The taste of blood was thick in her mouth, the red stuff under her fingernails, all ignored as her mind flew away in the intensity of her orgasm. Time seemed irrelevant, an endless field of grey... until a face distorted her vision. The beast whose heartbeat hammered against her red stained breasts asserted himself. Iron shaded eyes full of history and greatness, the silver of deceit and lust... those gunmetal disks looked at her with the devil’s version of tenderness.
Full lips panted words, a rich musical voice undistorted by the rasp his scarred lips imposed, distracting her between kisses over her cheeks. “Little one, that was very pleasing. I am very, very pleased.”
His mouth brushed her blood smeared lips, Shepherd looked deeply into hers, as if waiting for some act the female was supposed to offer. Claire lay there with his blood pooling on her chest and vague realization began to dawn. In horror, she grasped the consequences of her self-indulgent lack of control.
The depth of the bite... the placement...
In her fervor she had ripped claiming marks deeply into Shepherd’s flesh, almost as savagely as he’d marked her.
The purring brute’s forefinger traced over the blood on her lips, the trail that had leaked from the corner of her mouth, sniffing and panting and still deeply knotted. The warm heat of his tongue began to lick her clean of the red, bathing her mouth and neck, tending to a thing half in shock. The second his knot began to abate the smooth plunge of his cock began again, Shepherd knowing to fuck her immediately before her pupils contracted and his unexpected victory became her sorrow.
Making love to her until the Omega’s exhaustion pulled her past consciousness, Shepherd did not allow her a moment of regret—not when everything was so perfect. Not when she was finally responding as the Gods intended.Corday’s head was in his hands, every last testament of violence he’d found stirring up a more horrible thirst than his worn out, simple desire for revenge. What he longed for in that moment, what he craved, were the whims of a violent psychopath.
He wanted to see Shepherd suffer. He wanted to watch him bleed.
Corday wanted to torment his rival himself until the sounds of the monster’s screams might drown out the noise of the madness knocking about in his skull.
It was hard to swallow, even harder to admit there was no way to balance what he was with what a darker corner of his mind tempted him to become.
It was the room. It was the broken furniture. It was the blood.
The safe house where the Omegas recovered from the drug pushers’ brothel, the place they had been promised, protection was ransacked. The two Beta enforcers set to watch the women lay dead on the ground, wracked with bullet wounds.
Nailed to the wall, his hand raised in a wave, drooped a headless body hung like a sick banner. The clothes Corday recognized, the stature, the smell not quite ruined by the stink of carnage.
Senator Kantor.
The leader of the resistance had been taken, tortured, and murdered, and it had been done right under their noses.
Shepherd was toying with all of them–laughing at them.
There was no sign of the few Omegas who’d called this place home. Though before they had been stolen, based on the stink of terror in the air, Corday imagined they had been forced to watch whatever had been done to a man he looked up to like a father.
“Are you going to say nothing?” Leslie stood at his side, staring forward, her lips bloodless, her expression dazed.
The safe house had failed the women it was set up to protect. The few remaining Enforcers, the stunted resistance, was failing the city they’d sworn to save. The one man unifying the flagging population had been butchered.
What was there to say?
Corday was crumbling no matter the stern look he kept locked on his face. There was nothing left.
Staring at the stump of mutilated neck, at the blood, and the open cavity of the man’s torso, stepping over the entrails piled and stinking on the floor, Corday could find no worthy words for the corpse’s niece. “We should take him down.”
Leslie shook her head as if she couldn’t bring herself to touch the abomination. “What do you suppose they’ve done with his head?”
He had no intention of answering a question they both, deep down, must know the answer to. Instead, he turned his attention to prying the body as gently as he could from the wall.
When it was done, what could be gathered was collected into the only receptacle they might find–garbage bags. Corday stood covered in his mentor’s blood. “I am very sorry, Leslie, for agreeing to bring you here. He told me to keep you hidden, had I listened, I might have spared you this.”