by Merel Pierce
Surprisingly, the alpha retreated from her personal space without needing to be told. He returned to his prior perch, crossing one leg over its twin as he folded his hands in his lap and gave way to watching her in silence as he continued to purr. Though she was loath to admit it, the peaceable rumbling of the male did much to soothe her aching heart and mind. She couldn’t help but be grateful for the lightening of her load, the oppressive weight of her misery having days ago become too heavy a burden to bear alone. Were he not responsible for every horrible thing that had happened to her, she might have felt guilty for using him. But he was, so she didn’t. After everything she’d been through, December figured the least the bastard could do was pay her bills and purr for her.
After a few moments, she slid a tired look his way. She knew what he wanted, why he was waiting so patiently at her side. He needed to know who was responsible for the attacks against him. While she knew she should have portioned out the information to string him along and ensure his continued compliance in protecting her, she was worn out and wanted it over with.
“Riktor and Sergei. They were the ring leaders,” she began unsteadily. “I mean, I think Riktor was answering to someone else, because he always took calls when no one was around. But so far as anyone else knew, they were in charge.”
She cleared her throat again, annoyed at the lump already rising with the threat of new tears as she dared to speak of what had happened when her subconscious obviously wasn’t ready to relive the trauma.
“They were the ones who marked me. It was supposed to show the others how dedicated they were to taking you down. Like a symbol. Them taking what was meant to be yours.” She sent another careful glance his direction and found his body language already altered by her confession. He was tense, a muscle in his jaw ticking with displeasure. Even still, she powered ahead. “I’ll tell you everything I remember, but first, I need you to do two things for me.”
“And what might that be, little one?” The male replied slowly, his voice carefully controlled so that the rage he obviously felt wouldn’t taint her willingness to speak.
“There was a boy. Sergei’s little brother.”
“Maksim.”
December nodded, “I know how you people are. You don’t go against family. He didn’t like what they did, but Sergei made it clear what would happen if he tried to do something about it.” She had no doubt that Sergei would have beaten the boy senseless if he’d attempted to get help for her, but the truth was it had never been discussed in her presence. She was lying to him, trying to bolster her case for him to spare the boy.
“He tried to help me as much as he could.” She added. “He shared his food with me, snuck in medication to help with the pain. He brought me blankets and tried to keep me comfortable, and when they were done using me, he sat with me, and tried to comfort me.” Her eyes blurred with unwelcome wetness. “He’s probably the only reason I’m still alive.” She leveled the male with a pleading look. “Promise me that you won’t hurt him. That you’ll leave him out of all of this. He’s a good kid. Just promise me?”
“What is the second thing you wish to ask of me?”
“If you kill them. If that’s how this ends. There’s one man, a Frenchman named Dante. Compared to the rest, he was a saint. He wasn’t cruel like them. If you have to kill them, would you just not make him suffer?”
Nikolai’s features twisted incredulously, his disbelief obvious.
“You would ask me to have mercy on a man who took part in your abuse?”
December frowned. She didn’t have the strength or desire to explain it. “Yes.”
The alpha was silent for several moments, studying her from behind a veiled expression she couldn’t read. Finally, he sighed defeat. “Not only is my little wolf fierce, she has a more generous heart than her enemies deserve…” He grit out unhappily. “I will grant your requests, if only to ease your mind and help you move past this.”
December’s shoulders slumped, the strange sense of guilt assuaged by his assurances, as reluctant as they might have been. “Thank you.”
She spent the next twenty minutes telling him the names and descriptions of everyone she could remember having passed through the warehouse in the time she’d been held captive. He made notes on his phone, passing the information along to someone else via text when she’d finally finished. He hadn’t asked her what they’d done to her, bade her give him nothing except the information she thought might help them find the responsible parties. December was grateful. She wasn’t ready to talk about the rest, yet. Most especially not with him.
The rest of the morning passed quickly. The nurses brought breakfast and medications, a bland meal and far too many pills that the alpha insisted upon feeding her himself. It had been embarrassing enough in the privacy of his room; now here in the hospital it made her feel like an invalid.
When she’d thought to fight him on it, he’d stopped purring and grown mildly agitated. Unwilling to give up the blanketing comfort of his noise, she submitted. The male had immediately gone back to purring.
She’d dozed fitfully through the noon hour, waking again when the doctor returned with a rape crisis counselor she hoped December would speak to. Nikolai encouraged her to do so, even promising he wouldn’t intrude again as he had done earlier in the morning as he got to his feet to leave.
Agitated, she demanded that he sit back down, keep purring, and stop telling her what to do. When he’d complied, she unconvincingly told the women she’d consider it but wasn’t ready. She just wanted to be left alone. Reluctantly, they left.
While the cocktail of medications reduced her physical discomfort and made her feel hazy, the male was the only thing that seemed to give her any relief from her disquieted mental state. Apart from the few instances when he left the room to take a call or retrieve fresh clothing and a laptop that one of his men had brought for him, he rarely stopped purring, and he certainly never left her line of sight.
