Page 1 of Bitter Heat
PROLOGUE
The prison smelledlike piss and fear.
The scent had soaked into Kerry’s clothes and hair during the days he’d spent locked inside. It choked him even as guards led him away from the prison’s black iron gates and barbed-wire-covered walls. The bruises all over his body from his alpha’s rough treatment made the guards’ manhandling difficult to bear, but he didn’t have the energy to protest or the strength to cry out.
The guard on his right, the one who spoke with a deep, sub-Calitan accent, placed a hand on top of his head to prevent hitting it against the roof of the waiting, chauffeured car as the guard on his left maneuvered him inside. As if that small gesture was going to cushion him from injury—too little, too late.
“He’s clear,” the guard said, his accent thick, before ducking down to regard Kerry with carefully tempered sympathy in his eyes. Kerry thought he might be the same guard who’d cared for him after the heat had ended last time, too. “Have a safe trip home, all right?”
Kerry didn’t acknowledge him. He was too dazed to speak after his long ordeal. Aching all over from head to hole and down to his toes and back again, he wanted to cry, but tears didn’t come. His legs quaked, too exhausted from days of enforced heat spent with his imprisoned, contracted alpha, only sustained throughout by disgusting prison food and the primal urges he wished he could snuff out.
Almost as much as he wishedhecould be snuffed out.
Safe in the backseat of a plush, Monhundy-owned car, driven by a man hired by his wealthy in-laws and entrusted with Kerry’s well-being, he smoothed his now-wrinkled silk shirt with shaking hands. He didn’t understand why his in-laws always insisted he dress nicely when he came for these visits. No one saw him in his clothes but guards and prison officials. He was naked by the time they led him to Wilbet. But the Monhundys would never approve of Kerry appearing in “public” looking anything but well-heeled.
Outside, the sun poured down—the heat of summer already in full blaze in the arid county around the prison. The air fairly shimmered with heat, and he longed for the cool shadows of his beloved mountains, the wetness of the lake, and his pater’s comforting embrace.
Kerry pressed the tips of his fingers to his eyelids, blocking out the light, as gorge rose in his throat. This was the third heat his in-laws forced him to endure since Wilbet went to prison for the rape of Calitan district prostitutes, and each was more humiliating and violent than the last. There had been times leading up to this heat when he’d considered taking matters into his own hands. A knife, a gun, a rope—it didn’t matter what he used. All that mattered was stopping the trauma before it started again.
But he couldn’t do that to his pater. The Monhundys and their heartless desire for an heir of their son’s flesh and blood could be wolf-goddamned as far as Kerry was concerned. But his pater needed him. It’d tear a hole in his heart too large to ever heal if Kerry acted on his urges to end things.
After Kerry had settled in the backseat, the driver pulled the car away from the prison, jostling over the potholes lining the road in front of it. Pain shot through Kerry’s core, and he caught a whiff of Wilbet’s semen still lodged inside, left over from the last knot they’d shared. It now slipped free. Just like the first two heats after Wilbet’s conviction, the prison guards, armed with guns to keep Wilbet’s violent impulses in check, had ignored any non-lethal abuse Wilbet wanted to pile on. They’d only pulled Kerry away from his alpha and out of the heat room when the last wave had finally, completely passed. Like always, they’d had a doctor examine him for any serious injury, watched him dress with shaking limbs, and finally sent him away without a shower or a bath.
Like always.
The prison scent lingered, yes, but as far as Kerry was concerned, Wilbet’s scent was far worse. His contracted mate was anathema to him now, and yet Kerry was still legally bound to him so long as the Monhundy family refused to dissolve their side of the agreement. In fact, his in-laws now legally held the reins on Kerry’s life choices, finances, and heats since Wilbet’s incarceration. It was a side notation in the contract that Kerry had never thought to question, never imagining it would come to fruition. He’d been more concerned about the dissolution of the contract in the event of Wilbet’s untimely death—andthathad been negotiated in his favor. He’d failed to take into account other contingency clauses.
