by Addison Cain
But he glared at her with such longing.
You use me like a disposable doll.
Stopping long enough that his boots sunk a good two inches into the mud, he cut her a glance, looked about ready to rip her head from her shivering shoulders… as if he heard her silent tirade.
And then flew at her again.
Tongue and teeth and lips that gave no quarter, he didn’t care that she barked out an alarmed cry.
He blocked out the sky with his mass, held her pinned so the mud could not suck her down further, and rocked his hips against her belly with manic jerks.
Wet warmth that had not come from mist or mud marked her stomach, the male spilling so much precum the outside air would waft the aroma for all those near to sniff.
A dangerous Alpha was fucking, laying claim. Do not disturb.
Caught up in his impatience, Kieran began to bunch up her tattered dress.
It was as if he didn’t even realize there was more than his urges before him. One second he was growling for her slick, the next he had freed his cock and rammed it so deep inside her, Wren’s teeth snapped together.
Tongue invaded her mouth, he whined and bucked and pulled at her hair.
This was not the calculating seducer who only gave her pleasure with pain, the one who degraded her and did all he could to make sure she hated him.
This was a man possessed.
A man who was arrestingly rough and infinitely gentle.
Her back would be gouged with bits of cement wall, her pussy was screaming that he was too big, that she was stretched too full.
That his looming knot would see her in tears.
Yet her bowed body reveled in it, despite the fact that he pumped into her in the most horrible of locations.
A graveyard.
The mud that held her shame.
It was as if it didn’t matter. As if she was absolved.
As if this was what it should always feel like with a male.
Before Wren might even register what twisted her toes, an orgasm of epic proportions left her screaming into the mouth of a man she didn’t know at all.
His following knot was set deep, bursting out and interlocking them together in a way that left them both vulnerable.
All it would take was one thug slamming him on the back of the head with a rock. One freezing neighbor to drive a blade between their ribs to steal their clothes.
Sagging until mud squished Wren’s back, the pair of them took to the ground.
He wouldn’t meet her eyes, his own cast to the side as if he was in pain.
As if he felt guilt.
The warmth of his following burst, the twist of her vaginal cavity squishing his meat tight distracted just enough she didn’t realize how deep she’d sunk into the mud.
It covered her ears, creeping up her cheeks and about to fill her mouth.
The Second Alpha, his head thrown back, sucked in a hearty breath. Tossing his gaze her way, his breath caught and he yanked her out of the mire.
Dragging her out of the mud, he climbed up the scrap heap she’d piled for her fence and kept them both clear of the very mud that was slowly devouring Dale City.
Metal digging into the fresh cuts Kieran’s enthusiasm left on her back, Wren watched her breath fog in the night. Felt her delicate tissues pulsate and beg for more fluid from the fat cock inside her.
Whimpered when Kieran dumped another hot load of cream deep into her belly.
This knot expanded all the larger.
A knot the Alpha could not resist grinding deeper as he ripped open her filthy gown and lapped at her nipples.
Raw, tingling, exhausted, broken-hearted, world-weary, Wren lay back on her sharp metal scraps, eyes to the sky, while her unsplinted fingers played in tawny hair.
“Neither of those kids are your blood. Why waste the effort?”
The entirety of his voice was foreign, innocent. And, this was the first honest question Wren had ever heard from the pretentious, cocky male.
Hand to his chest, Wren pressed Kieran to sit up so that she could display the muck-filled yard he’d found her in.
Gated by debris and soppy with too much wet—where the syringe Kieran had dumped at her feet had been swallowed by mud, Wren laced her working fingers in the silent, brooding, utter fool’s hand.
Even surrounded by such a place, Wren knew Kieran had no idea what his eyes fell upon. She knew he didn’t see.
But she looked at him all the same, and pet his arm as if he were the lost child looking for a home.
Behind them, so many little bodies were lost in that mud. Some sinking, some rising. A sharp eye would see the bits of sun-bleached bone poking out here and there. They would see the little markers etched with names rain and wind had worn clean.
There had been little Faith, barely hours old when Wren had found her squalling in the mud. Tossed away like garbage at the Warrens’ gates. Even though she’d been only a child herself, Wren had taken her home, named her something suitable for those large, wise eyes, and held her to her breast the entire four days it took the baby to die of starvation.
Because Wren had no milk and could find no one who might trade with a penniless mute.
She had begged at the gates that separated her sector from the higher levels.
Been kicked, ridiculed, and spit upon.
Stiff with rigor mortis, wrapped in the prettiest cloth Wren could scavenge, the poor thing was properly buried. Weighted down with debris so her little body would not float up in the mud, Wren had scooped mud over the shallow hand-dug grave.
That was only the first infant Wren had stumbled upon over her years in this hell. So many tiny babies cast off to squeal in the muck for milk she’d never be able to provide.
It was those graves she pointed at first.
Kieran looked where she directed, eyes squinted and openly restless. So she’d cradled her arms in an unmistakable position and rocked them. As if they’d held a baby. She pointed to another bubbling mound. Same motion. Again. Again. Again.
Older kids were cast off too. Gwen, Cecily, Brandon, Xerxis, Palo… on and on their names went.
