Omega (3 page)

“My mate’s child isn’t mine; regardless, I intend to challenge Ian.” Colin tapped the surface of the table with his fingers.

Matos’s head snapped up. “Are you prepared to kill your old man?”

“He and Colonel Malachai are doing some fucked-up things and I believe they might be doing them to shifters, beyond taking blood samples and asking for volunteers to take a couple of pills. We need to counteract this bullshit, take over pack and council. I kill Ian and no beast will challenge us.” Colin pressed his lips together.

“I want no part of council. I told you that when my father died and I became Alpha. Betaille will become a safe haven for those who want to get away from shifter politics and its fucked-up consequences.” Percel grunted.

Colin exhaled. “I know, old friend. Matos will take over as council president.”

“I will?” Matos scrunched up his face.

“Good luck with that, cat.” Percel snickered.

“Fuck you, pig.” Matos huffed. “Colin, you need to talk to me before making that kind of statement.”

“Who the fuck else can do what needs to be done? Want me to ask the dragons up north, or maybe we can import a few of the big cats from Africa? This is our dilemma and we will handle it.”

Annoyance seemed to be a constant thread in his life. Colin corralled the feeling. His friends didn’t want to get involved but the problems he was certain were brewing needed to be nipped in the bud sooner rather than later or they would affect all shifters and not just his pack.

Chapter Three

Robbie wiped her top lip with the back of her hand. Malachai was stable and breathing on his own. She assisted Tom in the medical suite, but she was working blind. Tom wasn’t able or didn’t want to tell her what happened to the colonel. She had a sinking feeling he was either self-medicating for whatever reason, or he put himself on the drug trials meant for the volunteer soldiers. On her way out the room, she passed Ian, Colin’s father. He grimly stared at her before marching through the door she just exited. She gazed around the ward where the male subjects were housed.

Some lounged around the TV area but many of them rested in their beds, their skin had a loose, sallow appearance to it. Their bodies were not handling the trials well; a few had already died. Their families were notified that they perished serving their country. It was a waste and the program was having some serious hiccups, if only Malachai would listen to her. Human physiology wasn’t equipped to handle the foreign genes.

She pulled the gloves off and dropped them in the trash bin next to the doorjamb. Perhaps if the genes were introduced at conception or within a few months, maybe the additional markers would adhere as chromosomes. She shook her head and walked across the space to the glass double doors that led to the main building. A quick flash of her badge against the card reader attached to the wall, and the door clicked. She depressed the handle, yanking it open. Cold air blasted her face. She could go to her room and get some sleep but lately she wasn’t getting any rest. Nightmares riddled her sleep and it was always the same scenario. She was viewing the scene as a third party watching herself get raped.

Lying still, she couldn’t move. Pillows propped up her torso and her blouse was unbuttoned and open, exposing her bra. A man stood menacingly over her and terror made her heart pump rapidly; bolts of pain shot through her chest. He snapped open the front hooks of her bra. Her breasts spread to the side and his fingers stroked her nipples into tight buds. She screamed at the image in front of her but her body didn’t move and the man didn’t turn around. He rolled her skirt up around her hips and her panty hose down her pelvis and over her legs. Her panties were shoved off next and just when she thought he would twist to give her a look at his profile, she would wake, sweaty and tearful.

Always the same dream and her blackouts were growing more frequent. Usually when she woke, there was nothing amiss and she only suffered a pounding migraine. One time though, a couple of months ago the inside of her thighs had been sticky. She’d been raped, she knew that, her pregnancy was proof but she wouldn’t be a victim. Her breath hitched as she tried to breathe through the anger threatening to overtake her. First she would figure out who attacked her, and then she would handle it like she did everything else.

She was the only child to older parents who were in their early fifties when she was born. Her father passed away just before she signed onto the program and she hadn’t spoken to her mother in a month. She’d grown up alone and found solace in books and imaginary friends instead of real people. Recently, after she found out she was pregnant she’d asked for leave to visit her mother. Malachai had turned her down without even glancing at her paperwork, telling her the genetic trials were too important for her to leave during the middle of them. His denial sent her imagination into overdrive. She’d never considered him to be the one of the possible men that may have raped her. There was something that was right there in her head she just couldn’t quite grasp it. Something about the way he moved. Still, his wooden movements wasn’t enough to condemn the man; she needed more.

