But more time passed, and nothing happened. Stacy's heart kept on beating, and the expression on Vonn's face went from horror to relief to smug amusement.
Stacy ground the shards of the pill's coating despite knowing it wouldn't work. Had she ingested even the slightest trace of cyanide, she wouldn't be breathing.
Vonn released his hold and rolled off her, settling himself into a relaxed pose as though the two of them had been lolling about on a spring picnic.
"Holy shit, woman," he said, his voice a little shaky, "you scared the crap out of me. Anybody ever tell you that you're fucking intense?"
When Stacy didn't answer, he added in a softer tone, "You were really going to do it, weren't you?"
As Stacy finally accepted that she wasn't going to die, she was surprised that relief was among the emotions that washed over her. She pushed the shame of her failure down deep to deal with later. Living left her with a hell of a lot more problems than dying.
"I don't understand," she muttered as she, too, sat up. The bitter taste in her mouth was fading, and she was suddenly aware of the bright scent of young grass and earth, the warmth of the sun on her face. "How am I still alive? Was it my dormant nature? Are omegas immune to cyanide?"
Vonn laughed. "Omega is a nature, Sergeant, not a superpower."
"Then why am I still breathing?" Stacy demanded, not bothering to point out that many people would consider his unnatural strength, speed, and perception on par with a superhero's.
"Let me guess." Vonn watched her closely, his unnerving blue eyes locked on hers. "Did that suicide pill come from the Alpha Control Division?"
How did he know about the ACD?
"Yes, but…"
"There's your answer," he said with finality. "That bastard gave you a dummy pill. A fake. Makes sense if you think about it—that son of a bitch would never waste one of his precious guinea pigs just because the mission went south."
Wait—what? "How do you know about Agent Fulmer?"
"Fulmer?" Vonn echoed. "So he does have a name. Guess we'll have to stop calling him Dickwad."
Stacy's mind reeled, not so much from the fact that she'd stupidly just given up information but from the rest. If what Vonn had just said was true, not only had she been lied to, but she wasn't the first dormant omega Fulmer had sent to the Boundarylands.
Which begged the question of what happened to the others.
It was all too much to absorb, especially since Stacy had expected to be well on her way to heaven by now. But that didn't mean she was powerless.
She might be having a distressingly difficult time keeping her emotions at bay, but she wouldn't let that stop her from fighting back. Stacy forced herself to rapidly assess her situation. The first thing she needed to change was the balance of power. For that, she needed a weapon.
Rising unsteadily onto her knees, she tested her legs. Unsurprisingly, they were bruised all to hell, but strong enough for her to lunge for the iron poker lying a few feet away.
Once it was in her hand, she tucked and rolled, coming up in a fighting stance with the weapon held out in front of her like the fencing foil she'd spent so many hours practicing with.
"Tell me how you know about Fulmer."
"How do you think?" Not only did Vonn look completely uncowed, he didn't bother to stand up. "That bastard has been fucking around up here for months now. He's too much of a coward to show his face, so he sends in unsuspecting omegas to run his little experiments."
"How many?"
"Two, that I know personally. But that's only here in the uplands. No doubt there's been more in the midlands and down south, not to mention the entire Southeast Boundarylands."
Vonn wasn't making any sense. That, or he was lying. "That's impossible. There aren't many in women in the military anymore, and definitely not enough dormant omegas for what you're describing."
Vonn shrugged. "I never said he sent soldiers."
"But—but they'd never send civilian volunteers for this kind of mission. It's way too dangerous. If the public found out, the backlash would be—"
"Volunteers?" Vonn gave a derisive laugh. "Who the fuck said anything about volunteers? The two omegas Fulmer sent before you were a blackmailed photographer and a political prisoner."
"But that's…no," Stacy said, feeling like her head was about to explode. "Everything you're saying is a lie."
Vonn's chest rumbled with a low growl. He rose to his feet with considerably more grace than a man his size ought to be able to and wiped the dew off his hands. Stacy tightened her grip on the poker, but she needn't have bothered. Vonn didn't seem interested in fighting anymore, much less threatened by a two-and-half foot iron rod.
"You've been fed so many lies you've forgotten what the truth sounds like, Sergeant. But you've got to face the fact that all Fulmer cares about is the data you could provide him. He would have told you anything to get you to agree to come here." He paused to let that sink in, then added, "Even if you had said no, he would have sent you in by force. You didn't know it, but there was never a way out."
Stacy shook her head, even as the last of her denials crumbled to dust. Too much had happened in the last ten minutes for her to make sense of, much less know what to do next. She was exhausted—physically, mentally, emotionally.
She'd tried to forfeit her life over her primal attraction to an alpha. The fact that she hadn't succeeded was beside the point. She'd almost died—and for what? The lies of a corrupt official?
As soon as the thought entered her mind, Stacy pushed it back. She couldn't—wouldn't—accept that Fulmer had been using her as Vonn accused, not without proof. Not everything Fulmer had said was manipulation. There had to be greater good at the core of the Department's work, some classified reason that she hadn't been briefed on what was really going on with these experiments in the Boundarylands.
And there was no way she'd accept the word of an alpha over her commanding officer's.