As she would discover over the next few days, this was to become their routine. He fed her, helped her to the bathroom, oversaw her nurses and doctors as they cared for her, and spent his time purring or humming as he worked from his seat at her side.
When they were alone, he often tried to reason with her about speaking to the counselors. He was surprisingly tactful and gentle in his approach, keeping the discussion private between them and never questioned her refusals in front of the staff. She couldn’t bring herself to agree, no matter how compelling or sensible his reasoning seemed. Why they wanted her to suffer through reliving the details of the wretched affair, she couldn’t understand. She was miserable enough, and stubbornly refused to see how talking about what she’d endured might help.
Those first few days, December’s behavior began to fluctuate wildly. She alternated between spells of tear-filled misery, silent brooding, and fits of temper. Quite suddenly and with no explanation, the most mundane things became infuriating and caused her to lash out. Nikolai typed too loudly, the nurses outside her room were laughing too much to be doing any work, the sheets were scratchy and irritated her skin, the food tasted like dirt. Once she even became so angry with the nurses that she’d dug tiny crescent-shaped wounds into her palms from clenching her fists as she barked at them while they changed her dressings, nearly taking a swing at one of the women when she tried to make sure December hadn’t hurt herself too badly.
Even the gentlest reprimand from the male had her dissolving in tears and shying away, hurling irrational accusations at him and calling him any number of awful names. Every time it ended the same, with her fighting to be free of his grasp when he crushed her to his chest and purred as she struck at him and shrieked in anger or howled her pain.
She paced when the male would allow it, which was frequently enough that she suspected he was only indulging the behavior so that she would wear herself out. She always tried to close the curtains against the cheery brightness outside, only to have him open them again each time she
did.
The calm, persistent manner of the alpha was infinitely frustrating to her. But there was nothing to be done. He would not leave no matter how many tantrums she threw or how many times she screamed for him to get out.
Occasionally when she would find herself standing at the viewing window to the hall staring balefully at the people beyond, she’d beg him to let her leave. The response she received never varied. “I cannot do that, sweet one. You aren’t ready.”
December would cry then, whimpering so hopelessly that Nikolai would come and lead her away from the window and back to bed. On the rare occasion that his touch didn’t cause her to shrink in fear or rage in anger, he’d draw her into his lap like a child and hold her until the tears passed.
Often, when he thought she was sleeping the alpha and her doctor would confer about December’s condition in whispered words at the furthest corners of her room. On the rare occasion that she could piece together what they were saying, what she heard only exacerbated the anxiety that had become her constant companion since her arrival at the hospital.
Nikolai had inquired more than once as to whether December’s current state was due to the trauma she was refusing to address through counseling. The doctor confessed that she feared the severed pair bond was to blame for the erratic behavior December was displaying. She insisted he find a way to convince her to speak with the counselors, and that Nikolai consider allowing a colleague who specialized in pair-bond psychology to assess her condition.
She stressed her concerns over what might happen when the second bond was broken, insinuating that she knew he intended to dispose of the remaining man who had marked the omega he kept referring to as “his.”
With his reputation, no one had to wonder how the woman had come to that conclusion. She advised against rash action, expressing a growing concern for the mental welfare of the suffering omega. Nikolai agreed, submitting that another course of action would need to be taken to assure that his omega was stabilized.
December’s ears began to ring as her lungs constricted, the threat of fainting or having a panic attack quickly becoming a real possibility. The noise in her head drowned out the rest of their conversation and forced her to focus on her breathing instead. She lay in silence, struggling to continue the relatively even rise and fall of her chest as she waited for the doctor to leave. When the door finally shut, the alpha returned to his chair. She rolled to face him as he settled in, exhaling a shaky sigh as she opened her eyes.
“I’m sorry if I woke you, sweet one.”
She blinked at him a few times, her brow knitting as her mind worked frantically over the details of the conversation she’d overheard, “It’s not like I get much sleep anymore.”
He sat forward, covering her hand with the warmth of his own as he spoke. “Perhaps if you would consider speaking to the therapists, it would bring you some peace,” the alpha suggested. It was clear by his expression that he expected her to refuse, but she was too frightened at present to manage it. Instead, she merely frowned.
“Maybe.”
He smiled, a dimple creasing one stubble-studded cheek. “Maybe is better than no,” he praised softly. December bit her lip, moving her thumb so that it hooked around his own. The alpha squeezed her hand lightly. “Would you like me to sing for you, little wolf?”
“Yes.”
He propped his elbows on the edge of the mattress, drawing her fingers up to brush a light kiss across her knuckles as they watched one another. He cupped her hand between his own when the throaty rumble of a song finally trickled to life as he began to hum. Eventually his humming graduated to singing, as it always did.
The unpolished bass tone of the alpha’s voice was something she’d grown to appreciate over the past few days, his melancholy choice of traditional Russian songs more than appropriate given the circumstances. Despite her fears, it wasn’t long before she succumbed to the male’s lullaby.
