Page 52 of Frenzy
Flashbacks hit me hard, of people in coats just like that cutting me to make me bleed. To watch me heal. Of other horrors that my brain had buried deep in my psyche so I couldn’t ever dredge them up again.
“Are you okay?” she said, stepping toward me, but I backed away.
No. No. No. I couldn’t go back there again. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t let my cubs be experiments. No.
“Alistair, Bohdie,” the girl called. But I didn’t see her anymore. No, her face had been transposed with another face—the head researcher. They just called him Smith.
I needed to run, run away and not come back. I couldn’t be a prisoner again. I couldn’t.
Suddenly, Courtland was there. “Breathe.”
It was a command, not a suggestion, and I sucked in a gasping lungful of air. It wasn’t until then that I realized my lungs had been burning with the need for oxygen.
Courtland took in the room. “What did you do?” he roared, and then there was yelling and growling. Someone was speaking, but I could barely hear it over the rushing of blood in my head.
“The coat. Lose the coat.” Someone rushed past me, and then the sounds of babies crying filtered through my consciousness.
“Hey, Omega. Give me the babies. It’s okay now. Breathe.” This time Courtland’s Alpha command was laced with softness. I swallowed hard as the panic receded. It was the babies crying. And I was crying.
Courtland pried one and then the other cub from my arms, handing them off to Doc. He bared his teeth when the strangers reached for them. “No. Stay where I can see you.” He shifted his focus back to me. “Are you with me again, Pryce?”
I nodded, even though my heart felt like it was simultaneously constricting and trying to escape from my chest. He pulled me to his chest and thrummed loudly, for the second time in one morning. I was damaged, broken, and I was inflicting that on everyone around me. I was a fucking failure of an Omega and these guys would be tying themselves to a lodestone.
“Pryce was a captive at a lab for most of his life,” he explained, and my body tensed as I waited for their sympathetic hums.
What I didn’t expect was an exclaimed, “Holy shit, me too! For study or breeding?”
I whirled around and looked at the girl, who now stood in slacks and a button up shirt, her lab coat gone.
“Excuse me?”
Someone laughed, and it was then I noticed the rest of the people in the room. A tall blond kid, maybe just a little older than Rosa, and another tall blond, though he was far older. And his scent was … unusual.
“You’re the Lycanthrope.”
He nodded, his weird golden eyes taking me in. “Yes. Alistair. It is nice to meet you, Pryce. I am sorry that our appearance has caused you discomfort. We aren’t strangers to PTSD of this nature.”
I swallowed hard again and gave a tiny wave, before my eyes went back to the girl. She looked much younger now that I could take in her appearance without hyperventilating. “You were studied?”
She nodded once. “Yes, when I was very young. But I have an eidetic memory so I don’t forget. I was lucky—my main researcher was a good man. He couldn’t protect us from everything, but he tried.”
The blond kid wrapped his arms around her, giving her a fond kiss on the head the way you would a child. “Who would think that there’d be two of you in the one room?” he murmured, and she looked up at him blankly.
“Statistically, there's quite a high probability given—” He placed his finger on her lips.
“It was rhetorical, Stace.”
I crossed the room to Bonnie, stroking my hand over her hair, which was lank and unwashed. I didn’t care, inhaling her scent deep into my lungs. I let out a sigh of relief; just being close made me feel better.
But there was something about her scent today that was different. I couldn’t work out what it was though.
Stacey stepped closer, and I could feel her observing our interactions. “I’ve run some tests, done some bloodwork, but apart from some raised hormone levels and this unconsciousness, I can’t find anything in her brain that would cause this. It’s like her body has…” She paused, her eyes going comically wide, like she was a cartoon character with an epiphany. “Shit. That’s it. It would explain the positive activity in her gamma-aminobutyric acid receptor.”
Then she was gone, the Lycanthrope and Doc along with her, after he’d passed the babies back to Courtland.
Courtland’s phone rang at that moment, as we all watched her disappear. He passed the babies back to me now that I was calmer, and I took them in my arms, mentally apologising to them for my freakout. They were still fussy and I felt like a shit parent.
Courtland pulled his phone from his pocket. “Yes? What?” He was silent for a second, his brows anchoring down low. “Are you sure? Just the Betas? Okay, I’ll be right there. I’ll bring Doc.” He hung up, his face pinched with concern. “It's some kind of virus. Two more Betas just collapsed into unconsciousness.”