Her most recent blackout happened after mess hall. She could remember having dinner with Malachai and Tom, then becoming dizzy and telling them she hadn’t felt well before walking back to her room. Someone had come up behind her and slipped arms around her but she’d had a hard time lifting her head up by then to see who was accompanying her. The next day she was awakened by her alarm, disoriented, and nauseous but in her bed. Her clothes were twisted so tightly around her middle it was hard to catch a breath and she spent most of that morning crouched next to the toilet. Unsure what to do she turned to the only person she trusted, Colin.

They might tease and joke with one another but he had never pushed her to have sex with him and until she started waking up sore and confused she had been a virgin. So many emotions had roiled through her, and alone she knew there wasn’t much she could do. Even in nineteen seventy-four with the great strides made in women’s rights, a lot of the time a woman was not always taken seriously. She didn’t use the phone to call her mom, for fear the line could be bugged. At her wit’s end she’d whispered her fears to Colin during one of his appointments.

He tore through the vestibule where she collected the blood samples like a demon tearing through hell. Guards were called, by who she didn’t know, but it took eight men to pin Colin to the floor. They released him when he finally calmed down, but then he was rapidly firing questions at her that she had no answers to. Hurt filled his eyes and all she could do was hug him, fearful that he didn’t believe her. The knowledge that she’d been raped hung over her like her personal thundercloud. She wasn’t sure how to process the information, most times she just went through her day numb. Empathy, her creativity and desires were gone leaving her a shell of the person she once was. She was becoming colder, fearless. Nowadays she gave less than a fuck about some things.

At least she wasn’t alone. She might not have been able to get to her mother when she was at her worst, but when the knowledge weighed like a lodestone around her neck, Colin was there. He’d held her as she cried, screaming into his shoulder and beating his chest. Colin had sworn he would kill the man that had done it to her and she suspected that he thought she knew who the guy was. She wasn’t trying to protect anyone; honestly she had no clue who her rapist was.

A few guards flirted with her. Tom was always watching her. He didn’t actually do anything to her but his presence was unnerving. Malachai’s behavior was becoming increasingly erratic and their meetings were becoming more erratic. Something she’d never experienced with him before. As time progressed, she’d narrowed down her list of potential attackers. Once she knew for certain who’d drugged her and taken her virginity, she had her own version of hell she was prepared to inflict.

In the meantime she would deal with the night terrors and methodically make her way through her short list of suspects. She flipped the light switch to her lab and picked her coat up off the hook. Until she was so tired that she couldn’t keep her eyes open, she would sit at her microscope with pen and pad making notes on her findings.

At twenty she was the youngest member of the medical team. Considered a prodigy at science, she’d fast tracked through high school and college, graduating magnum cum laude at the age of nineteen with dual degrees in biology and genetics, and a minor in veterinary science. A day after graduation Colonel Malachai was knocking on her mother’s door with a job offer. Her mother had been so encouraging, telling her to see the world on the government’s dime. She snorted, if only her family knew. Her view of the world was a fog-ridden mountain range she could just make out through a tiny oblong window in her lab. If she was lucky, she might get a sliver of sunlight at sunrise.

As one of the few women in a facility full of men, she stayed in her rooms when she wasn’t working. The other older females, mainly secretaries and nurses, ignored her. An outcast and she couldn’t understand what she’d done wrong to elicit such harsh feelings. It felt safer staying out of everyone’s way, until she met Colin.

She’d taken one look at him, his smile put her at ease and his touch was gentle. He talked to her not at her. She didn’t feel self-conscious around him, talking to him was like an adventure since she never knew what he might say. Fifteen years her senior, he’d seen so much of the world where she hadn’t and his accent made her want to jump him. Robbie chuckled. No doubt he would let her. Their friendship had progressed slowly over months of constantly spending time together. He walked into the compound and it was as if he naturally took over.

