Nature had seen to that. It had stripped her of her options. As much as she wanted to be selective and wait for that perfect someone who made her feel whole, she didn’t get that choice. The best she could hope for was that she could at least stomach the person come morning who would need to fill the full sex side of her hunger.
Her first sexual encounter nearly killed a guy. She had been fourteen, and it had been nothing more than heavy kissing, but she’d drained him. He’d been human, and no one knew then about her requirements. That she was powerful enough to harm another with what was essential to her survival. The boy had been left hospitalized for several months, in a coma, the human doctors at a loss as to what had caused his condition. Thankfully, Alice’s father had managed to pull some strings, and he had someone sneak into the facility after hours with a small dosage of vampire blood. It was low enough in quantity that the boy had never been at risk of turning, but the blood had sped his recovery.
Alice’s guilt over who and what she was started then and it had never gone away. Ever since she’d tried her hardest to seek out supernatural males to fill her needs, but they were harder to come by than one would think in the college setting. So, she made do with what was available.
She glanced around the party and leaned against a wall, wanting to avoid sitting on any of the second-hand furniture for fear of getting something. No one in attendance piqued her interest or stirred her inner harlot’s desires. Slim pickings for sure.
This is what I’ve been reduced to, trolling frat parties for food.
Self-loathing crept up on her, but she pushed it down, hiding it in the recesses of what she feared would be a heart that was unable to heal. Unable to ever open and love another.
She let out an exasperated breath.
It was what it was, and she’d been forced to find ways to fill the void that didn’t involve sleeping with a new man every other night. While she wore a smile whenever it happened, it was fake, born out of a need to protect her feelings. She was thought of as a wild child, and in many cases she fit the bill, but more and more she wanted to shed the image and be thought of as more than just the girl who was always with a new man.
The couple nearest her were lip-locked. The man's hands roamed up and under the woman's shirt as they moaned into each other's mouths. The guy fumbled around, looking awkward and confused as to what to do next.
Yep, hardly an alpha in the bunch.
If it wasn't for the sexual energy radiating from them, Alice would have walked away to find a more titillating couple to stand near. This pair were merely eating each other’s faces, not moving into foreplay.
She tsked, sure this was one of the reasons the saying that youth was misspent on the young had come to be. She could teach them a thing or two—okay, ten. With a small snort, she looked in the direction of two women trying their best to gain the attention of a tall, built male. He was a new arrival, and the minute Alice laid eyes on him the hair on the back of her neck stood on end. The man was good looking, no doubt about that. But there was something about him that seemed hard, removed from all that was happening around them.
The bitch better show tonight.
She stilled as the man’s thoughts hit her hard. Her nostrils flared and she slowed her breathing, knowing better than to tip him off that she was hearing him mentally. It was rare for a human to get through her defenses. She concentrated on her personal walls and continued to watch the newcomer.
These fucking pussies don’t know which end of a woman is up, he thought.
While she agreed, her inner alarms sounded, but she stayed in place, watching him, getting the sense he was more than merely human.
Much more.
He sneered as he raked his gaze over a group of girls entering from the other direction. He paid close attention to their backsides as they walked past him.
They’d be fun to break, he thought.
She gasped, feeling the full weight of the truth behind his words. The man wanted to inflict pain, and from the hardness in his eyes, he’d done just that before. She stiffened and eased off the wall, keeping a close watch on him. With slow movements, she pulled her cell from her back pocket, hoping to avoid drawing attention to herself. She was careful to control her breathing and heart rate to the best of her ability. If he was a shifter, and her instincts said he was, he could easily pick up on differences in her breathing and pulse. That tidbit she’d learned from her adoptive father and his friends.
Her father had spent his life pretending to be human, having to reinvent himself every so many decades to throw suspicion off the fact he didn’t age. He, like many supernaturals, went so far as to alter his hair to try to make it look as if he was getting grays. Her father’s current position was in the government. In truth, he’d been working for them for decades under different aliases. Currently, he was a face for the supernaturals, a representative for them within the government. A select few knew the truth about him.
Most didn’t. And no humans knew the truth of him or their kind. And for good reason. Humans had a longstanding history of panicking and trying to kill that which they did not understand.
Dumbasses.
She pressed the contact button on her phone and selected the one for her father. She didn’t dare risk dialing him. The supernatural male in the fraternity house with her would hear her conversation regardless of how low she tried to speak. Instead, she decided to type a message to her father.
Nile better have the fucking artsy bitch or I’m gonna rip his head off for leaving me to get this one, the man pushed out with his mind, agitation coating his every word.
The artsy bitch? Alice froze as fear danced up her spine. Images of Mae played in her mind and she lost her battle with controlling her breathing. She knew better than to lose her cool, but she couldn’t stop the fear rising in her.
Mae is on her date with Corbin, she thought, calming herself. This guy was just a jerk and was probably all bluster, no real bark. Though, she did wonder who Nile was and who the artsy girl was he was supposed to pick up. Her inner alarms had more than likely gone off because he was a supernatural and she’d not run into many on campus outside of herself and Mae. Well, that and he was a douche. That much was clear from his thoughts.
