by L. C. Davis
There were others with him, two betas, maybe three. They hadn't stayed on foot long and it would be difficult to trace the car, but Duke had his mate in his heart and Everett's blood on his tongue. Just a taste of what was to come when he found the bastard.
Chapter Twenty
CONNOR
Connor woke in a room he knew well, since it was the setting of all the worst moments in his life. At first, he thought it was just another nightmare After all, pleasant dreams of Duke couldn't keep them away forever. Then silver shackles digging into his wrists and ankles, keeping him chained to the wall, slowly but surely acquainted him with the fact that this was his new and old reality merged into one.
Horror warred with anger as a man who had to be Aaron Hauser appeared. He had his late brother's taste for expensive designer suits and the same pale gray eyes that lit up whenever he was about to do something truly despicable. Connor strained at the chains, but the gag in his mouth kept him from screaming. Or biting, which was probably its true purpose.
"Now, now, no need to get all worked up on my account," Aaron purred in a voice that could so easily have been Richard's. Connor shuddered in disgust.
"I see why you were my brother's favorite pet," the middle-aged alpha mused, tilting Connor's chin toward him. "You are a lovely one. Vile, perhaps, but beautiful. Like a rose with thorns."
In lieu of telling Aaron what was on his mind, Connor worked all his disgust into his gaze, refusing to look away from the alpha in the deference he so clearly demanded from everyone else.
"Defiant, hm? We'll see how long that lasts. Usually a week in this place is enough," he said in his nephew's bored tone. He seemed to notice Connor's confusion and added, "You must be wondering why the Parlor is still standing after you burned it to the ground. You see, I don't share Richard's more prurient tastes, but he was so attached to the place, I felt compelled to reconstruct it to honor his memory. Of course, I had to wait until you were gone. It's funny how a little slip like you managed to instill so much fear in both the saints and the sinners. I wonder, did they know that imprisoning you would unleash the floodgates?" he mused. "And now look at you. To think, this is the mighty Cutter," he said with a loud laugh. "Not very impressive now, are you?"
An entirely fresh emotion seized Connor's heart, no weaker for the fact that he barely recognized it. The last time he could remember being overtaken by something so strong and so dark was the day Mel had been taken from their home. Was this grief?
After everything he had gone through to dismantle Richard's ring of perversion and torment, the Parlor was back. Two years. That was all it had taken to turn his life's work to nothing. Before, the fact that Cutter's legacy had been rendered meaningless by an alpha was what would have stung most, but now it was the realization that for all this time, the same suffering he'd endured had continued. How many others? How many of his soldiers had gone over to Aaron's side?
"Well, I think I'll let you take a moment to get reacquainted with your old room," he said with a smile. "But don't worry. I'm not like my brother. I believe in good old fashioned vengeance, an eye for an eye. You already paid your dues as his whore, and I hear you like to be treated like an alpha these days, so my men have been instructed to keep it nice and clean," he sneered. "But by the time they're done with you, you're going to wish for the days when you were Richard's omega."
Connor quelled his anger, refusing to give the alpha the satisfaction of seeing him shed a single tear. Whatever torture Aaron had in store for him, he made a promise to himself in that moment that he intended to keep, a goal he would need if he was going to survive with his sanity intact. Just like Richard, Aaron and Everett were going to die. This time, he wouldn't make the mistake of leaving a single trace of them behind.
Chapter Twenty-One
DUKE
Three days. Three days since Duke had found the broken remnants of Connor's collar in an abandoned warehouse where he had once come a hair's breadth from catching Cutter. The old Duke would have taken it as confirmation that Mitchell's theory was right. That Connor was taunting him, baiting him, but something deep in his gut told him otherwise. He knew his omega was in danger, that he hadn't left on his own. There had been a struggle in the garden, and he could feel it deep in his bones. The link seemed to be growing stronger the more time and distance there was between them, and he could feel the omega's suffering as his own. It was reassurance that Connor was alive, but with every second that passed without finding him, Duke grew warier of the state he'd be in when he arrived.
Duke was following his own trail after getting tired of false alarms from Colt, announcing that the trail was hot again only to find some memento from Cutter's past left at a certain location, usually a former auction site. Whoever was doing this wanted them to think Connor had escaped on his own, and they knew him well enough to torment Duke with all the little details of his failed attempts at capturing the omega in his past.
Digging deeper into Connor's past in an attempt to ascertain his current whereabouts had yielded unexpected information and the conclusions Duke had formed gave him more hope than ever for the prospect of his mate's redemption. He had fallen for Connor thinking that he was always every bit as cold and ruthless as he himself purported to be, but the evidence Duke had uncovered in his search cast doubt on that persona. Cutter had been responsible for a crime ring as intricate as it was far-reaching, that much was true, but the connections were more complex than Duke had ever realized. To be fair, he hadn't been as interested in Cutter's motives as he had been in his capture.