Very few had lasted longer than a month.
Some she got to hold a whole year.
Only Mikael and Alec had lasted long enough to have an actual future.
The Alpha still knotted inside her looked, then glanced back when Wren signaled the height of the child who was buried. She pantomimed a terrible cough.
Beside that grave slept a boy, one who’d been older than Alec when he’d passed. Who had been strong and smart. Wren pantomimed vomiting.
Each lost little life… she told their story without a single word. Starvation, violence, disease… an accident. She made the great Kieran bear witness. She made the bastard see what the Warrens really was.
Hell.
To his benefit, when he had seen enough, he set his forehead to her breast and said nothing. He never asked how many bodies she’d had to weigh down with bricks so they wouldn’t float to the surface. He didn’t ask their names or how she’d found them.
He just listened to everything she couldn’t say.
All the while his knot pulsating between them.
All the while his lips brushing over hers as if they were lovers and not the bitterest of enemies.
Chapter 10
Dress in shambles, bodice shredded down the middle in a way Wren would never be able to mend, she broke from Kieran’s hold when at long last his knot subsided. The panting male still hovered, tensing when she shuffled away—yet this was what he’d continuously demanded from her each time he fucked her in Caspian’s den.
“Get off me. Others do it better.”
Wren had no doubt that they did. And she’d never cared about impressing him.
She just functioned because she had a goal. Save Alec. Heal Mikael.
Survive and try not to smirk at the scars she’d set into their skin in her rampage—avoid staring at their healing noses and black eyes.
&n
bsp; Yet in the foggy dim of the Warrens’ night, it was not a sneer twisting Kieran’s lips when she pulled away. It was a frown.
Shivering from the loss of his heat, a light groan accompanying the movement that rammed a jagged bit of scrap against her spine, she shifted her attention from him—from that pained expression—and took a good hard look at herself.
Caked in drying mud, more naked than clothed, warm semen slipping from her slit to instantly chill on her thighs…
And healthier than she had been in years.
Hip bones no longer jutted out. Her bared breasts had fullness and weight.
She shivered.
“You’re cold.” It was as if he gnawed his tongue, biting back unspoken slander. “You will go inside your home and you will not come out.”
Wren shuffled back even farther, lavender eyes leaving her filthy body to take in the Alpha.
The Alpha tucking away his somehow still hard dick.
Kieran fought the teeth of his zipper before scrubbing his jaw with his palm. “Knowing Toby, he’s already prepping a transport of food and water for delivery.”
Doubtful. Wren could feel her bones shaking with his madness. Toby was ripping rooms apart and screaming at the sky, nowhere near the right state of mind to organize such a thing. But that didn’t matter.
Trying and failing to cover her breasts with the remnants of her bodice, Wren nodded anyway.
“If I find out that you didn’t heed this order, if I hear a peep about you scavenging or trying to run, I’ll cut off a whole lot more than the kid’s hand.” This was the domineering Kieran she knew, the one whose words dripped malice. The one who stood over her and threatened. “Do you understand me, Jax?”
There was no argument. Only an idiot would scamper around the Warrens with her tits hanging free. Just smelling of Omega was a recipe for a violent death. She told him as much when she gestured toward her exposed chest and pussy.
When green eyes lit on cold pebbled nipples, drifting lower to where his seed leaked out, they came alive with more than just anger. “What does it feel like, that bond you got with them?”
Hmmmm.
Curious Kieran would have been slightly amusing had Wren not been shivering in the cold. Tired, and thirsty. Her body had grown spoiled by access to life’s necessities and already complained about the lack.
Hugging herself to preserve warmth, she gnawed at her lip and felt exactly how Caspian’s and Toby’s half-formed bonds worked against her.
“Well?”
No point in brushing it off, she pointed to her guts and mimed a twisting cramp. That was Caspian, who even from this distance she could feel fumbling through the pinging in his guts with women and a great deal of drink. Each climax that erupted from his cock Wren felt a ghost of sensation building at the base of her spine to burst and leave her insides completely unfulfilled.
She knew he suffered.
She knew he could not comprehend the cause.
He didn’t sleep though the hour was late.
He felt the foreign pings of worry.
Lacking the ability to feel her out properly while gorging on his lustful appetites—it distracted him. Because he felt something was missing though he had surrounded himself with everything.
She wondered if he’d even jolted at her earlier burst of gratitude toward Kieran, or if he’d been too busying knotting his entire pen to grasp that that wondrous emotion had come from her.
Had he recognized her orgasm with his Second was not part of his physical pleasure?
Probably not.
That would require him to look past his own selfish interests and see her as more than just property. He would have to actually care to tune into the tiny two-way connection between them for more than a self-indulgent reminder of a terrible victory.
And a man like him, wasn’t capable.
Next Wren ran her palm over her shoulder, her arm, pointing to joints to signify the bones underneath. This was where she felt Toby. Bone deep, resonate, the frame that held her together utterly affected by him.
Male obsession tingled in a constant state of vibration. There was also adoration, determination, and guile.
