A woman walked forward. It was Wren.
Chapter Twenty
“I… felt you,” she whispered, fear trickling into the casing of her spine. “How?”
A wicked grin formed on Cassian’s face. In his hand was a rose. Delicately, he plucked the petals, letting them fall near his boots. The center of the bulb was tightly enclosed, but he broke it with his index finger. He stepped forward, reaching out his weathered palm to feel her soft and silky skin.
“Another memory implant. You knew exactly where to end up.”
As soon as the flat of his skin touched her cheekbone, she shuddered. He repulsed her.
“We are connected,” he said.
Tears formed in her eyes. Salt stung each minute nerve. Life was a cruel joke. No. It wasn’t a joke at all. It was just cruel. Punishment for punishment’s sake. If God existed, he was a sadist, but she doubted he was an alpha.
“Yes. A version of you,” she whispered.
Unable to look at his horrid face, Wren peered over her shoulder at the dancing women. They were just like her, but they lacked an important detail: her imagination.
They were props, moving manikins incapable of threading together any real thought. “I hate this place,” she said. “Why did you bring me here?”
“You deserve to be back with your kind.”
Wren could see the hunger in Cassian’s cruel eyes. He could no longer help himself. As she came closer to him through the darkness, her pregnant belly prodded the light, coercing his mind to feel the worst. He could finally touch her now, and when he did, he met her with a harsh smack.
Wren crumpled to the floor like a dirty pile of laundry. Stepping over her, he lifted by the hem of her shirt. “You don’t get a say in what you like or don’t like, whore.”
Wren spat against the dark floor and grunted. Wiping her face, she could see the faint hue of red gleam against the cold neon. Suddenly, Wren felt the hot flash of anger consume her. His scarred face loomed like a spirit phantom. All of her memories, all of the programming he gave her… he’d ruined her.
“It wasn’t my fault you let them take me,” she said. “You let them sneak into my room. You let them steal my purity.”
Once more, Cassian hammered his fist. Bone and muscle cracked Wren’s cartilage. Her nose ran like a faucet, hot enough to leave her gasping for air and quick healing. Begging.
Wren coughed and fell into the wave of abuse. Each blow she took was worse than the last. But she had been prepared for this. An alpha’s brutality had to be mastered with experience. Wren had all the experience a woman needed.
Panting and croaking like a gnarled beast, Cassian adjusted the wrinkles of his heavy outerwear. “Next time, I’ll crush your stomach. Have you had enough?”
Wren refused to nod. She’d known he would react like this, knew he would beat her until she was silent. She also knew he’d try to kill her once she said the last of what she needed to say. How he reacted after interested her the most.
“You let them do it…” she whispered.
Cassian leaned his head down until he was hovering against the top of her spinal column. “Say it again.”
She wouldn’t. He heard it, and now she would wait for it to sink in. When his pupils tightened, he clenched his sore and dripping fists.
“And I enjoyed every minute of it,” she said.
The words shot into the pit of his stomach. Feeling the cuck spread throughout his central nervous system, Cassian started to weep. Strangely, the tears subsided into the back of his throat, gargling through wretched shrieks of historical pain.
Life had cucked him.
“No!” Cassian swayed his head. Every poor choice that he had made… all of his failures… they fed into his fragile state. “You… you!”
For a moment, Cassian could picture her untainted body. Thin and vigorous. The spitting image of beauty. She would never be that again. She gave those traitors her fruit, and that couldn’t be forgiven.
He threaded his fingers through his thinning hair, fastening onto the contorted stems and pulling. Words fell from his mouth like electric thunder, but the sentence structure had eroded to the basics.
“Why… mother… can’t control… failure… I’m sorry… I am sorry.”