Not even if he was the only one who seemed to making any sense at the moment.
Vonn started back toward the house without another word.
"Where are you going?" Stacy demanded.
"Back inside to change. I hate the feel of wet denim."
"You're just going to walk away and leave me out here?" Stacy asked in disbelief.
"You're welcome to follow me if you want," he called without turning around.
"But—aren't you worried I'll escape?"
"Escape to where?" Vonn paused with his hand on the screen door. "I'm pretty sure you've had a tracker implanted in your arm, just like the other omegas did, so it's not like you could get past the border undetected. Fulmer would be on you before you knew what hit you. And they wouldn't exactly throw you a welcome-home party back at the camp."
Stacy opened her mouth to object, but the truth was that he was right. She was powerless—against her superiors, her government, Vonn.
"Listen, Sergeant," Vonn said, his gruff tone not entirely masking a trace of sympathy. "The way I see it, my land is the only place on earth where you're both safe and welcome."
Stacy cursed under her breath as Vonn disappeared inside, the screen door closing noiselessly behind him. The bastard was right. She could run like hell, but if even a fraction of what he'd told her was true, she could never really escape.
And even if everything he said was true, that didn't mean he wasn't a liar.
Because while Stacy didn't doubt that she was welcome in his home, his idea of 'safe' couldn't be further from her own.
Chapter Twelve
For the rest of the day, Stacy felt like a character who'd been dropped into the wrong movie. She'd stepped out of an action flick with a horror subplot and landed in what would have been the most boring domestic drama ever if the main character doing the cooking and cleaning wasn't a seven-foot alpha humming Led Zeppelin under his breath.
Stacy tucked herself into the chair Vonn had pointed her to, the one with the view of the majestic, snow-capped Cascade
s in the distance, and tried to make herself so still and silent that Vonn would forget she was there. Of course, that was impossible, given that he could read her like a book from across the room.
That was the thing that had Stacy the most shaken up. Not the fact that she'd tried to take her life, or that she'd failed, or that the entire nature of her mission and the intentions of the man who'd sent her were now in question. Stacy's training at least gave her a framework to compartmentalize all of that.
But right now, the thing she kept going over in her mind was that Vonn seemed to know her better than she knew herself.
She'd chalked some of the dossier's wilder assertions up to hyperbole. When Fulmer told her alphas could read emotions from scent, she'd assumed what was really going on was that they had somehow developed sophisticated cue recognition not dissimilar to established data on pheromones.
But no. The truth went way beyond the dossier's hypotheses; what Vonn had picked up without her saying a word left Stacy feeling naked and defenseless before him. It was enough to make her wish she had the alpha equivalent of an invisibility cloak to hide behind.
Not that she needed it at the moment. Vonn didn't seem too curious about whatever scent she was currently giving off. In fact, from the way he was behaving, it seemed like he didn't find her interesting at all anymore.
She wished she could've said the same thing about him.
There shouldn't have been anything interesting about watching someone fry eggs or stack kindling, but Stacy found herself riveted by the way Vonn rattled around the house like some efficient, oversized hausfrau.
She couldn't figure out how someone so huge could work with such grace and economy of movement. It was almost…balletic, in a way that fighting could sometimes be. There was a reason some NFL teams included ballet in their training regimens, though Stacy had little success convincing her own recruits to give it a try.
And she tried to imagine what Vonn would make of the suggestion. He seemed so sure of who he was, with a supreme confidence that didn't quite reach the level of arrogance.
Stacy found herself envying him. She wouldn't have been surprised if he never experienced a moment of self-doubt. Unlike so many of the men who'd passed through her training gym, Vonn's confidence was directly correlated to being capable.
It also went against everything she'd learned about alphas—that they were vicious, ignorant, and unpredictable.
And it wasn't just Vonn.
Sure, many of the alphas whom Stacy had come in contact with over the last week were loud, uninhibited, even a little wild—especially late at night when they emerged from the roadhouse full of drink and high spirits—but the same could be said about nearly every private who passed through Fort Blanchard, and plenty of the officers as well.
And then there was the fact that Vonn had outwitted her so easily. Placing the small pocket knife where she was sure to find it, discarding the pack on the patio to draw her outside where he could watch her every move while hidden.
Stacy hadn't just fallen for the ruse like a dumb recruit. She'd proceeded to give information away without even having to be asked. She could think of a few officers back in the beta world who would take great pleasure raking her over the coals for her mistakes. In fact, if any of them found out, they could easily use her failures to support their push to keep women out of the military altogether.
But why had Vonn been able to fool her so easily? After all, she'd done a stellar job of resisting manipulation when tested during Covert Maneuvers training.
The answer she kept coming back to was that it was connected to his ability to read her, the fact that he'd learned her so quickly.
Somehow, he'd been able to create a blind spot in her. Not trust, exactly, because Stacy didn't trust him as far as she could throw him—which was nowhere. Still, he seemed to know what she was going to do before she did it. How she would react to the feel of his—
Heat flooded Stacy's face. She would not think about those fevered, irrational moments she'd spent in his arms. The shame of it was almost enough for her to wish that the dummy pill had worked. Mainly because, after exposing her ravenous hunger for him, Vonn hadn't shown a lick of interest in her since.