Another slip of semen led his stomach to rebel hard. Kerry managed to alert the driver to his predicament, and the car pulled over to the side of the road with a quick jerk. Kerry shoved the heavy door open, leaned out, and vomited onto the road. The rancid foulness heaved up from deep inside like poison from his soul.
“Reckon it took, then?” the driver said when Kerry wiped his mouth with a crumpled handkerchief and sat back in his seat. Kerry pulled the car door closed again with a weak slam. “Going to be a pater, you think?”
Kerry swallowed back another heave and said nothing, staring out the window. Tears welled in his eyes as they drove away from the behemoth of a prison. It stood—a solid, dark brick building full of shiver-inducing cruelty—backlit by a white sun and a hot, blank sky. As blank as Kerry’s future, and just as empty.
Smoothing a hand over his shirt again, and wishing he had a jacket to stop his chills, Kerry closed his eyes to pray to wolf-god that there would be no child. He prayed for a solution. A way out of his wretched life. Most of all, he prayed for freedom.
Because he’d never dare pray for love again.
PART ONE
Late Spring
CHAPTER ONE
The two-story, whiteboarding house was tucked into the mountains five hours southeast of the city and an hour and a half from the nearest supply town. The ride up from the train station in the rickety wagon had left Janus tired and aching all over. After paying the waggoneer—a beta with a grizzled, brown beard and a lot of missing teeth—Janus sent him away, choosing to handle his two medium-sized suitcases himself. Behind him, the afternoon sun set in a ridge of the mountains, lighting a fire in the windows of the house and reflecting the orange radiance of the sky.
He gazed up at the place he’d chosen to be his home for the next year. The steep, angled roofline high above the second story and sparkling clean windows beneath the eaves indicated a well-tended attic space. The stone path going to the porch and around the side of the house was meticulously cared for and weeded. The house had been newly painted sometime in the last few years. There were several storage buildings at the edge of the lawn cleared away from the encroaching mountainside, and they stood in good order, as well. All this was clear evidence of the boarding house being owned by a proud and decent man.
It was also evidence that this new home would share none of the opulence of any of the numerous Heelies-funded apartments and mansions Janus had lived in throughout his life. He had no doubt that with time, these new circumstances would put his resolve to be independent to the test for sure. Yet, there was nothing he could find from a thorough study of the boarding house’s exterior to note as a real complaint. It was the kind of place many less entitled men would find quite nice, if not grand. Only the very spoiled, like himself, would ever turn up their noses at the earnest modesty of it all.
Janus hefted his luggage, making his way from the driveway to the bottom of the steps leading up to a wide, wraparound porch. There he paused, taking it all in again, searching for doubts inside, half-expecting to find them easily. And yet, he uncovered nothing of the kind.
After spending too much of his life at the tit of his uncle Doxan Heelies’ fortune, Janus had determined to make his own way for better or worse. Even in the face of a clapboard house with little more than running water and apparent cleanliness to recommend it, he remained determined. It was both a matter of prideandpart of his likely fruitless attempt to improve himself as a person.
Be careful, he warned himself sternly as he gazed up at the blue shutters and the sturdy roofline. He shouldn’t write the experiment off as a failure before he truly began. No matter how doomed his cousin Xan seemed to think his personal reform might be, he had Caleb’s encouraging words to cling to even if hehadlost the beautiful omega himself. Janus sighed as a familiar sadness washed over his heart.
Nowtherewas the regret he’d been looking for. He’d committed far too many mistakes in his past—errors of vanity, egoism, and hubris—but hurting Caleb was the worst of them. He’d let the brilliant, handsome man down, and all because of his ego and his selfish focus on prurient needs.
Janus shook those thoughts away. Caleb was happy now. He’d embraced the most unlikely of lives and found joy in it. For his part, Janus had accepted that he’d lost any chance with Caleb years ago, and he hoped he’d find a way to embrace life and joy, as well. With any luck, this new path would help him. Wolf-god knew his old ways of coping hadn’t brought those virtues to him.