One of the chief reasons why Cutter had been so difficult to find was because there seemed to be little rhyme or reason to his holdings. The epicenter of his empire was in the pacific northwest where he had first donned the moniker, but his influence expanded across the United States with small pockets of power that didn't seem tied to one industry in particular. His crew, a few of whom Duke had managed to track down and strong-arm him into giving him answers, had dabbled in drug trafficking here, omega auctions there, but there was a surprising lack of focus for someone so driven. After bashing enough skulls together, there were a few names that kept rolling off the tongues of alphas who weren't eager to breathe their last in the seedy bars or back alleys Duke had tracked them to. Richard Drake. Whether it was an alias or not, he couldn't be sure, but it was consistent.
Since the physical trail had long gone cold, and yielded nothing but dead ends, Duke decided to follow his most recent lead and his gut to Richard's doorstep. He was leaving a bar when his phone rang and he glanced at the display to see that it was Mel. While the omega had obeyed his mates and stayed home, he had set up his own command central in Mountain Ridge and Duke was glad to have him on board. Mitchell had already pulled back some of his men under pressure from Aaron Hauser who insisted that his son's disappearance was every bit as related to Connor as Duke knew it was. The only difference was that Aaron insisted Everett was Connor's victim and an unwitting accomplice to his escape rather than his kidnapper. He wasn't doing a bad job of persuading the Council of it, either.
Not that Duke could blame them entirely. After all, not long ago he would have been the first to presume Connor's guilt in the matter. It was strange to be on the other side, defending his innocence, but the cost of failure was too high.
"Mel, please tell me you've got some good news."
"No, I was calling in hopes that you would," the omega said with a weary sigh. Duke got the feeling Mel had slept about as much as he had over the last week. "Where are you now?"
"Split from the team. I'm following a different line of investigation," he admitted.
"Tell me."
"It's just a hunch, but this guy's name keeps coming up with Connor's old pals," he muttered. "I've tracked him to upstate New York, which is too close to Everett's stomping grounds for me not to investigate. Might be nothing, but..."
"It's more than what we've got now."
"Exactly."
"What's the
guy's name? If he's related to Cutter at all, I've probably crossed paths with him at some point."
"Richard Drake."
The line went silent and Duke checked the screen to make sure the call hadn't been dropped. Montana had shitty cellular reception. "Mel?"
"I know him." The omega's voice was strained and at first, Duke thought it was fear. Then he realized it was wrath. "He's dead, but he's an alpha who used to run a place called the Parlor."
"The Parlor?" Duke frowned. "Never heard of it."
"That's because Connor burned it to the ground years ago. That's the day he became Cutter."
Duke took a moment to process that. He'd pieced together more fragments from his mate's past than he'd ever had and the picture they formed was uglier than he'd ever imagined. There was part of him that wasn't sure he wanted to complete it, but when he did find Connor, he knew that healing whatever physical wounds had been inflicted on him was only part of the equation. "I need to know, Mel. I don't want to, but I need to so I can understand. So I can find him and bring him home. Tell me everything."
And he did. By the end of it, Duke was leaning against the wall of the bar's back alley, struggling to keep his shit together and only succeeding because he knew what the cost would be to Connor if he didn't. A scream of pure rage built in his throat but he managed to croak out a promise to Mel that he'd be in touch and hang up before letting it out, taking out his pent-up anger on the crumbling brick wall in lieu of a target who was long deceased. The knowledge of everything that had happened to his mate in the past alone would have been enough to break him like nothing on the battlefield had managed to, but knowing there was a chance that Richard was alive and had Connor in his clutches again was pushing him to the very brink of madness.
How it was even possible, he didn't know. According to Mel and Connor, Richard was dead. Could it be someone else from Cutter's past? Someone who knew exactly what he'd been through in that awful place operating under Richard's alias? The stories he'd pieced together seemed to imply as much. Whatever the truth was, all roads were leading him to hell on earth, a place innocuously known as the Parlor.
Chapter Twenty-Two
CONNOR
Aaron kept his promise, but so did Connor. He hadn't shed a tear no matter what the politician and the men he hired to do his dirty work did to him. Sometimes, it was simple deprivation. Food, sleep, water. Others, it was pure torture. The guards followed Aaron's orders not to violate him, but if the alpha thought he was making a clever point that physical pain could be worse than what he had endured in his time under Richard's control, he was sorely mistaken.
The promise of escape and all Connor was going to do in order to exact his vengeance when he managed it had been what he latched onto at first. For a while, the thought of dropping Richard in the deepest, darkest forgotten pit of society and acquainting him with the fact that there were monsters even uglier than him who wouldn't care about his money or authority had been enough. As the days wore on--he had been rendered unconscious too many times to be sure of his own estimate of how many he had spent in that windowless room--fantasizing about creative ways to torture Aaron and Everett ceased to be of comfort.
The worst of it wasn't the torture itself, but fighting back the urge to shut down, to force back the emotion that had so newly returned to him. He had once thought feeling was weakness, and while it certainly made the pain harder to bear, he somehow knew it was the only thing separating him from becoming the monster the world thought he was. The monster he'd been before. While shutting off his emotions and succumbing to numbness would have made the pain easier to endure, it would have meant forgetting all the good things, too. Mel and Hassan and Toval. Duke...
