Page 17 of Seducing Selena

She wasn’t looking at any of us. “I’m—” Her whole body tightened into a smaller ball. “I get cold easily.”

Derek lit the fire, but this was a large room. The thought of her shivering and in chains wasn’t one I could stomach. The only shivering I wanted Selena to do was shivers of anticipation before I showed her exactly how beautiful submission could be. How pain could bring both of us pleasure beyond imagining.

I strode out of the cage and over to the armchair where a soft throw rested. It was a deep green like that confection she’d been wearing before Derek took it from her. The color suited her.

Taking the blanket back into the cage, I did what I knew I shouldn’t. Because there was no way my Alpha could let this go. I crouched down and spread the blanket around her shoulders. She shuddered at the touch. Not pulling away, the kind of shudder that made me want to pull her closer.

I reached out and cupped her cheek. “Don’t be afraid, little one,” I said quietly.

“No?”

“No.”

She didn’t believe me. And I didn’t blame her one bit.

Retreating, the others were already outside of the cage, and Derek was the one to close the cage door and enter the code on the lock. The code changed as soon as the door locked, and we only had access to it. Even if she figured it out, she couldn’t open it.

We lowered the lights so that the fire was the only source, and I watched her turn and move, curling herself under the blanket before I shut the door behind me.

“Wait,” Derek said. “Until we’re back in the living room.”

I did, and the three of us all felt the same. The bar we used the most was in here, and after that, I needed a fucking drink. “I don’t know if I can do this,” I said, pouring myself a drink that was probably too large.

“We don’t have a choice,” Derek said.

“There’s always a choice,” Nick said. “We can’t just pass it off like there are no options.”

“Oh? What options would you like, Nick?” Derek’s voice echoed through the apartment. “The one where we let three years of fucking torture evaporate because we let our guard down, and let god knows how many Omegas be stolen, sold, raped, and killed? Or the option where we die and she dies because we make the mistake of showing our hand by being kind? Or the one where we protect her as best we can, and try to protect everyone else. You think I want to do this?”

“Derek,” I said.

He spun to me, eyes wild, and I wasn’t even sure he’d been fully conscious of what he’d been saying. He was so far gone, trying to reconcile the beautiful Omega and his instincts. I understood. I was there with him. Instead, I handed him the drink I’d poured and went to make another one.

“Sorry,” he said.

Nicholas sighed. “No need. I get it. I don’t want to do it either. But I also don’t think any good comes from pretending our hand is being forced. It is, and yet it’s not. Because when we tell her the truth—and I don’t fucking care, wewilltell her the truth eventually—the reasoning ‘we didn’t have a choice,’ isn’t going to fly.

“We are making the best choice out of a list of absolutelyshittychoices. And we need to own it.”

He was right, even if I hated it. “What are the odds we could do only non-sexual training in public?” I asked. “We’ve never been open in front of the clients. Maybe we can lean into that.”

Nick sighed. “And if someone asks her what we’ve been doing with her in private?”

“She’s a slave,” I said, throat burning on the word. “She doesn’t speak to anyone else without permission.”

What none of us were saying was that it wouldn’t fly with the most important client of all of them. His preferences were far more violent and deadly, but he still expected us to back up our claims of being the premiere slave trainers in the country. He’d said as much multiple times. Until Selena came out from behind the stage, our plan had simply been to shrug and tell him we were in the middle of acquiring new merchandise, since everyone had been sold at the auction.

“We are fucked from absolutely every angle,” Derek said. “Like… every single one. If any one thing tonight had gone differently, we’d have options. And of course, she’s—” he dropped his face into his hands. “She’s our fucking scent match. Did someone find a way to predict that and send her to fuck with us? Or are we just the unluckiest bastards of all time?”

I didn’t know. “If she’s faking it, she’s one hell of an actress.”

“Anyone who has the balls to come after us would absolutely make sure they had the best of the best. As far as the scent match… are we sure it’s real? We use fake hormones. She could be using them, too.”

“I’ve never heard of the hormones being able to fabricate a scent match,” I said. “But if that’s true, we’ll know soon enough. She obviously won’t have access to them, and they’ll fade in a few days.”

“Yeah…”

I knocked back my drink until the glass was empty. “Do we have a plan? As far as training her?”

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