The man with the syringe stepped over her and bent, jabbing the needle into her neck. Within seconds, her eyelids were too heavy to keep open.
“Is she sedated?” asked a man with a deep voice.
“Yeah, she’s out like a fucking light,” returned another. “Pavel said we should administer the sedative to her in twenty-minute intervals.”
“Christ, we already gave her enough to keep a grown man down for hours,” said yet another. “I get she’s more than human, but so are we and that shit does a number on one of us.”
“She ain’t like us,” said the one with a deep voice. “Load her into the van. Pavel is on his way here to deal with Romanov himself.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Rurik stirred, his head feeling as if someone had taken a bat to it and like he was in a fog. As he opened his eyes, he smelled blood. Having claimed Liberty, and tasted her blood in the process, he knew in an instant it was hers. She was injured.
Little Paw!
The smell of hybrids filled the room as well, bringing with it undernotes of death. Whatever The Corporation was doing when it came to altering the DNA of adult supernatural males had a nasty side effect—rapid decay.
Another scent filled the area and Rurik growled.
Pavel.
A pair of men’s loafers appeared before him. He turned his head slightly just as a man bent near him.
Rurik’s mind tried to wrap around what he was seeing.
Pavel was there, crouched, grinning, but the man had aged a considerable amount since Rurik had last seen him. That was something shifters didn’t do. They aged at a snail’s pace. Yet there was Pavel, his hair a mix of gray and white, wrinkles around his eyes and mouth and age spots on his skin.
What in the hell had happened to him?
“We meet again, old friend,” he said, sounding like a psychotic cliché. He lifted his to his face. “Do I look different?”
“W-what do you want?” asked Rurik.
“My life back,” Pavel said. “Since I can’t have that back, making you suffer will have to do.”
Rurik tried to get again but failed.
Pavel glanced past him. “Give him more.”
Something poked Rurik in the neck and his head instantly felt as if it were wading through quicksand. He fought to stay awake.
“Lib-er-ty,” managed Rurik.
“The girl is loaded in the van, sir,” said a man from the hallway.
Liberty!
Pavel sneered. “You and I have unfinished business, Romanov. I’d hoped to end that in Savannah, when I used your mate’s scent to draw you out of the clinic, but that didn’t go as planned. But still, it left you less of a threat.”
Rurik vividly recalled smelling something he couldn’t resist before he’d been ambushed. That had been Pavel?
Bastard!
Rurik snarled, wanting to lash out at the man, but everything on him refused to cooperate. His body had already been battered and bruised from the attack weeks ago. This wasn’t helping matters any.
Pavel lifted Rurik’s head by his hair. He put his face close to Rurik’s. “The Corporation wants you brought back into the fold.”
Confusion knit Rurik’s brow. He’d never been part of The Corporation.
As if reading Rurik’s mind, Pavel spoke, “What in the hell do you think your time with the Okhrana and every variation of it was? You didn’t buy into the bullshit that they were offshoots of PSI, did you? Tell me you’re not that gullible. You were The Corporation’s bitch, just like the rest of us.”
“N-no,” Rurik managed though it was slurred.
“Yes,” said Pavel, prior to bouncing Rurik’s face off the floor. He stood and drew his foot back, kicking Rurik in the side, snapping more than one rib in the process.
Whatever they’d given Rurik kept him from being able to do anything other than lie there and take the beating as Pavel continued kicking him. Rurik didn’t give a shit about himself. All he cared about was getting to Liberty.
He had to push through it all. He had to get up and get to his mate—to his wife.
Wanting it and making it happen were two very different things.
Pavel laughed. “When I’m done carving up your mate, she’ll be unrecognizable. I’ll do a much better job than last time. What I’m going to do to her won’t be something she can heal from. Then, she’ll go back to being a science experiment for The Corporation.”
“Stay the fuck away from—”
“Your wife? I smell sex in here. You claimed her, didn’t you? This is going to be even sweeter. I’m going to make you watch as I do to her what you did to me,” said Pavel, yanking open his dress shirt to reveal ugly scars.
“No,” whispered Rurik, everything in him wanting to get up, but he couldn’t make his body do what he wanted. “No!”
Pavel winked. “Oh yes.”
Hopelessness filled Rurik. He knew his friends were on their way to Durham, but the odds of them making it in time to save Liberty weren’t good. It was up to him to protect his mate. It was his job, his responsibility as an alpha male. He didn’t need it spelled out. He understood that she was the love of his life. He couldn’t go on without her—he wouldn’t.
Yet here he was, too weak to do anything other than take a beating and beg.
Pavel looked to the others. “Secure him. Take him to the warehouse. Chain him there. I’ll be along shortly with his mate.”
With that, the bastard stood and walked away, leaving Rurik there, on the floor, surrounded by armed men.
Someone grabbed Rurik’s arm and twisted it behind his back. He felt metal wrapping around his wrist as he stared at his other arm, stretched out on the floor in front of his face.
Various scenarios played in his head—all of which left Pavel torturing and killing Liberty. Each one sent Rurik closer to the edge of losing control—of giving himself