Connor's heart ached in a place deeper than Aaron's men could cut with their blades whenever he thought of Duke. Of how differently things might have been if he had just given the alpha that chance he'd asked for in the garden rather than running. He knew now that Mel had been right the first time. He was afraid of Duke, but not the way he had ever feared Aaron, or even Richard. This was a terror that ran so much deeper because it held within its grasp the one thing that could actually break him. Hope.
Running from the possibilities, the uncertainty, had seemed like the safest move at the time, but now Connor couldn't escape them. What might have been, what could have been, all that would never be. Things he had never before wanted, never let himself dare to dream of. Countless nights spent the same way the best night of his life had been, in the arms of an alpha who loved him, wanted him, of all people. Being human enough to return that love one day, to feel some semblance of the peace Mel had found in his mates. To know what it was to hold a life he had created with his mate rather than watching the light of it fade from the eyes of his enemies. He had only just begun to feel the other energy laced within his own, but he was too afraid to attend closely enough to it to tell if it was still there.
Some part of him knew that even if the physical shock hadn't caused a miscarriage, surely being flooded with neurotoxin would have. He knew better than to think that begging Aaron for mercy would yield anything but the opposite on the off chance that he hadn't lost the pregnancy. Duke's pup. Grief was such a foreign concept to the omega that he couldn't understand how it was possible to mourn the loss of a life that had once only filled him with fear and doubt. Now it was just a reminder of the life he would never have. No matter how long he outlasted Aaron's men, no matter how hard he fought to keep his old self from returning now that the drugs and the toxins keeping him stable and tranquilized had worked their way out of his system, he knew it was only a matter of time before he gave in.
Escape was inevitable for Cutter, but uncertain for Connor. He would have to become a monster again to get out of the Parlor and return home, but would any of them even want him then? Would Duke?
The door creaked open and Connor flinched in spite of himself. Aaron was there, which meant it was a special occasion. He snapped his fingers and two betas dragged in a woman who was bound and gagged. She didn't seem to have any marks on her and her eyes didn't have the hollow, distant look of an omega who had been working in the Parlor for long. She was many decades past the cutoff for their depraved clientele, in any case. The guard forced her to her knees and when she lifted her gray head, Connor found himself looking into the eyes he'd once never thought he would see again.
Lora...
Her eyes widened. She recognized him instantly, even though he had changed considerably while she scarcely had. His chest seized in some emotion he didn't trust himself to recognize. Anger, fear, disgust, betrayal. With Lora, it could be any of them at any given moment. The recollection of feeling was coming back swifter in the presence of the woman who had forced him to go numb than they had before.
"Good, you recognize each other," Aaron sneered. "I hear you two are old friends. And you share a hobby! I'm sure you know of the omega who's been killing alphas. Cutter, meet your copycat." He yanked the gag from Lorna's mouth and she snarled.
"Unhand me!"
Aaron ignored her, striding over to Connor. "See? I brought you a present."
Connor stared at him, for once unable to decipher an alpha's true motives. Aaron reached for the key in his pocket and began unshackling him. Connor cried out in agony as the shackles broke from his skin and he barely caught himself on his hands and knees. His body trembled as he looked up and found himself face-to-face with Lorna.
She was different now. Every bit as angry and bitter as she ever had been, but smaller somehow. Weak. Maybe she always had been. Maybe it was him who'd grown stronger.
"You," he seethed. "You led him to me. I spared your life."
"I did no such thing!" Her voice was just as harsh as it had been then.
"She's telling the truth," Aaron mused. "It seems Lora here has taken it upon herself to punish alphas in your stead."
Connor frowned, looking between the alpha and his other omega prisoner. "Why?"
Lora wouldn't meet his eyes
. "I wasn't always Richard's servant. I entered this world the same way you did."
Connor's stomach churned. He didn't want to hear any of this. He didn't want to displace the image of Lora in his mind as his tormentor, as the guard dog who had kept him within Richard's gates. He couldn't imagine her ever being anything but ancient, ever being the way he'd been before she and Richard had turned him into something barely recognizable as human. "Why alphas? It's been so long, I assumed you were dead. Why start killing now?"
"Because you stopped."
He flinched at her scolding tone. Some things never changed, some responses were too deeply conditioned to lose. "So what, you took up my mantel as penance?"
"There's no penance for the things I've done. Nor for you," she said, turning her cold, unfeeling gaze on him. There was something closer to sympathy in it than he would have thought her capable of. "We're monsters, Connor. I might have twisted your soul the same as others tainted mine, but they're ours all the same. We've damned ourselves, just like Richard."
"No," Connor hissed, rising to his feet despite the fact that his limbs were weak and aching from disuse and restraint. "People can change. I've changed."
"Have you?" Aaron asked with a coy smile, slipping a blade from his coat. Connor cringed and hated that fear was the only response he could muster. Exhaustion had taken the fight out of him long ago, and while seeing Lora had rallied the last embers of his will, he knew he was no physical match for the alpha, let alone the four guards stationed in the room. Not without his venom. When Aaron flipped the blade in his hand and offered the hilt to Connor, he stood frozen, unsure of what to do.
