Page 57 of Hide or Die

The man who’d dragged me inside shoved me onto one of the benches. I yelped as my weight landed on my cuffed hands, fingers bending painfully. He wrenched my arms to the side so he could get at the cuffs and clipped a hanging length of rusty chain to them. The chain was attached to a bolt in the frame of the van above my head, and short enough that I had to hunch awkwardly to one side to keep the strain off my shoulders. It occurred to me in a detached sort of way that if the van got in a wreck and I went flying, both of my arms would be wrenched out of their sockets—maybe torn off completely.

My guard settled on the opposite bench, arms crossed and legs spread wide, leering at me. His badge was city police, not federal security—not that it ultimately mattered.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked in a wavering voice. “What precinct?”

“We’re taking you straight to hell, bitch,” he said. He reached down and cupped his crotch suggestively, his grin widening. “But ask me nice, and maybe I’ll take you to heaven first, you little omega slut.”

The words slid off, not sticking. There was no point in protesting. I was an unregistered omega. I had no rights. It felt odd to think that I’d been in a meeting room with international dignitaries not so long ago, hammering out policy and treaty details. The fact that these two worlds could coexist on top of each other seemed wrong, somehow.

I didn’t respond, and the man’s expression twisted into anger. He worked his jaw for a moment and spat, the gob of saliva hitting my bare shin and sliding down.

“Stupid cunt,” he said. “Walkin’ around like you’re something special. You ain’t special. You ain’t nothin’.” He spat again. This time it landed on the floor by my feet.

When I still didn’t rise to the bait, he seemed to lose interest. The van rocked and juddered as it sped through the early morning gloom, the chain tugging at my wrists when I swayed. After an eternity, it slowed and turned before backing up and finally coming to a jerky stop. The engine turned off, and I heard doors opening and slamming. A fist rapped on the side, and my guard lumbered to his feet.

“End of the line,” he said with a smirk, looming over me as he unhooked the chain and hauled me upright.

The van doors opened. The vehicle had backed up to an institutional-looking rear entrance. Dirty brick walls framed steel double doors that stood open and waiting, like the maw of some great beast. Fluorescent overhead lighting glared from within. I tried to crane around—to get a look at the city and try to identify what part of it we were in—but it was no good. The glare was too bright, the night still too dark, and I was dragged inside before I saw anything of use.

There would be no phone call to a lawyer for me. No chance to tap the brakes on what was about to happen. The SWAT officers handed me over to the precinct’s intake officers. I was stripped, cavity-searched, dressed in a scratchy gray smock, and handcuffed again. My blood was drawn from a vein in my arm, and I was finally shuffled off to a freezing cell in an empty part of the station. The door clanged shut, and a few moments later, I was alone with the echo of my own unsteady breathing—once more a prisoner trapped in a cell, but this time without my packmate or an alpha protector for company.

Sometime in the coming hours, representatives from the Committee would come. I would be transferred into their custody and remanded for a sham trial. Not only was my life as good as over, but Enoch Sloane would use my case as fuel for his paranoid conspiracy-mongering. I might well have just brought down Prime Minister Fairbanks’ government with my stubborn insistence on staying to fight, rather than running when I’d had the chance.

Did they have Kam in custody, too? Was he even now huddled alone in some other bare cell, somewhere in the city?

Would I ever see him again?

I sank down to sit with my back against the sleeping bench with its thin, plastic-covered mattress. Covering my eyes with my hands, I curled forward against the staggering ache of my own stupidity.

“Oh, Kam,” I whispered, a barely audible rasp. “I’m so,sosorry.”

TWENTY-TWO

Alex

“YOU’RE SURE about this?” I asked, my tone flat. Beside me, Beckett kept his hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road ahead as we pulled up to a stoplight in the murky, early morning gray.

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