with anger and fear. “He told me about the horrible experiments that you did there.”
The professor wheels himself onto a small platform elevator which hums as it begins lowering him down to the level where I’m being kept.
“Then he no doubt told you about how you came into the possession of him and your mother—your foster mother. You are stolen property, Omega. I haven’t kidnapped you. I have simply taken back what rightfully belongs to me.”
Mr. Driscoll has climbed into the seat opposite mine, and the doctors have begun connecting various cables and tubes to electrodes and ports embedded in his skin. He snorts and casts a disdainful glance at the professor as he slowly rides the elevator down.
“Let’s not get too big for our britches there, Professor,” Mr. Driscoll snaps, “Don’t forget who is in charge of this operation. I’m funding this project. The Omega and her child belong to me, and nobody else.”
“Of course,” the professor mutters bitterly, as the elevator settles to the ground floor with a mechanical hiss. He looks askance at Mr. Driscoll with is one good eye.
“My child?” I whisper.
“That’s right, my dear Omega,” the professor wheezes, and I cringe as he begins rolling toward me. “You’re pregnant with the Alpha’s child. What was his name again?”
“Conway,” Mr. Driscoll chimes in, fidgeting as the doctors finish hooking him up to the tubes and wires connected to the central device.
“Pregnant?” I gasp. “There’s no way you could tell that already. It hasn’t even been one day since…”
I cut myself off, blushing at what I’ve basically just admitted.
The professor’s grin widens.
“Since the Alpha bred you like a beast?” he laughs. “He must have enjoyed himself immensely. Just look at that succulent Omega flesh.”
He is right beside me now, and he raises his right arm. I realize for the first time that the limb is a bionic replacement, just like his eye. The limb is metallic and skeletal, and there is a whir of servos as he reaches out to stroke his cold, cybernetic claws along my arm, making me wince in disgust.
“You’re wondering how we have already confirmed that you are pregnant?” he asks, stroking my tear-striped cheek now. “It’s your Omega genes. They have an accelerative effect on the process of fertilization and placental implantation. The tests are indisputable. You are carrying the Alpha’s offspring in your belly.”
He draws his mechanical hand away, and flashes that ugly grin once more.
“But I don’t need to tell you all that. You were already well aware you were pregnant, weren’t you? You knew from the very instant that beast filled you with his seed.”
My tears flow again because the professor is right. I am pregnant. I can feel it. I’m pregnant with Conway’s baby. That’s not the part that makes me cry. It’s the fact that these wicked men seem to have some plan for my child, and I don’t think it’s anything nice.
“Why do you want my baby?”
The professor directs his wheelchair around to the other side of me, carefully inspecting my restraints, his bionic eye whirring faintly as it focuses in and out.
“Not exactly a baby yet,” he snickers. “Why it’s still just an embryo. An embryo which we will harvest for its stem cells.”
“Harvest?” I cry. “But why?”
I don’t care about what the professor said. Maybe it is only a small embryo still, but it’s mine. It’s mine and Conway’s. It’s the new life that I created with my mate, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to just sit here and let these creeps take that away from me. But how can I fight them with these restraints?
“Why?” Mr. Driscoll shouts from his chair where he is now plugged up from head to toe with various tubes. “So that I can live forever, that’s why! You’ve already seen an Alpha’s accelerated healing up close and personal, no? Well those Alpha stem cells in your belly carry an even greater power of rejuvenation. The power to reverse aging, to resist disease, to repair nervous tissue. I’ll be practically immortal.”
The professor rolls his one good eye at the businessman’s speech.
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. This bastard wants to steal my baby’s life to make himself live forever.
“No,” I scream, struggling in vain against my restraints. “You can’t do this!”
“Oh yes we can,” the professor says casually. “We can and we will. This has been a long time in the making, Omega. You don’t realize just how much work has gone into this project. There are so many problems involved in this procedure, which is why your and Conway’s involvement was so important.”
I shake my head, blinking away my tears. My fear is gradually being replaced with rage. I can feel it coursing through my veins, filling my muscles and making me strong.
“Why me?” I ask.
The professor smirks as he wheels himself toward the strange device in the middle of the room and begins tapping away at a keypad with his bionic fingers.
