Page 13 of Hide or Die

My head still ached, though it was getting better quickly.Tooquickly. I knew I would need to play up the injury for at least another few days, to cover the fact that my pre-heat omega hormones were supercharging the healing process. I’d been knocked unconscious. A beta wouldn’t have bounced back from this kind of head wound so easily. I could only hope the grime on my face would distract from the speed at which the bruise was fading.

Jax had fared quite a bit worse than I had in the crash. The shrapnel wound in his side had stopped bleeding after a couple of hours, but the left half of his face was bruised badly enough that even alpha healing would take some time. More worrying, the other piece of shrapnel was still buried in his arm, too deep to pull out without some kind of tweezers or forceps. Infection was almost a certainty—and while Jax hadn’t been lying when he said alphas were hard to kill, that didn’t meanimpossibleto kill.

Despite his quiet confidence that rescue would be on its way soon, the hours dragged on with no sign of anything going on outside of our little prison, for either good or ill.

The worst part of it was, I desperately needed some kind of a contingency plan, and yet I couldn’t say a single word about my heat. Without Jax’s presence, Kam and I might at least have tried to brainstorm some kind of damage control. With him here, I didn’t dare speak about it, except in the vaguest possible terms regarding my ‘lost medication.’

I needed pills that I didn’t have. There was no way to get them. If enough time passed without them, it would bebad. None of this was helpful in the least. And indeed, as the clock ticked inevitably toward my oncoming heat, rescue still might not be enough to avert my own personal disaster.

One didn’t simply run down to the local pharmacy to buy heat suppressors. Getting them without being caught was a complicated and expensive process. If the cavalry showed up and pulled us out of here an hour from now, I still wouldn’t be able to get them in time unless my luggage had miraculously survived the crash and someone thought to bring it along during the rescue operation.

My only possible hope would be to disappear into some remote bolthole, where I could hide myself away before I started perfuming. Because once I did, it would advertise my omega-in-heat status to every single person in my vicinity who had a nose.

Idesperatelydidn’t want to have to ride out a heat cycle alone. And it was probably moot, anyway—I didn’t have a clue how I could find a safe hideout in an unfamiliar country during the aftermath of a terrorist kidnapping. Even after we were rescued, I’d be under constant watch. Medical checks. Debriefing. Round the clock guards. There was no way I’d be able to hide what was going on.

Time ticked on, inexorable. I marked it by my companions’ periods of sleep... by the guards’ infrequent deliveries of bad food and stale water.

By the slow slide of my body toward disaster.

Days passed. The guards wouldn’t talk to any of us, in any of the languages we knew. In desperation, I even had Jax curse at them in halting Turkish.

Nothing.

Dark smudges of worry and exhaustion were growing beneath Kam’s eyes. He knew exactly what was at stake...exactly how few options I had left. I was certain that the time when I would normally have taken the heat blocker had come and gone, as the hours and days marched slowly by. My pheromone suppressors would be giving up the fight within the next twenty-four hours, at most. And... what then?

Unless Jax succumbed to some kind of blood infection bad enough to render him unconscious, he would figure out what was happening immediately. I knew almost nothing about him beyond the obvious. He was subjugated. Chemically castrated—so at least if someone raped me, it would be our beta captors and not him. He seemed like a pleasant and respectful enough individual—now, at least. But alphas had a reputation. Yes, it was a stereotype... but with the sheltered beta life I’d led, I didn’t know enough alphas personally to know how much of that stereotype was bounded in truth.

In fact—sad as it was—my interaction with Jax, Flynn, and Alex was the closest contact I’d ever knowingly had with alphas. Maybe there had been others hiding in plain sight like Kam and I were. If so, they’d been doing a good enough job that I’d been none the wiser.

It hardly mattered, though. Whether or not Jax turned into a caveman at the first whiff of my pheromones, once the guards came in to find me writhing on the floor and flooding the cell with heat-scent, it would all be over. They would either kill me—with or without including some combination of torture and gang rape first—or they’d try to use me as some kind of leverage against my government. And I had little doubt the UFNA would cheerfully hand me over to the Committee for trial and execution as an unregistered omega, if it came down to it. Otherwise, the scandal would rock the parliamentary government to its core.

I was pacing, scratching absently at my forearms with my fingernails. I wanted to disappear into the dirt floor... to climb the stone walls and hide in a crevice like a rat. I needed to get away. I needed to be somewhere else.Anywhereelse.

“Madam Ambassador,” Jax said, his manner still perfectly formal and proper despite several days spent huddled on a bare dirt floor nursing untreated wounds. “I know there’s something you two aren’t telling me, and I think it’s time you did. Is it to do with your medical condition, or is there something else?”

Kam’s shoulders hunched a little tighter, and he ran a nervous hand through his dark hair. I was spared having to come up with an answer by the sound of the lock on the cell door releasing. Irrational desperation drove me toward it as it opened. I rushed at the two familiar guards, heedless of the semi-automatic rifle in my face. In my peripheral vision, I was dimly aware of Jax hauling himself to his feet... of Kam gasping my name in warning.

“Please,” I begged the guards, forgetting to speak in French as my blood buzzed and itched in my veins. “Please, you have to let me out of here! I can’t be in this cell—”

The one with the AR-15 used the barrel to shove me roughly backward. I stumbled and hit the ground in a sprawl. The impact jarred my brain loose of its heat-daze in the same instant Jax growled and gathered himself to lunge.

“No!” I cried, as the rifle swung around to cover the enraged alpha. “Shit! Jax, standdown!”

Jax clenched his fists at his sides in frustration, but he planted his feet and did not charge.

“Just... sit down, Jax. Please.” Kam spoke in his calmest voice. His body language was open and appeasing—the kind of posture every omega knew how to employ instinctively from early childhood. He switched to French, keeping the same even tone as he spoke to the guards. “We’re calm now. There’s no need for violence.”

“Violence is how we make change.” The new voice came from the open doorway, speaking awkward, heavily accented English.

He strode in, unfamiliar, but dressed in the same mix of local clothing style and military surplus gear as the guards. His air of command was obvious.

“Please,” I told him. “We need to talk to you. We can come to some kind of arrangement...”

He ignored me, and tossed a battered notebook on the ground in front of us.

“You and you.” He pointed first at Kam, then at me. “Learn this speech. Tomorrow we make video.”

“If you want money, our government will pay,” I tried desperately, knowing it was a lie. Knowing I was throwing away every ounce of dignity I had left by even saying the words. What must Kam think of me right now? What must Jax think?

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