Corrupted (Alpha's Claim Book 5) Read online

  To spy.

  On every home, every citizen, every transaction, every breath.

  Living through the strangers on the screens until many didn’t feel like strangers at all. Their names—her favorites at least—she knew. Their preferences in foods, their friends, their favorite sexual position.

  Maryanne had access to practically everything. Using her tricks to see, to find, to uncover, more and more every day before she went crazy from the solitude. Every last angle of every last room, alley, bedchamber, and communication network. Always watching, now fluent in the local language.

  Under grow lamps. Fed bland food. Exercised like a pet.

  Lonely.

  Machines were poor company. Shepherd was worse.

  Jules. She hated just enough that verbally sparring with him on the rare occasion he entered her prison gave her something.

  Release.

  God knew she wasn’t having the sexual kind. Unless it was with her hand and maybe acting the voyeur on a particularly interesting liaison.

  Yet, being caught masturbating on the job wasn’t really the kind of conversation she wanted to have should Shepherd pop out of a dark corner. Which he did if she deviated even slightly from schedule.

  So work, work, work.

  What the computers missed as they devoured visual and audio data, it was her sole duty to cherry-pick and deliver with a bow and a “sir.” To date, Maryanne’s reports had resulted in the deaths of four hundred thirty-seven strangers.

  Yet Followers didn’t just pluck potential insurgents off the street as they would have in Thólos. No bodies were strung from buildings or left to rot in the streets. Here, all was done with finesse. Accidents staged. After all, people slipped off the poorly maintained causeways all the time. Especially before the Queen had returned to save them from themselves.

  At Her Royal Majesty Svana’s ruling, infrastructure was under repair… but the city was in such poor shape that sometimes buildings collapsed. Maybe while rebel factions happened to be gathered inside. But who cared about settling dust when schools were opened and children were spoiled with knowledge. Hospitals expanded, and the sick recovered. The hydroponic gardens were upgraded, and food became more readily available.

  The streets grew safer under the Followers’ watchful eyes. After all, criminals knew best how to find their own kind. Squash them like bugs. Take over the necessary rackets. And control everything under the glass.

  The economy flourished.

  The shy Queen was loved.

  The imposing Chancellor Shepherd was adored.

  Fact.

  Adored, feared. Aggressive and just. A precise blend of politics and power.

  All a façade to hide a secret that would bring the city to its knees.

  Those under the invader’s banner—the Followers dressed in black—had murdered, replaced, discarded, crushed thousands upon thousands of the very people who sang their praises.

  And that was fucking terrifying.

  As scary as the glint off the gold on his finger and the fact that she was not the only woman locked away in this brightly colored new place. Not once, on any screen, had Maryanne seen Claire.

  Report complete, forcing a full breath despite uncanny anxiety, the Alpha female sat a little straighter. “How’s Claire?”

  Wow, she really was starved for conversation to even dare bring up that name. But the wedding ring… it had been taunting Maryanne for months.

  Not just the ring…

  The man looming over Maryanne’s workstation stank of Claire’s slick. Not that Maryanne would dare crack any such joke, or even look at him sideways. Not now. Not ever.

  She thought Shepherd had been scary as fuck in the Undercroft. She’d feared him in Thólos. Now, seeing what he’d done in Greth, the man practically made her wet herself.

  And here he was, reeking as if he’d come directly from fucking his mate and wanted the world to know it.

  “None of your concern.”

  Death wish. Maryanne had to have had a death wish to ask, “Has she been eating?”

  And fuck, she’d caught his full attention. That glacial stare, the weight of so much concentration on a simple living being about to be snapped in half like a twig. Even the way he turned from the dozens of monitors to face her full-on.

  Maryanne swallowed.

  And Shepherd stared.

  Time dragging on like claws on flesh.

  A full minute passed. “She’s my best friend. Aren’t we doing this all for her?”

