One Last Try Read online

  Joth ended testing, observation, and study at our father’s death, when those visits came to a halt.

  Humans had demanded the pack turn my brother over to face justice when authorities had identified his first victim as a human girl. Our kind would have put him down, mercifully. That was shifter justice. A sick animal should not be permitted to suffer and a dangerous animal even less so. If he hadn’t killed the little girl, Joth would have died for his crimes, but he did murder the human. Our treaty with the towns compelled the pack to hand Joth over for punishment. Because of the treaty, he lived and became an endless source of fascination to humans, who were rarely awarded the opportunity to study us and never before so closely.

  In my darker moments, I believed he’d killed the little girl to ensure his survival, but most of the time, I was more rational. My brother was a monster, true enough, but that just made him more leery of human cages. He’d never prevaricated about the murders, though. He’d confessed, answering their questions with frank and disconcerting openness. Those questions he could answer, at any rate. Why he’d done it, unfortunately, was as much a mystery to him as to everyone else. That, he could not answer.

  To this day, no one could. Solving the enigma of my brother hadn’t relented in six years, and Joth had cooperated with the intense study right up to the moment our father died.

  Which was what had led to me sitting in a plastic chair in a Westfield visiting room again. From sheer desperation, the humans and my new alpha had thrown me to the wolf—literally—in hopes of breaking the stalemate.

  Though no one consulted me about it, I guessed my return to the prison indicated the gamble had paid off. Either my brother had agreed to resume testing or he was negotiating it. I wouldn’t be here otherwise. Joth had asked to see me for years, without success. My father had refused. I was too damaged, too vulnerable. Too weak.

  Yet, there I sat for a second time: live bait.

  I didn’t fidget. My pulse didn’t race. I’d wiped my mind of worries the moment a beta had fetched me for the dressing routine that had preceded my first visit. Unlike my brother and the odd affection humans entertained about free will, I had no choice about where I would spend my Tuesday. I complied with a repeat of the miserable horror as readily as I’d submitted to Dio rutting me. No complaint slipped from my lips, nor any sign of turmoil or rebelliousness escaped me. I’d managed the visit before and I would damn well cope again—better than last week too. I had my pride. Little else, but pride, I clung to.

  None of them would ever guess how desperately I needed to flee this small dank room that stank of old cigarettes and desperation. They’d never know how deep the sight of my brother sliced into me or realize the ache even casual chatter with him wrought. Joth wouldn’t see me sweat. Neither would the humans or my pack.

  Fuck them.

  Fuck them all.

  Lucky for me, I’d had years to practice my facade of numb indifference, else I’d be humanely put down as my brother should have been or land in an isolation cell next to him, another lab animal for humans to experiment on. Healthy wolves could afford rage and the hurt fueling it. Shifters uncorrupted by a taint of evil could snarl, bite, and rebel against their fate. Not me, but especially not for an omega, barren or not. I was as helpless today as I’d been the night Joth’s claws had gutted me.

  I regulated my breathing and retreated into a placid cocoon the click of the door opening on the other side of the glass could not disturb. I stared at the metal tabletop, the telephone receiver I would be forced to use to communicate with Joth hanging on the cinderblock wall beside me. He froze in the opposite doorway, nostrils flaring as guards released him from his restraints.

  Fierce alarm shivered up my spine.

  With Joth freed, the humans left us. Lacking the enhanced senses of a shifter, they had no means of perceiving the sudden danger I felt vibrating in the air despite the walls and window glass separating me from my brother. Ignorant, perilously foolish, the guards simply locked the door, sealing us inside.

  If I lifted my chin to meet his stare, I’d see the eyes of the killer I’d met six years ago. Stomach knotted, I kept my gaze down, my shoulders slumped, and my muscles loose. The less I resisted, the greater my chance of leaving the visiting room alive.

  My brother shuffled to an identical plastic chair on the other side of the window. He kicked it to the side with his foot, giving him room to sit. He sprawled in his seat, menacing in his self-assurance. He lifted a hand not yet tipped with sharp tearing claws to snatch the telephone on his side and waited for me to do the same.