“We needed an Omega to carry the Alpha embryo of course. Don’t take it personally, my dear. You’re just a vessel, that is all. Now don’t worry, this won’t hurt a bit.”
There is a hum of gears and servos as a multi-jointed robotic arm extends from the central device. The end of the arm contains a long, sharp needle, and as the other doctors watch, the professor controls it until it is aimed at my abdomen, the tip of the scary needle just a few inches away.
“You said Conway was important,” I cry, struggling to keep my mind clear through the whirling storm of panic. “Why him? Why not any other Alpha?”
The professor stops what he’s doing and turns his chair to face me, his scarred mouth curling with a self-satisfied smile.
“You’re very observant, aren’t you?” he titters. “Yes, that was another problematic factor. You see, in order for the Alpha stem cell therapy to work, there has to be a close genetic match between the donor and the patient.”
My mind is whirling, trying to understand. My guts continue to churn with discomfort as I look at the needle aimed at my belly.
“I don’t understand,” I say between angry sobs. “That would mean that my baby is related to…”
I can’t even bring myself to utter the prick’s name, so I just jut my chin in Driscoll’s direction.
“That’s right,” the professor sneers. “Mr. Driscoll is the grandfather.”
The room seems to spin around me, and I feel like I’m going to puke.
“You mean he’s…”
“Yes,” the professor says with a nod. His voice sounds strangely proud of me for putting it all together. “Mr. Driscoll is Conway’s father. Years before you were born, your mate was accidentally sired out of wedlock by Mr. Driscoll with a young woman who was his mistress. She had to be well paid to be discreet about the matter. It was a minor embarrassment for a man in Mr. Driscoll’s position.”
“Professor,” Mr. Driscoll interjects, but the professor ignores him and continues.
“However, years later, after Mr. Driscoll encountered me, it became clear that his illegitimate son also offered an opportunity. When Conway’s body was mature and strong enough, he was taken and subjected to the appropriate conditioning as part of the Alpha Initiative, and his memory was wiped. All of this with the endgame of having him impregnate you in order to create that priceless nectar you are now carrying inside you.”
Mr. Driscoll shifts impatiently in his chair and clears his throat.
“Why the fuck are you telling her all this?” he sniffs. “She doesn’t need to know the details. Now can we please get on with the procedure? I’ve waited decades for this. I’m not going to let you delay things any longer with your idle chit c
hat.”
The professor’s expression drops, his ragged visage becoming somehow even more malicious and hateful.
“No,” I shout again, but this time it’s a roar.
Startled doctors all cringe away from me, some of them pressing themselves against the sterile, metal walls of the circular enclosure. Even Mr. Driscoll tenses in his seat, his knuckles going white as he grips the armrests tightly. His Alpha bodyguard takes a step forward.
The maternal rage inside me is overwhelming. My Omega genes refuse to let these assholes steal my baby from me without putting up a fight. My muscles seem out of my control, and when I glance down, I’m surprised to see my body unnaturally bulging with muscles as my arms and legs strain against the restraints. Meanwhile my mouth is uttering the most vicious snarling sounds, like an angry, rabid dog.
Heck, I’m even scaring myself a little
The only one who isn’t afraid is the professor. He merely laughs and even rolls a little closer to me. My fingers twitch and contort, desperate to get hold of this vile man and tear him to shreds. To claw his one remaining eye out. To break every bone in his worthless body.
“Ah yes,” he giggles grotesquely. “The Omega’s maternal defense mechanism. We learned about that the hard way back at the Facility. But I wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice. That’s why I made sure to quadruple the tensile strength of your restraints.”
He grazes his wicked, bionic claw over the rippling muscles of my straining arm. I snarl and gnash my teeth at him. I’m practically foaming at the mouth.
“Easy,” he whispers softly, “You don’t want to injure yourself, do you?”
“I’ll kill you!” I bellow, my voice ripping through the room like an exploding bomb. “ I’ll kill you both! You and Mr. Driscoll.”
I glare at Mr. Driscoll, who is squirming in his seat, his face a mask of real terror as he struggles to calm down.
“You won’t be killing anyone today,” the professor says, as that hideous grin overtakes his face yet again. “But I’ll tell you what, I’ll kill Mr. Driscoll for you. How does that sound?”