***
The next time she woke it was still dark, and the smell of a second alpha tainted the air of her room. Though the scent was vaguely familiar, her body reacted unpleasantly to the stimuli all the same. She opened her eyes, struggling upright in bed as she clutched her blankets to her chest. She blinked wide, nervous eyes at the two men standing near the door, the hair on the back of her neck bristling suspiciously. “What’s going on?”
Nikolai turned away from his companion, who December recognized as the man who’d found her in the warehouse days before. The alpha hadn’t allowed any other men in the room since her arrival, and she didn’t realize until that moment just how frightened she would feel in the presence of other alphas. Something was wrong. She could feel it, and that only made the acrid taste of her fear more bitter.
Her heart fluttered anxiously as she waited for someone to answer her, desperately hoping she was overreacting. “Donovan, please wait outside. See that we aren’t disturbed. I won’t be long.”
The older man stepped out of the room without so much as a word, shutting the door silently behind him. Nikolai moved to close the blinds on the viewing window, leaving them in relative darkness save for the nightlight plugged into a light socket in the bathroom.
“What’s going on?”
Nikolai approached slowly, easing himself down next to her on the bed. “Sweet one, I must leave for a short time,” he cooed. “Donovan is here to watch over you until I return.”
“Why do you have to leave?” She demanded warily as she edged away from the hulking silhouette of the male perched beside her.
“We’ve found Sergei.”
December swallowed hard, her panic growing as the realization of what that meant soaked in. “Are you going to kill him?” She asked in a breathless whisper.
“Yes. He cannot be allowed to live after what he’s done. The betrayal is too great, and he must pay for what he’s done to you.” He explained gently, speaking to her as though she were a feral animal he did not want to startle. Tears stung her eyes as she twisted the blanket between her fingers.
“But you can’t. If you break the pair bond… I might…You know what they say can happen!” She wailed desperately.
Nikolai reached for her then, his hand drifting over the top of her shoulder and then curling around the back of her neck where his fingers came to rest. “I know, December. But that will not happen to you, I swear it.” His hand tightened in increments, as if he expected her to bolt. “I only hope that someday you will be able to forgive me for what I must do. This isn’t what I wanted. But it’s the only way, little wolf,” he apologized, his voice so graveled with grief that it tipped her over the edge into a panic.
“I don’t understand Nikolai, what’s happening? What do you have to do?” She pleaded softly, choking on a whimper when he drew her body against his own, her feeble resistance amounting to nothing against the infinitely stronger male. Nikolai moved his hand to her waist, his grip tightening as he lowered his head to whisper against her ear.
“I’m sorry, December… Gods above, forgive me.”
Chapter 21
He didn’t give her a chance to react. The alpha’s free hand sealed over her mouth the same instant his teeth sank into the delicate flesh at the junction of her throat and shoulder. December screamed, but the awful sound was muted by his quick thinking.
She sobbed and screeched against his hand, jerking and twisting until he was forced to release his grip or risk tearing the wound further than he intended. Her tortured wail of agony and despair vibrated against the skin of his palm as the male licked instinctively at the blood trickling out of his claiming mark. His soft, remorseful apologies grew thicker as the taste of her blood on his tongue triggered something primal in him. The alpha’s unintended arousal pressed intrusively against her thigh, and fear of another rape rendered her motionless.
Instinct told her to be still, to be quiet. December tried to obey, whimpering pathetically against his hand as she clutched his shirt and tried to swallow against the pain. “It was the on
ly way.” He murmured against her throbbing and broken skin, his tongue darting out again to lap at the coppery fluid dripping off her shoulder.
She moaned unhappily as her pain began to ebb when the male’s attention lingered at her throat longer than she expected. His hand slipped away from her mouth just as a strange, pulsating warmth blossomed in her core, spreading unwelcome threads of heat through her body. December’s brain stuttered and tripped over the morbid knowledge that her body was growing aroused, a thing that hadn’t happened during her first bonding and she certainly wasn’t prepared for this time.
Fearful and confused, she renewed her struggles, hitting and shoving at the male desperately as she bared her teeth and growled. “Get away from me! Get off!” She continued to strike at him, screeching like a banshee. “You son of a bitch!”
December yelped when he snatched hold of her wrists and pressed them against her own chest, finally drawing back far enough for her to glare up at him. “How could you?!” She accused, her emotions alternating so quickly between devastated and angry that she hiccupped and whined as she jerked in his hold. “How could you do this to me?”
“It was the only way.” The alpha implored softly, “I’m trying to protect you.”
“I trusted you!” The admission caught them both by surprise. The male’s expression twisted painfully when December began to sob again, ashamed and miserable.
Nikolai eased her back onto the bed, standing before he finally released her. She rolled away from him immediately, curling into a fetal position as she abandoned all pretenses and cried inconsolably.
“I am sorry, sweet one. In time you will see, this was for the best.”
“Just leave!”
With a heavy sigh, the male retreated. She was vaguely aware of him pausing in the open doorway, murmuring harshly for his enforcer to see to it she was cared for and not to let her out of his sight. Then he was gone, and for the first time since he’d rescued her from the warehouse, December didn’t care.
