Chapter 110: The Reckoning Begins

Selene’s POV

I wasn’t saying a word, and I had no intention of starting.

Aiden ... or Reid, whatever he wanted to call himself ... picked up his phone and made a call.

"Yeah, you guys can come in. She’s not complying," he said.

"Oh, so you’re calling for backup." I let out a short, cold laugh. "You can’t tame a single she-wolf without assistance. You’re a disgrace."

He answered me with his whip.

It came down hard and fast, and I screamed before I could stop myself.

"Ahhh!"

Not even the Alpha would have allowed something like this to happen to me. I had thought Lucian’s chambers felt like fire ... a place designed to break you down slowly. But this? This was hellfire. A burning furnace that consumed everything that dared enter it.

"I’m glad I didn’t let you touch me," I spat through the pain. "You’re a foolish, dumb wolf."

"If I had wanted to touch you, I would have," he said, crouching to my eye level. "But that wasn’t the mission. That could still come as a bonus though."

"Shut the fuck up, Aiden."

"It’s Reid." He said it slowly, like I was supposed to care. "And I doubt I’d enjoy it anyway ... your pussy must be stretched wide by now with everything the Alpha’s been doing to you."

That one landed differently. I felt it somewhere beneath the physical pain.

"Tell me the secret and I’ll call them off," he continued, straightening up. "I’ll send them back before they even get here. Simple trade."

I looked him dead in the eye.

"I will never tell you anything. Kill me if you want to, bitch."

He slapped me across the face.

Then he moved lower ... too low ... and pressed his face toward my chest like an animal, his hands reaching. One palm forced my chin up while the other squeezed my breast.

"Didn’t get to taste it when I had the chance," he murmured. "Maybe I’ll fix that before you die."

He was a pervert. There was no other word for it.

"I regret the day I ever crossed paths with you, Reid," I said. "You’re a bastard."

He went inside the house and came back out holding a gun. He loaded the bullets in slowly, deliberately, letting me watch every second of it.

"You will talk today, Selene," he said as he cocked the hammer.

"You’re shameless," I said. "You want history to remember you as the wolf who shot a helpless woman tied to a chair? Because you were too weak to get answers any other way?"

He fired a shot into the air.

"Silence."

I went quiet immediately. The sound had rung through my ears like a bell and I couldn’t pretend it hadn’t.

His men walked in behind him. Two of them ... both enormous, built like walls, each one somehow bigger than Reid himself. One of them already had his whip out. It was long and thick and I knew from one look that it was going to be worse than anything Reid had done.

"She still hasn’t talked?" the first one asked.

The second one grabbed me by the collar. "Speak, bitch."

The first one swung.

The whip caught me across the arms and thighs and I screamed. When I looked down, I could see blood rising to the surface of my skin in thin, angry lines. They tore my skirt next and flogged me again, repeatedly, without pause, until the world started to blur at the edges and my knees gave out completely.

"Please..." My voice came out shaking, barely mine. "I don’t know anything. Ask the manufactory."

It was the closest thing to breaking I had ever come.

I looked around the room through swollen eyes. There was no way out of here. No exit. No intervention coming. No one who knew where I was.

Who was going to save me?

"Reid, she’s not giving us anything," the deeper-voiced one said, glancing back at him. "She’s already dead meat. Should we go ahead?"

Reid didn’t even hesitate. "Do it. We’ll tell the boss she wasn’t compliant."

They dropped their guns.

Then they dropped their pants.

My stomach lurched. The goddess herself couldn’t have prepared me for what I was looking at ... two enormous men, stripped down, standing over me like I was nothing.

They snapped the chains off me and forced me to the floor, each of them pinning me down with their full weight. My clothes were torn the rest of the way off until there was nothing left between me and the cold ground.

I had nowhere to run. No voice loud enough to reach anyone. No strength left in my body to fight.

I accepted it.

I didn’t want to, but I did.

"Wait."

Reid’s voice cut through the room.

They paused.

He walked over and crouched in front of me ... on the floor where I lay bleeding, broken, barely holding on ... and looked at me like I was a particularly stubborn puzzle.

"Look at yourself," he said quietly. "You have no control over what happens next. So stop pretending you do. Give us the secret to your machine and this ends right now."

Blood was filling my mouth. I let it sit on my tongue for a moment.

Then I smiled and spat it out at his feet.

"Even from my grave," I said, "I will never tell you a single thing."

"Do it!" Reid shouted, jumping back. "Do it now!"

They spread my legs and moved in ... and then noise erupted from outside. Something heavy hit the doors. Then the doors crashed inward.

Soldiers flooded the room.

Reid bolted. He was gone before anyone could get a hand on him ... slipped out like smoke the moment the chaos started. But his men weren’t fast enough. The soldiers grabbed them both and stripped them of their weapons without breaking a sweat, pinning them down like they weighed nothing.

Then one more person walked through the broken doorway.

Lucian.

I stared at him. The shock hit harder than the pain had.

How did he know I was here? How could he possibly have known?

"This is the place," he said, almost to himself. "I was right."

He crossed the room in seconds and dropped to his knees beside me, gathering me up off the floor and carrying me out of that house and into the waiting car outside. Before the door had even closed behind us, I heard him give a quiet signal to his soldiers.

Two gunshots rang out a moment later.

Reid’s men were dead.

I tried to speak. My mouth opened but nothing came out ... not a sound, not a syllable. That was what my stubbornness had cost me. My own body wouldn’t cooperate anymore.

"Hey." Lucian’s voice was steady, close to my ear. "You’re safe now, Selene."

The car was moving fast. I could hear him telling the driver to push the speed, that I was losing too much blood. I hadn’t even registered that myself until he said it.

We reached the king’s chambers and a doctor was already there waiting.

I could see the ceiling above me. My eyes were open but they kept threatening to close on their own, like curtains being pulled slowly shut.

"Will she be alright?" Lucian asked.

"I need to run tests and stop the bleeding first," the doctor said, then turned to the nurses and gave quick, sharp instructions.

Lucian came to stand beside where I’d been laid down.

"Don’t overthink anything right now," he said quietly. "You’re going to be fine. Those fools have been dealt with." He paused. "Most of them."

Most of them.

Reid had escaped.

And Lucian only knew about the men in that room. He had no idea there was a whole network of them ... an entire team running the same operation, doing the same dirty work. They all needed to be found. Every last one of them.

I had to get well.

I had to get answers from Lucian.

And I had to make sure that what was done to me tonight didn’t go unanswered.

The hunger for it surprised me ... that dark, sharp craving for justice that sat in my chest like a hot coal. It wasn’t something I recognised in myself. But that room, those men, that floor ... they had reached inside me and pulled something out that had apparently always been there.

Waiting.

Reid and every single person standing behind him would fall. I was going to make sure of it.