  Trembling, I obeyed.

  “You’ve been fucked, omega,” he said, his growl predatory and furious.

  I’d heard that voice before. Once. Eyes shutting at the blast of pain, I pressed my lips together. My fingers clenched the telephone receiver so tightly the joints ached.

  Joth sniffed. “You haven’t been bred.” He inhaled again, lustily, the sound carrying over the line. “But you stink of another’s scent, a male scent.”

  I gulped, mind whirling. He could smell me? How? A foot of concrete and a solid pane of thick security glass separated us and prison officials had repeatedly assured me that my brother couldn’t compromise the visiting room built especially for him. Each side of the room was distinct from the other, the electric powering each on different breakers. The video feeds didn’t lead to the same computer, the only shared connection the telephone line. If Joth lost control and shifted, he wouldn’t get to me through that window. The same glass protected the President, for fuck’s sake. Everyone, human and shifter, thought I was crazy, but none of them wanted me dead. Not lately anyway.

  “Nothing to say?” my brother taunted me.

  I shook my head. Hell, no, I had nothing to say. Not a damn word.

  Goose bumps pebbled my skin at his answering chuckle. “You aren’t trying to make a baby, are you?”

  Wild terror filled me. I shook my head again, confident he wouldn’t smell a lie on me because, no actually, I didn’t think I could breed for Dio or anyone else. Joth had ended any genuine chance of that.

  “Good.” The satisfaction in his laugh proved Joth believed so too. He leaned forward, lifting his hand to trace a finger down the glass separating us. “If you aren’t breeding for them, you’ve no reason to let them fuck you. Stupid slut.”

  His words were like a body blow, a sucker punch straight to my gut. My breath left my lungs in a quiet whoosh, the fear and hurt almost more than I could stand. Their cameras were recording. Surely, this would be enough? Because this wasn’t Joth. The dangerous killer who spoke to me now wasn’t my brother. This man was the monster… if you could call him a man at all. Claws had erupted from his fingertips in the brief moments since the human guards had shut the door, the scrape of Joth’s fingertips on the phone’s cheap plastic stirring tiny hairs at my nape to urgent attention.

  I wasn’t dealing with my brother, but rather my brother’s wolf. The sick, twisted, malevolent creature that had taken three lives, four if you counted the wasted shell our father had become before he finally died. Five, counting me.

  The President might be confident in the strength of that glass, but I’d met the monster before. I suddenly wasn’t as sure of my safety. My stomach balled, the phantom memory of claws stabbing into my tender middle as intense today as when he’d gutted me.

  “Nox?”

  I shuddered, hating how familiar that voice sounded. Intimate. Like my brother’s. It reminded me of secret giggles under the covers, flashlights stolen from a kitchen drawer so I could stay up at night swapping jokes and not be scared of the dark. The wildness rumbling in it echoed the joyful woops and screams when a younger Joth had leaped, hands outstretched for the rope we swung on to dive into deeper water in the miniature lake not far from my den.

  This man who was not my brother, somehow, still was.

  I jumped when he pounded the metal table on his side of the visiting room and was wholly unsurprised at the
dent cratering the surface when Joth lifted his fist. I glanced at the door behind him, hope surging. They’d come soon. My brother’s aggression, his struggle with shifting, would cut the visit short.

  “No, pay attention,” Joth said, the alpha’s command in his voice a heart-wrenching hint at who and what he might have been had his beast not been polluted by… by… “Look at me.”

  I’d rather yank out my eyeballs, but sterile or not, I was still an omega. I could no more deny the order of an alpha than I could live without breathing. My gaze skittered from the dented table to the chambray shirt our dead father had provided him, then to his forearm. Wiry black hair spiked from his skin, the denser pelt of his emerging beast silent testimony to who controlled Joth. Heart thudding, I couldn’t force my gaze higher, not even to his throat.

  Joth’s frustrated grunt echoed from the phone. “Do you know why I didn’t kill you, Nox?”