He hadn't even acknowledged her when she followed him into the house, other than to point to the chair with a curt nod. After disappearing into the bedroom, he'd emerged a few minutes later in a clean pair of pants, then set about making breakfast without a word. Not that she expected him to ask her how she liked her eggs, but as he moved around the compact kitchen assembling dried herbs and thick bacon and a creamy wheel of cheese with practiced motions, he almost seemed to have forgotten she was there.
Stacy knew she should have felt relieved to be out from under Vonn's scrutiny, but she was left feeling ill at ease. Was ignoring her just another tactic to get information out of her? Or was the way he'd treated her earlier the real act, pretending to be lured by her dormant omega nature in service to some other goal? And what would that even be?
"If you've got a question, you might as well come out and ask it," Vonn said, pouring beaten eggs into the skillet with the frying bacon. Stacy's stomach was growling in earnest as the cabin filled with delicious aromas. "Keeping things to yourself won't protect you here. Remember, I can sense everything going inside you."
"If that were true, you wouldn't need me to ask the question," Stacy said.
"It doesn't exactly work that way. But I can guess—you're wondering what happens next."
"Anyone in my position would be," she countered. These non-answers were reflexive, even though she knew they wouldn't work on him.
"Funny you should say that." Vonn slid a spatula around the cast-iron skillet, folding cheese into the omelet. "Because I was just now thinking I've never heard of anyone being in this situation before—a captured beta soldier who is also a dormant omega, forced into the care of an alpha who's known to be looking for a mate."
Stacy sat up a little straighter, a frisson of alarm mixed with something else, making her nerves tingle. "You're…what?"
Finally, Vonn looked up, his expression bemused. "You didn't hear that around camp?"
"No." Stacy swallowed, trying to match his blank tone. "Why would I?"
"Even alphas gossip," Vonn said, flipping the omelet, which had puffed up golden and tempting. "Some of the brothers have big mouths. I went head to head with one of them over an omega a few months back and lost. No big deal."
"Oh." Stacy found that she didn't like the image that came to mind, of Vonn fighting over some other woman. She also couldn't imagine him losing.
Stacy caught herself, mortified. Her reasoning powers were definitely off, in danger of leading her nowhere good. She had to steer the conversation back on course. "You said I was forced into 'your care.' Strange way to put it, when I spent last night tied to a bed."
Vonn shrugged. "That was your choice, not mine. I would have been happy to have you under the covers with me."
Stacy berated herself, even as a warm spiral opened up deep inside her at the image his words provoked. She supposed it was her fault for making references to the bed and being tied up.
But maybe she could turn this to her advantage.
"There's another thing I'm not sure I believe. You made a big production out of pretending to want me back at the roadhouse. I get that maybe you did that to avoid raising suspicions with the others. And once we get back here, you didn't waste any time pinning me on the ground. But the minute you got the information you wanted, you—" left me there, a small, forlorn voice inside her protested. Stacy imagined squashing it like a bug. "Took off."
Vonn stilled, his hand holding the spatula hovering over the pan.
Then he gave a sudden, loud bark of laughter. Stacy froze—not in fear, but at once again having no idea how to interpret his actions. She'd never felt so off-balance with a combatant.
"That's really how you're interpreting what happened out there?"
"I'm not interpretin
g anything," Stacy responded, stung. "It's what happened."
"Nope." Vonn picked up the pan and slid the omelet onto a plate. "What happened was you proved that you would rather die a horrible death than accept your true nature and admit your attraction to me."
Stacy's head was starting to throb with the effort of sorting through the conflicting thoughts and emotions knotted together in her mind. She had lost the thread of what was true, of what she'd been sent to achieve. "I…anyone in my position would have done the same," she stammered.
"Bullshit." Vonn slammed his fist down on the counter, making plates jump. He glared at Stacy for a long moment before tossing down the spatula and coming into the living room, where he towered over the chair, much too close. "Every goddamn word out of your mouth is a lie. I know it's all they fed you in your training, but at a certain point, you're going to have to own up to the truth."
"I-I'm not lying," Stacy protested, hating the quaver she couldn't keep out of her voice, knowing it gave her away.
"Then why do you keep contradicting yourself?" Vonn lowered himself to one knee so that he could look her directly in the eye. His features, shadowed by black stubble, might have been carved by the same granite his house was built on. His brow was lowered in consternation over those melted-ice eyes. "You keep telling me how much you want to get away, but what goes on inside you when you fight me doesn't have a whole lot to do with fear. I could smell the want on you long before you started to gush slick, you know." Stacy started to protest, but he shut her down with a growl. "You'd rather die than let me touch you the way I want to. The way I need to. But when I leave you alone, even though it's harder than ripping a tree out of the ground with my bare hands, you act like I took your pony away."
Stacy's mouth worked, but it was hard to make words when the heat inside her had flamed into life, threatening to release more of the slick Vonn was trying to convince her he could detect. It didn't make any sense. She didn't want this. Didn't want him.
Vonn: The Boundarylands Omegaverse: M/F Alpha Omega Romance Page 9
