Page 2 of Protector

In. Out.His chest moves under her soft hand as he breathes, his tormentor oblivious to his internal battle as she manually checks over his body.

He knows what they’ll do if they discover this secret—his one remaining link to a humanity neither he, nor they, wish to be reminded of. It will be like it was when they rid him of his body’s reaction to pain: unrelenting stimulation until his receptors cease to respond.

He has endured months of agony. Months of sleep deprivation. Blood. Death.

Buttouch…

The warmth of human connection. The pleasure of another sentient being’s caress.

His nerves hum under her fingertips as she stretches up to press against his face, testing newly healed flesh.

This is the one thing he has left that doesn’t belong to them—and if they take this too, then he will truly be nothing but the machine they see him as.

Thatshesees him as.

He knows her name, but he tries not to use it, even in the quietude of his own mind. Thinking of his tormentor as a person makes it harder to slip into the nothingness that makes his time in her lab tolerable.

In the same way he is simply a sophisticated weapon to her, she is to him a nameless, faceless cog in the system that created him.

Except when she touches him.

In. Out.

“Still no pain?” she asks, stroking both hands down his shoulders with firm pressure, and he remembers how she answered a call in the lab a few weeks back. How the female voice on the other end called her Addie, the familiarity in the shortening of her name sparking his curiosity. To that woman, she is a person. Perhaps someone dear.

To him, she is anything but.

“No,” he grinds out.

She flicks her gaze up to his, light gray eyes behind black-rimmed glasses taking in the tightness of his jaw. “Any tension? Discomfort?”

“No.”

“Good.” She steps around him to inspect his back, and her shoulder gently bumps against his arm as she does.

He isn’t prepared for the pressure, isn’t braced, and without thinking, he sucks in a small breath, tasting her scent.

A faint whiff of her floral shampoo fills his nostrils, and panic hits his brainstem. But it’s too late; the kiss of her smell blooms on his palate, warm and female andhuman,and his body reacts.

Shit.

There is nothing he can do. They left too much man in him, too much alpha. His abdomen tenses, heat pooling low. Every touch of her fingertips against his back only tightens the pull in his groin, and it’s maddening and revolting, andfuck,he never wants her to stop…

She does, of course. Once she is sure her prized soldier is fit for battle once more, she pulls her hands from his skin and steps around to his front again. And that? That is why human touch is the worst of the tortures he endures.

It feels like having found the narrowest ledge on an otherwise mirror-smooth cliff surface. Like being allowed one final breath of relief, of hope, before the ledge crumbles and he plummets into the depths of despair once more.

She makes a small noise of consternation, and when he dares a glance at her, her cheeks are tinged pink.

She moves her gaze from his hard member rising proudly between his thighs, but she doesn’t meet his eyes when she says, “If you experienceurges,AX2, you are instructed to take care of them. Privately.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She flattens her lips to a line, and he braces for the sting of his chip. In the beginning, when he had yet to learn caution, she tried to dissuade hisurgeswith pain. Eventually she conceded, but made it clear he is to handle his biological needs when alone in the lab at night.

But today, no punishment follows from the chip imbedded in his brain.

“All this technology at our fingertips, and I still can’t separate the baseness of alpha biology without losing the strength you need to survive your conditioning,” she says, the same irritation from before flaring in her voice. “It’s been more than threeyearssince your class was created,and we’ve been unable to make another successful prototype since. But every soldier we mold after those same blueprints hasalpha issues.”She makes a gesture in the vague direction of his erection without looking directly at it. “Too much aggression, too much dominance, too muchneed.”

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