  Cocking a brow, the barest twitch in his cheek, Shepherd verbally struck. “Not once, in all the time she’s been safely back in my care, has she so much as breathed your name. Not once, Maryanne.”

  Chin lifting, Maryanne curled her lip. “Because she thinks I’m dead.”

  “Does she?” Dismissing her as if she was nothing, gray eyes went back to the monitors. “I think we both know better.”

  “Why can’t you ever be nice to me?” Fire, where it came from, Maryanne didn’t know, but it came and burned where she’d been colder than a Thólos corpse. “I follow your orders day in and day out. I obey. I pace, and jump, and wash, and organize. I give you the lives of what might be decent people if they so much as breathe the wrong phrase in passing. What the fuck do you want from me, Shepherd?”

  “I want you dead.”

  Snuffed out, not even a trace of smoke. Frigid, a living corpse. A tired, lonely woman who could really use a drink offered no reply.

  Silence was the appropriate response.

  With obedience came a sort of mercy. Honesty.

  Shepherd, cutting a glance over his shoulder, said, “It frustrates that I can’t kill you. Me, because I despise you. You, because you know how close to the grave you will always be. You’ll never be a Follower, Maryanne. You’re too selfish. Too empty for even me to fill.”

  “Too useful, you mean.”

  “You have your uses.”

  Was that… was that a concession? “I have five more years left in these rooms. I just want to know how Claire is doing.”

  A flicker of light came to a very dark man. “She is painting today.”

  Done with her, with her reports, her efforts, her endless toil staring at people free to do as they wished, Shepherd faded back into the shadows. Leaving Maryanne with nothing but her screens.

  Dinner arrived. She ate. At the appointed hour, she lay down on her cot, warmed by a colorful blanket in a dreary room.

  When the chime woke her so she might slog through another day of endless watching, something new shone like a beacon.

  On the wall… a fresh painting of flowers.

  For the first time since Thólos fell, Maryanne cried.

  And then she threw up.

  5

  There was dry toast for breakfast.

  Maryanne followed protocol: she tidied her sleeping quarters—first cleaning up the drying pool of stale vomit. Afterward, she made the bed with sharp lines. Once bed-making precision had been achieved, she washed her body until her skin stung from the abrasive rag and scentless soap.

  Mustering enthusiasm was dreary, her body dragging as she pulled clothing over her limbs.

  Entering the arena of her misery—the room of screens—fresh, uninvited tears fell.

  Not a single monitor fed her. There was no life to be seen. She had no window…

  Maryanne was trapped in a gray prison with nothing but four walls and the lingering stench of barf. There was nothing for her anywhere. An Alpha female who had flouted Shepherd’s dominion of Thólos. Who had prepared for a long life of solitude. Who had swept the feet out from under a giant when his mate rebelled. Had nothing.

  But dry toast and solitude.

  And a painting of flowers she could neither bring herself to look at or avoid.

  Lunch was bland tomato soup.

  Dinner consisted of… she didn’t know. Maryanne had not even looked before she lifted her plate from the slot and sent it crashing against the opposite
wall.

  “GODS DAMN YOU!”

  Two days. No food was sent.

  Water, she drank from the tap, its coolness cupped in her palms as she slurped.

  On the third day, the darkness lifted. Ten screens came to life.

  Only ten.

  Each one drab. The display no longer featured the fantastical people of Greth with their bright colors and zest for life. Strange-looking multitudes dressed in gray jumpsuits—characterless, colorless drones going about their day—in a creepy harmony of boring absoluteness.

  Two more days, she watched in solitude, forgetting to sleep, to wash, eating her food without tasting as she stared into a mundane, endless caricature of life.

  It was sad to see. It was confusing.

  The monitors were no longer a game; they were work. There were no trysts or secrets to devour. There was conformity and peace.

  As if he sensed the moment Maryanne was at her lowest, the darkness parted, and a massive walking nightmare appeared. “Your feed is now keyed to Bernard Dome, located in the former country of France.”