Were she not certain he raged in the Waterworks, she wouldn’t be surprised if he were standing in the shadows watching her now—watching this with a smile.
Twisted guts and endless tingles, that ebb and flow and subtle taste of other emotions. And this was not even a full bond.
To explain to Kieran his effect on her, she caught the tip of a nail against his neck, drawing it slowly down until the Alpha broke out in gooseflesh.
Openly shivering, he closed his eyes, and let his head fall back while she extended the sensation.
Purring without thought, shoulders relaxing, it seemed he begged for more attention, but her lesson was over.
She was tired.
Voice soft as it had been that first time he’d seduced her on the floor of her home, Kieran said, “Go inside. Don’t come out.”
***
No food or water arrived that night.
No clothing or a source of heat.
Lying where she’d once had a nest, ancient linoleum under her body, Wren spent the night in icy cold.
Teeth chattering, mud freezing until she might crumble it off with her hands, she faced the kind of chill that killed.
Had she been warmer, she might have sensed grievous danger.
Had her joints not been locked in stiffness, she might have made it out.
But the ground had already been shaking long before her chattering teeth realized it was not just her body that rumbled.
The home she knew was destined to sink, was already descending into a torrent of mud. It oozed through the bars on her windows, ran in a river through her buckled front door.
And buried her no matter how she flailed and fought the tide.
Sucked under, encapsulated, Wren was caught in the drift.
Her pale arms flailing in the onslaught was the last view of his mouse Caspian saw before his cameras cut out, the Alpha screaming for his men to muster and dig her out.
But it was too late.
Several floors of Wren’s sinking building had been claimed by the mud before they arrived.
And she was gone.
Chapter 11
Chest expanding, the human leather of his coat stretched and creaking with each great pant, Caspian shot daggers at the sunken shit heap. Thirty-four floors still stood, Dale City’s engineers bracing the building far above the stink of the Warrens… while simultaneously doing nothing for those who had lost their homes in the mud.
Warrens rats were beneath their notice.
Just as they were beneath Caspian’s.
All but one, at least.
Every inhale was laced with sharpness, every exhale burdened with an angry growl. No one neared him save Toby, who clawed at his shaved head, mattering beneath his breath as he manically paced.
The Third Alpha had already torn long gashes into his scalp, clawed his veined forearms to shreds—self-mutilation keeping him level enough to shoot his First Alpha a hateful glare.
“Twenty-four hours you said. A whole fucking day with no food or water. No blanket—punishment for being the perfect Omega who loved her brood. Had you not interfered, I would have been here with her, boss! She wouldn’t have died!”
“Watch your tone.” The warning had been spoken lowly, but it seemed the hundreds on the scene froze.
Toby, nostrils flaring, showed his teeth. “You murdered our mate.”
The barest of flinches. Knuckles cracking, Caspian looked away from the bubbling mud for the first time since arrival and set the full weight of his displeasure upon the seething Third.
Mindlessly picking at an oozing cut, Toby narrowed his eyes. “And now she’ll never know estrous. I’ll never fully bond her. And you… the ghost of your marking my sunshine will always ping in your chest. You’re half-bonded to a dead Omega. Only way to wipe her clean from your corpse is
to fully bond another. And when you do, I’ll see her drowned in mud.”
Kieran stepped between them. “You know how he gets, sir. Pay Toby no mind. A day or two and he’ll remember his place.”
There were eyes on them, eyes that would report to rival gangs. To government. To his own men. They could not show dissension. But later… Toby was a dead man. “Leave.”
“Try and move me, and you’ll have a show on your hands that will echo through the city for fucking years.” And his Third meant every word, digging his feet into the soggy ground and bracing to be charged. “I’m not leaving until they pull her body out.”
Her body…
The thought of a limp, lifeless mouse hanging from a worker’s arms like a rag, stole Caspian’s next breath. She’d be blue under all that mud. Stiff.
How much water would it take to wash her clean?
Odd feelings accompanied such thoughts like barbed wire corded through his belly, squeezing as it cut deep. Vomit came to Caspian’s mouth, swallowed back down by an act of pure willpower.
“They won’t find her, sir.” Kieran crossed his arm over his chest, looking to the building. “To dig down that far… she’s buried with her children. I think that’s what she’d want.”
Brow cocked, Caspian turned his glare to the handsome one. “What?”
Was his Second growing fucking red-faced?
“I asked you a question, Kieran.”
“The kids she found.” Clearing his throat, the Second pointed to a patch of mud now littered with massive debris. “The ones who died. A dozen, maybe more, are buried there.”
Reeking of jealousy, Toby shoved forward. Inches from the Second, his finger kissing the trigger to the firearm hanging from his shoulder, he demanded. “She doesn’t talk to you. You can’t read her hand signs. How do you know that?”
“The dying kid in the hospital told me.” The answer came on a hiss, a bristling Second unflinching before the manic Third.
Kieran was lying, Caspian could always tell. And had Toby been in his right mind, he too would have seen the tick that betrayed their pack-mate.
“Enough.” There had been more than enough antagonism. More than enough insubordination. More than enough of that vicious feeling pulverizing his guts to a pulp. “The men keep digging.”