  Ripping my chin down, I jerked my head from side to side. God knows I’d wondered. He’d shredded the girl and had eaten substantially of her flesh before Kinessa had discovered him. Joth hadn’t eaten our brother or our mother, but he’d still torn them apart. Regardless of the swiftness of his attack when I had finally wandered home that day, I remembered that much of the horror. The ragged red chunks had staggered me. I’d frozen and stared, uncomprehending, at pulpy swaths of blood. Then Joth had cracked my skull with our baseball bat and I’d known only crushing darkness and the agony enflaming my belly as he’d stabbed me. My memories blacked out there, but the fact remained that I was the only victim Joth hadn’t decapitated or dismembered. Though egregious, my wounds weren’t mortal either, not for a shifter.

  He’d let me live.

  Not our mother. Not Kinessa, or that little girl.

  Me. Only me.

  “I didn’t have to take your life to destroy you.” My brother scowled at a screened window that slid open in the door behind him. “And I still don’t.” He snarled at the tip of a tranquilizer gun sighting him. “Remember that, omega: I still don’t.” His clawed hand smacked his neck at a puff of air from the door delivering a dart filled with I didn’t know what.

  He tore the syringe free and threw himself at the window separating us. I cringed in my seat at the impact, air locked in my lungs while I waited to see if the President was as safe as humans believed. The glass cracked, a spider web spreading that, thank God, obscured my view of Joth rearing back to strike the window again and again.

  The glass held.

  Shoulders slumped, I glued my stare to the tile floor until Joth lost his fight with whatever drug the humans had shot into him. I heard rather than saw the crash of his collapse, as well as the barked orders and tapping footsteps when guards rushed him.

  “Don’t let him fuck you again, Nox,” my brother shouted, words slurring. “I don’t want to hurt you. Don’t make me—”

  They dragged him out the door before he finished his threat.

  Yolanda, my human escort inside Westfield, guided me through the administration building of the prison with a great deal more haste than the week before. She passed me—and a flash drive—to my driver who peeled out of the parking lot like his ass was on fire. He darted glances at me in the rearview mirror while navigating traffic, but once we reached the suburbs of the towns, he must have realized I wasn’t about to lose my shit because he slowed the Cherokee to a more reasonable speed. The tense vigilance of his surveillance tapered.

  My belly twisted, sick and sour. My hands digging into the seat cushions shook, but I was all right. Better than all right. I was lost inside my mind, a trick I’d learned after the murders. I retreated into my thoughts and let the real world vanish. I could focus on anything or nothing save the white noise of my blood pumping inside my ears. Today, I concentrated on my plans for a bench for Dio’s cabin, the design, the supplies I’d need, and what decorative elements might suit him. In my mind, I didn’t have a brother or a barren womb the stranger who’d become my new alpha hoped to fill. The biggest problems I had involved acquiring the right blue wood stain, one that wouldn’t be a misery to my sensitive nose, but would nevertheless make the tribal pattern of engravings on the new bench I imagined pleasing to the eye.

  The driver dumped me at the log cabin again. I waited on the rickety bench inside the door. Again.

  No one called for me. No one came. A rectangle of sunlight crept across the oak floor as the remainder of the afternoon passed. Voices rumbled from the other room, the volume growing and quieting in the cycle of their arguing. With my sensitive ears, I could’ve eavesdropped. They were fighting about me, at least in part, but I didn’t care. What good would it do me to know? If my opinions or feelings mattered, I would’ve been consulted, but they left me on the hard bench. Probably agreed with the rest of the pack, that I was crazy, broken, or both. Maybe they were right because I whiled away that Tuesday pondering which joints I would use to piece together the wood, considering whether I should wait until the walnut I’d cut had properly seasoned or go ahead with my supply of oak, and thought of where I could forage plants for natural dyes rather than using harsh chemicals.

  Shifters came and went.

  Shadows grew longer.

  My empty stomach grumbled.

  I could’ve built a thousand benches by the time Asa rested his palm on my shoulder. “Nox? Follow me.”

