Page 36 of His Master

“He forced her to go through heat without an alpha?” My jaw dropped. I couldn’t imagine the cruelty of that.

Victor’s face hardened. “She made it to the second day before the madness of a denied heat got the best of her. She slit her wrists with a kitchen knife.”

I gaped, feeling absolutely awful for Aunt Rebecca. It made me hate Vincent Woodbury even more.

“I was born a few summers after that,” Victor went on. “My father was Uncle Vincent’s brother. Both my parents were betas, and when they actually managed to produce an alpha son, Uncle Vincent was furious. He swept in immediately and claimed me as his own.”

“He didn’t!” I gasped, horrified by that, too.

Victor nodded once. “He waited until I was five, mind you, and until it was absolutely certain I was an alpha. The odds of two betas producing an alpha, or an omega, offspring is less than fifty percent. Uncle Vincent claimed I would be wasted on two betas, so he took it upon himself to raise me from school age on.”

Victor was silent for a moment. I could feel the bitterness and the hurt of a child who had probably been torn from a loving family and forced into a cold life of harsh expectations rippling from him.

“I communicated with my parents and saw them more than Uncle Vincent knew,” Victor went on. “The servants made sure of it.”

“Are your parents still alive?” I asked cautiously.

Victor shook his head. “No. Mom died of cancer when I was twenty-five. Dad sort of just faded away after that, though he only passed about three years ago.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said, touching Victor’s knee the way he’d touched mine earlier.

Victor shook his head. “I didn’t make them proud, in the end. Uncle Vincent got his claws into me too early. I…I haven’t always been the man I wanted to be.”

He said all of that with his eyes focused tightly on the road ahead of us. I could feel the hurt and the shame of the life he’d once lived.

Surprisingly, he didn’t try to hide that from me.

“I didn’t know Hayden Kipling was your brother,” he said, glancing to me as he looked to the right while turning at an intersection. “I can’t imagine the pain his kidnapping must have caused you.”

I smiled weakly at Victor. “Honestly, it was only a blip. Hayden managed to call me while he was in captivity, and I was able to help rescue him. The whole ordeal only lasted a few hours.”

“Still,” Victor said, making another turn that took us into the heart of Barrington. “I don’t know how you can look me in the eye, knowing what happened, let alone….” He let his sentence go, his emotions a jumble.

“It wasn’t you,” I said simply. “The fact that you feel bad about it tells me you’re a good person with a conscience.”

Victor merely huffed ironically at that, then made another turn into a parking garage.

I didn’t want my master to continue to feel guilty about something that wasn’t really his fault, but there wasn’t much I could do about that. I had the sense that Victor’s sad childhood contributed to his views of the world now, that he’d probably embraced his uncle’s ways at some point, but that the influence of his parents had stopped him from becoming the same sort of alpha as Vincent Woodbury. I actually felt sorrier for Vivien Woodbury, even though the jury was still out on whether she would be a help or a hindrance to what Victor was trying to do.

Trouble started as soon as we pulled around to the valet parking station and got out of the car. The valet on duty glanced warily at Victor, but took his keys.

“You’re not going to confiscate my car, are you?” Victor joked with the young woman.

“No, sir,” she said, albeit a little hesitantly, like that’s exactly what she’d had orders to do. “I might just park it on the street, though, and then keep your keys with me.”

Victor nodded in understanding. I would have been willing to bet the valet staff had been given orders not to let Victor park, but the valet seemed more loyal to Victor. That, at least, was a good sign.

The next sign of trouble came when Artemis met us at the door.

“Your security access codes have been deactivated,” Artemis said instead of a greeting. “Get ready for resistance as we head upstairs.”

“Understood,” Victor said with a nod as he and Artemis fell into step together once we were inside the ground floor foyer. “Simon, walk between us. I don’t want you to get lost.”

“Yes, M?—”

I glanced worriedly to Artemis as I caught up and took my place between the two, big men. Every cell in my body wanted to embrace my slave role, even though we were so far outside of our play space, but every bit of shame and embarrassment for the things I craved came back to me and more. This wasn’t the safe world of a fantasy, this was reality.

More than that, Artemis had seen me deep in my slave role. He’d seen me naked and hard and messy. And even though it hadn’t actually been him, the extraordinarily vivid fantasy that Victor had shared me with Artemis was still hot in my mind.

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