Page 30 of Jace

“Snake, this is a preview,” an orderly said, trying for decisive but only sounding whiny. “We can’t sell her off to you yet. This one, she’s connected to one of the hoity toity beta families. She can’t just disappear. People will ask questions and?—”

“How. Much?”

Then my body did something that just drove home the shittiness of the situation. I didn’t want this man’s hands on me, didn’t want those freakishly pale eyes staring down at me, piercing me, but the very cunt he’d described so thoroughly? A gush of slick oozed out at the sound of his growl.

It’s an instinctive reaction, I told myself furiously. You know this. Omegas can be raped, just like anyone else. This is sexual assault. He’s touching you without your permission!

That last bit somehow brought my body back under my control. I jerked my knees shut, scrambling off and away from the examining table I’d been lying on, even as my legs threatened to give out. I shoved down the hospital gown I was dressed in, my lips pulled back in a snarl.

“Ohh, baby… That was exactly the wrong thing to do,” Snake said, a slow shit-eating grin spreading across his face. “You wanna run, little girl? Fucking run. I love it when you put up a fight.”

“Snake, we can’t do this, not yet. You’ll need to pay more?—”

“Name your fucking price. This little bitch ran from me twice now, and my beast? He can’t let that shit slide.” His arm twisted, revealing a long, highly detailed snake tattoo all the way down one arm. “I need her taste in my mouth and my fangs in her flesh.”

I didn’t know why I moved, since there was nowhere to go. Back to the wall, I kept him in my line of sight while I tried to ascertain a way out, but the room appeared to be locked down tight. The orderlies got twitchy, moving towards the door, a hand shifting across the wall to a red button that seemed to be an alarm.

Yes, that, a primitive part of my mind shrieked. Alarms brought people, attention, even fire sprinklers, and I was willing to bet no one here wanted an audience for the shit they were trying to pull. So I did something I really didn’t want to do.

“Leave me alone,” I cried piteously, only partly making this shit up. Real tears pricked my eyes, because fuck this arsehole and fuck the weasel dicks who let him near me. “I don’t want you. I want Jace.”

Ouch. I was trying to goad the alpha, get him angry and stupid, so why did it feel like someone had detonated a bomb behind my sternum? My words had an instant effect, Snake’s gorgeous face becoming monstrous as his lips pulled back in a snarl. Great, now what?

Omegas were supposed to have greater speed and agility, my human biology teacher at high school told me, and I was about to put that to the test.

“You’ll want what I tell you,” Snake snarled and then lunged as a pitiful little squeak escaped me.

But I was ducking out from under his arms and scrambling over to the doors before slamming my hand down on the alarm, when the orderlies went to stop me from leaving.

The place erupted. Sirens wailed, red lights flashed, and best of all, the doors swung open on automatic, obviously in preparation for an evacuation.

“You stupid bitch!” Snake snapped, grabbing for me, but the bed was now in his way and he had to scramble over it.

“We need to get her out of here and into containment, now,” one orderly said to the other, also trying to catch me and getting in Snake’s way. “An omega running loose during an evacuation? Our heads will be on the block! Get her!”

But I didn’t give a damn about that. With adrenaline pumping through me, giving me speed and strength I wouldn’t have thought possible, I was out of that room and down the hall. The problem was, where to go?

I sprinted along the corridor, weaving through the beta orderlies as I went, somehow empowered when we went running in the same direction, but then they caught sight of my gown, marking me indelibly as what I was.

“Stop her!” came familiar voices down the hallway.

“Hey, where do you think you’re going?” someone called.

Where? I had no idea, but something told me that the swinging doors in front of us might have the answer, so I put on speed, getting closer and closer until…

A strong hand slapped down around my wrist, stopping me mid stride and yanking me to a stop, pulling me out of the flow of rushing bodies. My eyes jerked up, seeing him for the first time.

Chapter Ten

Sloane

I looked up at the beta man. Brown curly hair, medium blue eyes, the kind of face that could easily get lost in the crowd. Those eyes appeared sensitive as they shot from me to the corridor I had just come from, but these, they were familiar.

“You really shouldn’t have run,” he said, grimacing as the alarm blared around us. “And hitting the alarm? I’m guessing it was you who set it off, because no other chump here would be that stupid. That sends the whole place into lockdown and gets the cops around here, poking their nose into things that they really don’t need to.”

I blinked up at him, trying to work out if he was the friend I needed or the adversary I did not. The barman? What the fuck was the barman from Jace’s bar doing here…wearing an orderly uniform? I shook my head, trying to shake the feeling of foreboding off. Maybe he’d gotten another job? What were the chances? It was possible, right?

Yeah, my adrenaline flooded system wasn’t buying that.

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