This party is a joke, the man continued from his spot across the large chapter room.
Alice wondered what he was doing at a party known campus-wide to be a sexual haven if he didn’t want anything to do with it at all. The more she watched him, the more unease returned, settling deep in her. She held her phone loosely, the text to her father started but never finished or sent.
The man raked his gaze around the room and then froze as his eyes landed on her. A sick, twisted smile tugged at his lips as he pushed off the wall, boldly walking in her direction. The college kids naturally made way for him, parting as if they too sensed the alpha in the male and subconsciously recognized how deadly he was.
Alice felt like a trapped rat, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. He’d set his sights on her and he was headed straight for her.
Run, she thought, yet couldn’t seem to get her feet to cooperate. By the time she managed to get her act together, he was close enough to touch her. The minute his hand made contact with her skin, her succubus screamed. Even the harlot didn’t want the man’s touch. When she wasn’t on board with a guy, there was a serious problem.
She jerked out of his grasp, and he laughed, leaning in close, his hot breath moving over her cheek. “I can smell it on you.”
She tensed. What could he smell on her?
“Succubus,” he said with a hushed whisper, grabbing her arm again, squeezing tight. “We heard a rumor there was one in the area. Looks like the grapevine was right for once.”
Alice found her nerve and stepped back, narrowing her gaze on the man. She looked him up and down and shook her head. “Not interested, bucko.”
He smiled, but it never reached his eyes. His thoughts came at her in fragments. What he wanted to do to h
er had very little to do with sex. He let her leave his space, and she seized the moment, rushing down the hall and out of the front door. The cool night air rushed over her, giving her a sense of security. She walked at a brisk pace, nearly running in hopes to put distance between herself and the man. She exhaled, assuming she’d managed to put enough space between them to be safe. Something pinched her neck and she swatted at it, coming away with a small red dart. Confusion knitted her brow as she stared at the dart in her hand. Everything around her blurred and she staggered, turning and catching sight of the man from the party. He was there, holding a weapon in his hand as he wore the same, calculated smile he’d had on his face inside. The smile was the last thing she saw before darkness swallowed her whole.
Chapter Three
Brad hissed as the guards took turns hitting him with chains. Each strike cut deeper, ripping flesh and drawing blood. He trembled in pain at the bite of each strike but did his best to avoid showing as much. He’d rather die than allow them to see they were getting to him. They were winning. It wasn’t as if he could fight back. Not with the amount of drugs they had in his system and the fact he was tethered to the wall by silver-coated chains that also cut into his flesh. As a shifter he had a natural-born allergy to silver, and the guards exploited it to their advantage as often as possible. It would take him days to heal the damage they’d done already by chaining him the way they had.
In the past, they’d left him chained and bound overnight, and by morning the flesh, in the areas the silver-coated chains had touched, was totally gone, as was some muscle. That had taken Brad nearly a week to recover from before the doctors had commenced with a new set of testing. The testing had left his body changing, his body and his wolf’s reactions to things differing and inconsistent. Worst of all, when he’d been forced to shift, his wolf form had increased in size. Not that it had been lacking in size prior to the testing, but now it was much bigger than the average shifter male wolf form. And more powerful. Much more powerful. In addition to it all, the wolf was now even more unpredictable.
Less trustworthy.
He’d never fully trusted the damn thing to begin with. Now he lived in fear of it. Fear of it taking over and leaving him trapped in wolf form for the rest of his days. He’d seen others who were being held have that happen. Hell, he’d even spent time stuck in shifted form during his period in captivity. The guards had loved that, loved taunting his wolf.
“Nothing else to say, you piece of shit?” demanded a guard as he hit Brad with a chain. This guard was relatively new but had come in with a chip on his shoulder. He wanted to show he was as hardcore as the others. That meant he was proving to be one of the more brutal in the mix. “Not so big and bad now, are you?”
The man wiped blood from his nose. Brad grinned, knowing he’d probably broken the guy’s nose only a minute prior when he’d head-butted him. A different guard whipped him with another chain, bringing yet another hiss of pain from Brad in the process.
The guards would never have had the nerve to attack him if he wasn’t chained and drugged. He’d have ripped them to shreds and they knew it. Hell, he had killed a number of them since his capture, however long ago that was.
Lifting his head, he glared at Albin, the leader of the guard group who seemed to take the most pleasure in his torture. Albin’s beady blue eyes settled on Brad, and he smirked, showing off a row of teeth Brad wanted to knock out of the man’s head. He also wanted to mount the guy’s head on his front door, but that was neither here nor there.
“Like that, wolf?” Albin demanded, his rank breath moving over Brad.
Brad managed to lift his middle finger, despite barely being able to move. “Fuck off.”
Albin’s gaze heated. He lashed out again, hitting Brad in the face with the chain. “Scream, Durant. Scream!”
