Page 83 of Vendetta

Unseen hands groped and grabbed at me. I squirmed away the best I could, but there were too many, and soon I was hauled onto the slick steel table in the middle of the main room. The chill of the metal snapped me out of my daze, and my eyes adjusted to the overly bright lights. Leather straps tightened around my wrists and ankles, and I bit back a whimper of pain.

I bared my teeth and hissed as Lorenzo’s ugly, lopsided face materialized out of the glare.

My anger eclipsed my better judgement, and I couldn’t stop myself from blurting out the first thing that came to mind. “Is this the only way you can get an omega to submit to you? Strap her down? I always knew you were a creep, but I never thought you’d sink this low.” Yes, I had, but it sounded dramatic.

A crooked grin pulled across his face in a macabre facsimile of glee, flashing metal screws bound by rubber-bands holding his teeth together. It looked like someone had broken his jaw. No one could have deserved it more. That would explain the slurred words, though. With the speed at which alphas heal, it would’ve had to have been recent and an extremely bad break.

“You should watch your mouth, bitch. There’s no one to save you now.” Spittle flew from his lips, spraying over the borrowed clothes I was wearing.

He should take his own advice if the state of his face was anything to go by.

The only reprieve from my disgust was the faint scent of maple clinging to the collar of Ollie’s T-shirt, soothing the edge of my nerves.

Inwardly, I cringed, but did my best not to show it. “Right, sure. Whatever makes you feel like a real alpha. What’s going to happen when you have another omega fiancée turn up dead? You don’t think people are going to find that suspicious?” My mouth was going to get me into trouble, but now that I’d started, I couldn’t keep my derision to myself.

Lorenzo rifled through a selection of cutting tools hanging on the wall beside the table. “Who said anything about killing you? And even if I did, things like that have a way of being overlooked in certain circles. What about we say you’re in the Maldives with your mother, or is she buried in some unmarked grave somewhere? I never could get your father to say. Probably because he doesn’t know. What do you think? Should I tell you?” He turned toward me, a pair of cutting shears in his hand.

Unimaginative—the jab at my mother and the choice of scissors—but I kept that opinion to myself, thinking better of insulting him again, at least while I was tied down to a stainless steel table.

“Oh, what? Cat got your tongue now? And you were being so chatty. Maybe I should cut it out for you if you don’t want to use it?” He grinned and snipped the shears in the air a couple of times for emphasis. “We can do that later. First, you stink. I didn’t realize you liked rolling in shit, Rosa.”

I sniffed. All I smelled was the faint, sweet, buttery pheromones Oliver had left on his shirt and, further away, moldy laundry.

It was hard to take Lorenzo seriously based on my experience with him. He talked a big game, but there was no chance he had the stomach to cut my tongue out. He’d always been more words than action in the past. I could more easily imagine him running from a spider than cutting out someone’s tongue.

“You sure do talk a lot for someone with a broken jaw,” I muttered.

Listen, it was a stupid thing to say, I know, but I’d never been good at holding my tongue even in the best of circumstances.

His eyes narrowed. “Yes, this,” he motioned to his green, mottled jaw. “Courtesy of that animal, Cruz. It’s nearly healed now. Thank you for worrying about my health. I knew you’d be the perfect, compassionate wife.”

The alpha that Maria called Emilio stepped into the light. “Let’s teach her a lesson about talking back.” He grabbed the collar of Oliver’s red T-shirt, yanking at it like he was going to tear it.

Lorenzo sliced through the collar, down the torso, and then the sleeves, yanking it off and throwing it on the floor. Cold air blanketed my skin as my body was bared. As if I wasn’t nauseated enough already. This wasn’t helping. I withered under the stares of the two alphas, a cold deeper than the chill in the air sinking into my chest, but I held my silence.

“You’re insane! My father will kill you for this.” I thrashed, trying to get away, but it was no use. All I could do was endure the humiliation.

They both snickered like naughty schoolboys seeing my tits so vulgarly displayed. “I doubt that very much,” Lorenzo said once his bout of hilarity wore off.

It was starting to dawn on me that this had the potential to go very badly. They weren’t backing down. I needed to come up with something, or I was going to be way worse than fucked. I swallowed the bile simmering in the back of my throat and pinched my lips shut.

Shit. I had to think.

Lorenzo meandered to my ankle and slid the shears up my shin, cutting through the black sweats I had on. “As I was saying. No one is coming for you. We can take as long as we want. All your father’s soldiers were rotated to other positions across his territory and replaced with handpicked alphas that are loyal to me. As for the pack that had you…” He scoffed. “Oh yes. We are well aware of that. So if you’re here, and not being tortured at the Moreno compound right now, someone fucked up.”

Ice bloomed in my chest and bled into my limbs, joining the frigid edge of the scissors, reminding me just how lucky I was that he was only cutting my clothes and not my skin. “I escaped and came back here for protection,” I said while pulling against the leather straps, testing them for any weakness. They didn’t give. My father took better care with his equipment than that, but these idiots were too lazy and careless to lock the buckles. It’d be difficult, but with enough concentration, I might be able to get them loose.

Lorenzo rolled his eyes dramatically. “Liar. You were hundreds of miles away. There’s no way you got all the way back here without help.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t have help,” I mumbled, catching the strap on my left wrist between my fingers.

How the fuck did he know where I’d been? I needed to keep him talking. He said he wasn’t in a hurry, so he’d probably keep me alive as long as I was entertaining.

He ignored my petulant mumble and continued cutting through the fabric up my thigh, over my hip, and through the elastic waistband. “You know, I always hated your father. I thought we’d be kindred spirits, you and I. You hated him. I hated him. It could’ve been perfect between us, but you had to run off with the Morenos.”

“They kidnapped me. I didn’t run off,” I said, my mind whirling around the fact that he’d just said he hated my father and that he knew far too much about where I’d been and who I’d been with.

“Well, sure. Because they thought Rafael killed their mom. Wouldn’t those boys be upset to find out it was actually their own father who killed her?” He snickered through his banded teeth.