  France? There had been some information about the place when she’d been the terrible student of her childhood… a history of something? Maryanne could not recall, yet she knew the name and had tuned her ears to the song of a language she did not understand.

  Strange as it was, behind the accord and utter boringness of the display, beautiful things made up their architecture and squares. Fountains, cobblestone streets, white, glittering buildings. And she had watched without sleeping. Because the people did not represent the art of the structure. Same haircut, same pasted blandness of expression. Same uniform.

  Where were the pickpockets? Where was the lust?

  A clock rang, and everyone stood in unison, marched to eat, marched to shit, marched to work, marched to eat.

  Did they march to fuck?

  Where was that monitor?

  A sweet Beta lover she had once been faithful to for over a month had called Maryanne’s eyes enigmatic. He had loved her eyes, not just because they were beautiful, but because they were devious. Playful.

  Beyond her pouty lips, they were perhaps her best feature.

  How long had it been since she’d seen mascara or fluttered her lashes at some potential paramour?

  Why did it feel ugly to lift her gaze to acknowledge Shepherd, knowing he found nothing about her appealing? That it didn’t matter that her eyes were enigmatic, just as it didn’t matter that his whole person was basically disfigured by Da’rin.

  Both of them were basically hideous, outward appearances aside.

  Acknowledging that for the first time, more than a year into her sentence as Shepherd’s indentured prisoner, Maryanne had finally grown a semblance of a spine relating to this man. There was only so much she had left to lose… and it was starting to look more worthless by the minute. “I saved your life in Thólos. I dragged your huge, lumbering body to your men.”

  As if he might actually be offering comfort, the walking terror put a single hand on her shoulder, reciting a speech as if he had memorized the day they landed on this new ground. “To save yourself and only yourself, Maryanne. Yet I live. Subsequently, Claire lives, so you serve your sentence in luxury. You possess a soft bed outfitted with blankets. From your taps flows clean running water. Unlike your few months in the Undercroft, you have a toilet, a bathing cubical, and a purpose. Daily, you are fed a perfectly balanced diet, delivered to you three times a day, when you are not unwell.”

  If they were going to talk truths, then she had a word or two to add. “I hate it in here.”

  “Good.” Shepherd didn’t care, would never care about her impulses or her urges. In fact, there was an odd respect for how well they understood one another in that sense. The conqueror, the king, held all the power. She held all the resentment. Should she not survive the years of her sentence, Maryanne would die alone, forgotten, with nothing but screens and her hand to see her through.

  The idea had flittered through here and there over the ages under Shepherd’s thumb. But she had always brushed it off, because there was an end date. There were passions to pursue.

  Glorious irresponsibility waited on the other side of that door. She would eat and drink and fuck her way through Greth until the glory of this new place was saturated into her cells.

  She would steal things, because she liked to. She would let people down, because it made her remember she was strong.

  And some other poor fool locked in a room with screens would watch her every move until an accident cut her down in her prime.

  Her useless, pointless, vapid self wiped away as if she had never crossed the ocean on a transport and abandoned her home to desiccate in the arctic snows.

  What was she really going to do there? Live in her house while everyone died? Run out of food after a few years of hermit-hood? She was going to wait for a savior to clean up the mess and immerge chubby cheeked and ready to wreak havoc?

  She would have died, just like everyone else died. Just a little later.

  Completely alone, without so much as a watercolor painting on her wall.

  “I won’t help you invade another Dome, Shepherd.” Wow, had she really just said that?

  The weight of his hand still on her shoulder, the man failed to acknowledge her statement. “Impress me, and you will have total control over Bernard Dome surveillance. Fully learn their language. Translation will only be offered by computer for three months. If you fail to attain fluency, these screens shut down forever. You will die in here, well fed, with clean water, withering and pathetic. Exactly how you would have died in Thólos.”

  Her host hit too close to home with that zinger, the first-rate bitch who made her her rearing her beautiful head. “My sentence only carries five more years.”