A sticking point for Malachai, she’d watched the way the he scowled every time Colin was near. Malachai would quickly become scarce when Colin was around or he would hover around Ian when both men were present. Secretly, she’d planned to gift Colin with her virginity, but that was shot to hell.

“Fooking hell.” She dropped her voice to imitate his deep brogue when he was really agitated and smiled.

Robbie pushed her hands into rubber gloves, walked to the refrigerator, and pulled the samples from the trays. Setting them on the counter she stared at the glass slides. His first kiss had done her in, ruined her for anyone else. After a few weeks of talking and chaste kisses, he’d slammed her against the lab door and pressed his mouth on hers. His lips, the way he slid his tongue into her mouth, she’d never experienced that kind of passion and it was for her. Briefly, it felt like she was using his lungs to breathe with. She’d placed her hands on his chest and the rapid beat of his heart beneath her palm was wonderful. Her uncertainty melted under his expertise as he deftly skimmed his hands along her body, molding her form to his.

No man had ever made her feel so desired. Throughout school the boys overlooked her. They only acknowledged her when they needed tutoring or occasional help with an upcoming test. She realized she wasn’t beautiful, that maybe her brown skin was more a hindrance than a help in predominantly white academia. More often than not she was looked down upon, shoved aside, sometimes threatened. There was no use in telling anyone, to be black in the early seventies was still difficult, she didn’t care how many marches and protests minorities held.

Her only option was to trust that things would get better and hold onto that faith. Funny thing was, Colin never commented on her color or even acknowledged it. She doubted there was actually a place they could run away to where they would be safe. Then again, until she started working in the program she didn’t believe that men could turn into animals. That was still a shocker; the first time Colin became his wolf sent her into hysterics, but after watching his transformation a few times, she came to appreciate the beauty of it. The way bone and muscles broke and melded seamlessly. It was a pity shifters had to stay hidden, they were a wonderful and amazing subspecies that should be celebrated. She pushed a lock of hair behind her ear.

The government hid so many things from the people in general. Instead of using these men and women for weaponry to enhance soldiers, there were so many other applications their genetics could be applied too. She peered through the eyepiece of her microscope and slid a slide into the metal holders. A few turns of the knob and the cells became clear. Robbie lifted her head and picked up a syringe from the tray. She injected a drop of dye on the thin glass. A strand of chromosomes appeared that she hadn’t noticed in the other samples.

Robbie lifted her head, rubbed her eyes and looked again. She truly must be tired. What she was seeing wasn’t apparent in any other shifter she’d taken blood from. An extra DNA strand that quite possibly could be used as a bridge to attach the new genetic material.
No fucking way; it couldn’t be that easy.
Ideas filled her head and she mentally sorted through them, tossing out the wackier notions. She gazed down at the name written on the plastic, Matos Snoil. For the time being she would keep her information to herself.

* * * *

Colin gazed at the numbers, the pack was hemorrhaging money and he couldn’t figure out where the leak sprouted from. With the funds they were receiving from the government contracts, Volkshire should be flush with cash; instead they were broke. In the morning he would cancel all of Reana’s credit cards. Her spending habits needed to change, receipt after receipt showed where she was buying clothes for all occasions but there were no items for the boys. Most times his sons didn’t wear clothes since they preferred to play as their animals. She wasn’t doing anything special for their people. There were damn receipts for every frivolous thing, except groceries or particular supplies to help out struggling pack members.

He bent over and pulled out his bottom desk drawer to yank out his bottle of cognac and a tumbler. He set them on his blotter and poured two fingers worth of liquor into his glass. Even with Reana’s spending, there was still way too much missing. He took a sip of the alcohol then absently set the drink down. Amber liquid sloshed his fingers when he placed it on the uneven plane of his desk calendar and the wooden surface. He set the glass right and shook his hand while pulling a few tissues from the box next to the phone to dry his fingers.