  Instead of going into the great room to be fucked by Dio again, Asa led me to a bedroom. The bed was a prefabricated monstrosity with a headboard made from chipboard, but the quilt stretching across the king-size mattress was nice, an intricate pattern of tranquil blues and greens. A pair of boots rested below a naked wall hook. A stack of battered paperbacks cluttered the stand by the bed.

  The space smelled of pine. Of Dio.

  “Shower is through there.” Asa pointed to a door across the bedroom. “Put your clothes in the hamper.”

  Mentally adding bedroom furniture onto my to-do list, I walked to Dio’s bathroom. I stripped and put the clothes that weren’t mine in the designated basket. Since I eschewed the main house to bathe in the stream near my den, I hadn’t showered indoors for a while, but crazy wasn’t synonymous with stupid. I figured the various knobs out, and when luxuriously steaming water sprayed from the showerhead, I ducked underneath.

  Bliss.

  Though tempted to enjoy the hot water pelting me, I didn’t dawdle. I washed my hair twice. With a bar of soap, I scrubbed my skin until it pinked, not easy considering my work outdoors had made me as tan as a tree nut. Since this was Dio’s shower and his bedroom, I took particular care in cleansing my ass and groin. To hell with Joth’s threats, I knew why I was there.

  When I exited the shower, the basket containing the clothes I’d worn to the prison had vanished and only a single white fluffy towel graced the sink vanity, which confirmed my purpose in Dio’s private rooms, should there be any doubt. I dried off quickly and thoroughly. Since someone had bothered to leave a brush beneath the towel, I ran it through my damp hair too.

  I didn’t own any mirrors, nor build furniture that included them as a deliberate choice. I didn’t mind the scars. I wasn’t self-conscious of them and didn’t consider any of mine particularly disfiguring. The silvery line on my face running jaggedly from my left temple to below my earlobe was a scar, not an indictment, a visible reminder of the damage a monster could inflict. The uglier tangle of scars on my abdomen didn’t bother me either. Why should I care? No one else gave a moment’s thought to how I looked, least of all me. I wanted to appeal to my alpha, though. I didn’t know if he had decided to fuck me again to send a message to my brother, to try to breed me, or simply because an unmated omega no longer under the protection of kin translated to fuss-free entertainment for his dick.

  I kind of hoped for the last reason—at least he wouldn’t rut me out of a sense of duty—so I brushed the wild cloud of my hair, styling it forward to cover the scar on my face. The sun had bleached my dirty blond hair into a wide range of hues including platinum
streaks that were marginally attractive. Judging my appearance reasonably presentable, I hung the towel on a bar to dry and returned to the bedroom naked. I stumbled to a halt at Dio shutting the door to the outside world.

  Honestly, I’d expected to wait. What else had the interminable hours on the bench outside the great room been if not a lesson in my insignificance? And why ruin that with behavior I might be deluded enough to judge as eager?

  Then again, I could hardly mistake the harsh contours of Dio’s features as glad or anticipatory. The gracefulness of his fingers as he flipped the lock on the door and the fluid elegance of his body when he pivoted to face me, however, didn’t show reluctance. His stare flickered with the yellow glints of his beast, but he otherwise banked whatever hungers I’d stirred in him.

  I could not read him.

  Fortunate for me that I hardly required sharper senses and physical cues to recognize what was needful. Feet leaden, knees shaking, I walked to meet him at the door. Upon reaching him, I dropped to kneel, my arms dangling loosely at my sides, my gaze down. Only the pattern of the bedroom rug and my alpha’s boots filled my world.

  He grunted. Fingers tunneled into my hair and gripped tight. My mouth watered at the scritch of his zipper lowing and he used his fist to pull my chin—my mouth—up. My pulse thrummed. I’d never seen a cock this close before and the beauty he dragged from his fly did not disappoint. Hard and growing harder still with his stroking grip, he was the same length as I was, but thicker, especially at the base where his knot had already begun to swell. I licked my lips at the stretch of his foreskin when he paused to play with the hooded head and my stomach growled at the bead of fluid smearing from the tip.