  She might survive that in solitary confinement. It’s not like this Dome was going to be ravaged, cracked, and infested with the virus. She could have made it five years in Thólos too. Though she’d had books and COMscreens. There had been sex toys and distractions.

  Shepherd nodded once. “True. Yet, I never claimed that you would leave this room alive. In fact, I have ordered every last Follower to assure that you do not.”

  Maryanne was not sure when she had looked away from that gray, terrible gaze. Only to look at more gray terrible monotony on the screen. Bernard Dome. “I suppose this is where I mention your mate.”

  “Maryanne, you are a terrible person. You deserved the Undercroft. Yet I set you free all the same.”

  She was terrible, through and through. Yet she was also wise enough to know that somewhere, someone loved her. “Claire would never forgive you.”

  The magnetism of the man led her to meet his gaze again, right as the scariest Alpha male in creation stated coldly, “Claire would never know.”

  One Alpha faced off against another, Maryanne rising from her seat to stand tall—her final stand. Words had never worked with this male, the male who had set her free from the Undercroft after unspeakable things had been done to her. Who had set her free to run havoc in Thólos after she begged at his feet for protection. The savior she had abandoned at first opportunity, because he was fucking crazy. The man who had destroyed her enemies and haunted her dreams.

  Claire’s mate.

  The ugliest, most ruthless motherfucker born to a dead world. A beast she had watched murder millions, Maryanne laughing until it wasn’t funny anymore.

  A male who did not flinch when her forearm swept her workstation, sending instruments flying before she might button down real rage. “What more do you want from me, Shepherd?”

  Never one for subtlety, a massive hand fit over the top of Maryanne’s skull—turning her gaze to a new illumined screen.

  The new world of… nothing that already led her eyes to unfocus.

  Because demeaning her seemed to be one of his greatest sports, Shepherd spoke to her in a tone that let her know precisely how much of a simpleton she was. “You are worthless as you
are. So grasp this. Jules requested that I spare your life. Therefore, I keep you.”

  Well, leave it to the ol’ creepy blue-eyed Beta. “Jules, huh?”

  “Any allegiance you might have in those hollow bones belongs to him.” Shepherd flipped on another monitor, in such a way that it was utterly embarrassing to realize she could have turned them on herself at any time. “So I suggest that you pay attention to these screens and see what you have failed to notice in the last two days.”

  No way! No way was Jules in a cell in some eerie foreign Dome!

  There was something, something almost human in Shepherd’s statement. “Should he die, Maryanne, so shall you.”

  Jules, the cryptic, nasty piece of shit that he was sat unmoving on the newly illuminated eleventh screen. Solitary in a cell that lacked even a toilet. A cell nowhere near as nice as hers.

  Her Jules, her only tie to civilization.

  “I don’t… I don’t understand.” Why in the heck was he even on foreign soil?

  “You will report on the hour, every hour.”

  “What about sleep?”

  “Every hour until you can give me something worth keeping you alive. Apply your talents—”

  “My Gods! Is that porn projected on his cell wall? What the…? Why are they showing him…? Wow… that Alpha could use some pointers. Did you see how—”

  “It is a live feed, which you will find on screen seventy-two. Meet Jacques Bernard, the regent of Bernard Dome and his Omega, Brenya Perin. I would like to know why Jules’ tenure in their prison involves watching the Omega suffer.”

  “Gross. Look at her face, she’s mangled.” Maryanne was already totally sucked in, speaking to herself when she muttered, “Someone get that girl a sandwich. Oh, and some backbone. Did you see that? She’s not even fighting anymore. Who treats their mate that way?”

  “Yes, I see it.”

  “It’s just wrong… she’s crying.”

  “Every hour, Maryanne. On the hour. Or all the screens go dark, your food dries up, and all you will have left as you starve is the painting to remind you of how horrible you truly are.” And like that, he was gone.

  Every hour, on the hour, she sent a report, unsure what Shepherd was looking for, but scandalized by what she found as she switched on more screens.