Growling, Brad continued to glare at Albin as he hung limply from the chains. They were secured to the wall and that was the only reason Brad wasn’t currently on the floor—again. He’d been beaten so severely he wasn’t able to stand on his own. Not yet anyway.
Albin whipped him again and tossed his head back, laughing with his buddies about the amount of blood they were drawing. They each took another turn, beating Brad more. Brad shut off to the pain, all while ignoring their comments and mocking. He focused on what he would do to them the moment he was able to gain the upper hand. He would make their deaths slow and painful. He’d make them suffer like they’d never suffered before. He’d make them pay for what they’d done to Vic. How they’d tortured his friend until he was nothing more than a broken shade of the man he used to be. They’d inflicted so much damage on Vic that Vic had been taken out of his cell on a stretcher, and Brad had never seen him again.
He was probably dead.
And Kim? She’d been taken as well, and while he’d been in the same location as her to start with, all that had changed quickly. He had no idea if she was alive or not either, or what she might have had to endure at the hands of the enemy.
Brad’s gut twisted at the thought. Yes, his face would be the last the guards would ever see in this world. He’d make sure of that much for Vic and Kim, and for all the others the guards had hurt.
“Food break,” said Albin, nudging the man nearest him. He dropped his chain and the others followed, doing the same. “I worked up an appetite.”
Brad was starving but didn’t dare hope for food. The meals he was given were barely edible and almost always laced with drugs. He’d learned long ago the medication they slipped in his food and drink was created to keep him sedated for the most part, and sometimes horny. So horny that he’d wanted to fuck a hole through the cement walls. It took resolve unlike any he’d ever known before to hold tight to the sexual urges when the scientists forced them on him.
They’d tried to get him to breed with various females they’d brought in, but he’d held out. Just barely, but he’d managed. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could go before he broke. The last two women had been close calls. They, like the other females the doctors had administered drugs too, couldn’t handle the meds. The women had died in his arms, despite his best efforts to try to save their lives.
I’m in hell, thought Brad coolly. The knowledge that he was resigned to his fate jarred him. He wasn’t a quitter, but had to admit the fight was close to being beat out of him.
Albin slammed the cell door behind him, and his laughter echoed down the hall. Brad exhaled and closed his eyes, doing his best to catch sleep where he could. He needed the rest to heal the damage Albin and his buddies had done, and he wasn’t sure when they’d be back. They might lose interest in him for the rest of their shift, or they might very well devise even more devious ways to torture him while on their lunch break. One never knew with them.
As he hung by the chains, he started to drift off to sleep. While his mind was on the very edge of giving in to much needed rest, his thoughts became jumbled. There was a flash of long red hair and creamy pale skin and the overwhelming sense of fear washed over him, though it wasn’t his own. It was someone else’s fear.
A woman’s.
Brad struggled against his holds as the visions continued to come to him. He couldn’t make out the woman’s face or too many clear details, but the smell of fresh strawberries and mint filled his head. The combination of scents gave him a burst of energy that seemed to center in his lower region. After the beating he’d taken, he wasn’t sure how his dick still managed to get hard, but it did.
He opened his eyes slightly, seeing that he was still in his cell, still chained to the wall, and then his head fell forward, the visions continuing. He saw the pale, leggy redhead being lifted by a man he didn’t know, but he could clearly see the guy’s face. It was a face he wanted to etch into his memory. This man had caused the woman’s fear and confusion. And this man wanted to harm the female.
“No!” Brad roared, jolting and making the chains rattle. At the same moment the vision and feeling of borrowed fear vanished,
so did the smell of strawberries and mint. He instantly mourned the loss, and for the briefest of seconds he thought back to a time before he’d been held prisoner, when he used to daydream about what it would be like to have a woman of his own and a family.
There was a loud boom from the outer area. He jerked his head up, listening, his nose filling with the smell of smoke. A piece of him hoped the place was about to burn down and take him with it. Death by fire was welcome to death by slow torture.
When the door to his cell blew inward, the tiniest surge of hope filled him. Help had finally arrived. As men in masks burst in, carrying firearms and tranquilizer guns, he had a split second to wonder who they might be when one of them lifted a tranq gun, aimed it at Brad and fired several times, loading him with even more drugs.
“Grab the merchandise and let’s go,” one shouted as Brad fought to stay awake.
Not friendlies, he thought, fading away.
Chapter Four
Alice came up and off the hard floor with a quickness that surprised her, especially since it felt a lot like she’d been asleep for weeks and was possibly hit by a truck while she was out cold. The action was too much too soon. She swayed and fell, hitting the ground forearms first. Pain shot through her arms and her upper back, leaving her gritting her teeth. Her long hair fell forward over her face, and she took several deep breaths through her nose, trying to fight the urge to vomit, while her head and body were wracked with a combination of pain and something else.
What the heck happened?
Why did it feel as if she’d spent the night prior drinking to the point she forgot her own name? She looked to her side, half-expecting to find a man or rather men she didn’t know, naked and near her, a clear sign she’d lost control—again—of her succubus. But no. She was alone and she wasn’t in a bed.
Wolf's Surrender Page 3
