Page 30 of Marked
I looked around and tried to find an escape, but there was none. The door we’d entered from had slid shut, and a thick white metal bar had come down across it in what looked like a very effective lock. No one was coming in, and I certainly wasn’t getting out.
Needle held up his very ominous syringe, and I practically snarled back at him.
“You don’t need that,” I retorted. I glared at the floor as I knelt down and untied the laces of my boots, before angrily kicking them off. I pulled my socks off next and shivered as my bare toes pressed against the cool white stone floor. I unclasped my jeans and pushed them down over my hips. When they fell to the floor, I kicked them off too. I paused, standing there in only my panties and t-shirt. I hadn’t put my bra back on that night when I’d tried to escape the Ghengrills, and I was more than aware of that fact right now.
My nipples hardened into tight little points, and Bastard cleared his throat. I cursed them out in my head, too terrified of Needle and his threats to actually voice them out loud. I grasped thebottom hem of my shirt and pulled it up and over my head as though I was ripping off a bandage.
“Underwear too,” Attitude said rather bluntly.
Alaric roared in his cage. I turned my head to look at him, and it was quite possible that he was even more furious than before.
With a heavy sigh, I pushed my panties down my hips until they fell to the floor. I gingerly lifted one foot and then the other out of them, leaving my clothes a crumpled mess on the floor. My arms wound around my chest, covering up my breasts as much as I could.
It was painfully obvious now that there was no out for me. There wasn’t even the slimmest possibility of escape. Alaric was trapped and so was I. There were three of them, and only one of me. I had no weapons and no hope of stopping whatever was about to happen.
“Get her in the scanner. I want to start recording the physical changes she’s going through as she fully enters her heat,” Attitude ordered.
I wanted to cry, and I turned toward the only one of them that had shown me any sort of kindness since I had met them.
“Will it hurt? Am I going to die?” I asked, capturing Attitude’s eyes with mine. For a split second, I thought I saw something that resembled sympathy there, and he shook his head.
“We aren’t going to kill you. You’re too valuable of an asset for that. We aim to study you, and we aren’t going to hurt you unless you force us to,” he answered.
Needle and Bastard came toward me, and I suddenly realized I very much didn’t want them to touch me.
“I’ll go. You don’t need to use force,” I squeaked, nervously taking a step back.
“I’ll put her into it,” Attitude said. He gently placed a hand on my naked back and guided me forward. I tried not to flinch or make a sound as I walked toward the scanner. Attitude slowly turned me around so that my spine pressed against the metal plate. With relief, I realized that it was warm and not cold as I had expected. He lifted one ankle and placed it in the center of the large circular metal band. Then he lifted the other.
“Put your wrists in the center of each one,” he directed.
I obeyed. I didn’t want to, but I did.
Once I was fully situated, another steel band wound around my waist. Attitude pressed a palm to the back of the metal plate behind me and the entire contraption started growing warmer. It began to tingle.
Electricity buzzed from the metal bands, expanding outward and circling my wrists like the handcuffs I’d worn not long ago. After a second or two, the electricity seemed to expand and solidify into a force that served to imprison me. I couldn’t get out. I could hardly even move. I was a captive once again.
The scanner began to rotate, facing me in the direction of Alaric’ cage. He looked back at me in horror. The look on his face was one of pure rage.
“Get your filthy Ghengrill hands off my mate,” he roared, and I swore his glass cage rattled.
“You sure that’s a high enough grade to keep him in there?” Bastard asked.
“It’s sturdy enough to hold the Uruk-Zuk, so it should hold him,” Needle answered.
“What an Uruk-Zuk?” I asked, desperate to distract myself with something.
“It’s a really big animal that lives here on Ghengra. Very strong. Something like your Earth bears, only about three times the size and much meaner,” Attitude answered, his voice oddly scientific.
Alaric pounded on the glass walls again.
“Maybe we should get it reinforced. This has never been tested against a male Lupenii before,” Needle said. There was a slight strain to his voice that I recognized as nervousness.
I recalled that they had mentioned that the military had never successfully captured a male Lupenii before, which meant that they’d likely never held one captive before. Alaric was strong and now the only question that remained was whether he was stronger than whatever kind of beast an Uruk-Zuk was if either of us ever got out of here.
The scanner tilted backwards about thirty degrees to a point that still allowed me to watch Alaric in his clear cage. He was pacing back and forth now, the tension radiating off him in waves, but somehow, he seemed different.
His muscles looked denser, his entire frame somehow broader, as if his body was stretching, thickening with power. His breaths came out in heavy, uneven exhales, his fingers twitching, flexing like he was fighting something deep inside. And then, right in front of me, it happened.
