Corrupted (Alpha’s Claim Book 5)

It should have occurred to Brenya sooner. In Palo Corps, her duty had been to identify defects and repair them. Rarely was the damage as simple as a poorly fitted connection or faulty wiring. Yet even if it was, when an engineering grunt made the descent, their duty was to know that every moment they risked exposure, everyone under the glass depended on them.

The entirety of the infrastructure had to be considered. During the climb, if dust was found on a solar collection, it was the grunt’s duty to polish it in passing. If the wind had carried some bracken that stuck to the glass, it would be removed.

Mated to the Commodore of Bernard Dome… her days were now spent under the weight of a large Alpha with a constant erection. She braced. Trying to survive—knowing George had suffered, knowing the lives of Annette and her baby might end at any moment, hiding as often as she was able in the mindscape of such utter darkness, Brenya knew what Jacques had failed to grasp.

It wasn’t just George, or Annette, or little Matthieu.

Everyone under the Dome was in danger, and it was Jacques’ doing.

And it had to be undone.

She could have told the Alpha these things, but he had proven himself incapable of listening past his own flawed judgment. Her voice to him only mattered if it was to please his ego, to thank him for something she had not asked for and didn’t want.

That is what it meant to be the most powerful woman in Bernard Dome. It meant diamonds locked around your neck and silence in the presence of Alphas.

White dresses, sweet wine, boredom, unease, and the constant job of supplicating the male who had admitted he hurt her during sex so she would fight back.

Because she had not touched him when he was inside her? No one had told her she was supposed to touch him. Ancil had strictly ordered her to bend over and brace.

Annette was right, there was nowhere to run. Jacques would always follow.

This was going to be her life, until the life went out of her.

And it already felt like she was being pushed to the wayside by Jacques’ mental invasions and Jules’ yawning emptiness. An overbearing presence in juxtaposition to a man whose soul had been scooped out.

Gnawing hunger that grew worse by the day. The dust on the solar collector she had missed. A total failing in her duty to the Dome.

Ambassador Jules Havel was starving.

And she could feel it as real as if it were her own guts crying out for sustenance.

The same man who had witnessed her public warning to Annette not to eat the Beta rations she had been served at his state dinner. The Thólosen terrorist knew the food wasn’t clean.

Jacques couldn’t see the endless unfeeling void of the man like she could. He didn’t understand that poking his rabid dog was going to kill them all. Jacques didn’t know that Jules had a Rebecca.

And if he was even as slightly obsessed with the woman as Jacques was with Brenya, the Dome was going to suffer all the sooner.

“You are tormenting me with your indifference.”

The moment Brenya understood how much she had overlooked by wallowing in her own unchanging misery, she set down her golden fork. Abandoning the remaining pasta Jacques had served for dinner, she couldn’t bear to look at the man for another moment. “I think I am going to be sick.”

The Commodore’s complaints about her lack of engagement when he mounted her and her indifference to his existence evaporated, Jacques rising from his chair as if coming closer to her would be anything other than unsettling.

The purr was loud, forceful—rapid in a way that almost leaned toward panic. Yet his arms were oddly gentle as he helped her stand.

The dinner was deserted to the evening air, the golden fork with so many possibilities forgotten, as it had been forgotten each night. After all, every maintenance panel hidden behind the papered walls of the Commodore’s bedroom had been sealed beyond her ability to open them.

Not that Brenya had tried. She could smell the epoxy.

The myriad of buttons that ran down the back of her dress were undone with hurried expertise, freeing Brenya of another hated dress with the finesse of a man who must have done so for other women many times. Usually, he just rent her clothing from neck to navel. Usually, the Alpha was more concerned with licking cream from her nipples as dessert than he was with treating her clothing with respect.

The man liked to break things, he liked the noises she made when he uncovered flesh in the most violent of ways.

He liked to hold her down in the nest and pour sweet things on skin. He liked to lap and suck and leave marks with his teeth.

But at her statement of illness, she had been offered a reprieve.

Instead of fucking her, again, he pressed her back to the mattress and thought to touch in a way that seemed as if he practiced intimacy. The strokes of his large, warm hands were long. His purr was masculine and determined.

Lulled into a quiet place, cautious that he would alter his intention and use her like he did his napkin at dinner, Brenya floated in mental stillness.

He believed her asleep.

Brenya encouraged this by retreating to that emptiness where she could hide uninvited, eyes closed and breath soft. And a miracle was delivered.

Shifting his weight off the bed as if trying not to wake her, Jacques went to his dressing room. Moments later, he had quietly abandoned the room.

Opening her eyes to blissful solitude, Brenya invaded another man’s emotionless void further. Leaning on the wrongness of Jules to hide what she intended to do.

She slipped from an unsatisfying arrangement of blankets and pillows, bare feet landing on a soft rug.

If smiles were something natural in Central, Brenya would have smiled to see that Jacques had left his day’s clothing on the floor beside the bed. The vanity of the Alpha was so extreme he donned fresh things to confront what made Brenya sick.

Obsessive as he was, there was no other logical alternative for his behavior.

Jacques’ abandoned shirt became hers, the only piece of utilitarian clothing that had touched her skin in ages.

Just like the sloppy leavings of his apparel on the ground, the male had forgotten to lock the door to his private balcony. He had not considered that a golden fork was priceless beyond its polished glitter as one twirled their pasta in the bowl of a matching golden spoon.

The unused knife was almost as exciting.

Priceless china and crystal goblets were abandoned for the simplicity of dumping leftovers atop the starched napkin Jacques had told her was to be laid in the lap and used to dab the mouth should a sauce turn rogue.

Foolish.

Fabric of this nature, with its tight weave and stiffness, was much better knotted up at the corners. Brenya made a tool from a frivolous thing. Just as she took the stolen shirt on her back and wound the tails that hung almost to her feet into a sling.

Careless if Central’s fancy cuisine was mushed into one soggy mass, Brenya tucked the pack in her makeshift pouch and snatched up the only tools she would have for what had to be done.

Just as she would have bit down on any tool when her hands needed to be free during maintenance, she pinched the golden necks of her utensils between her teeth.

Hands braced on the wide balustrade, she took a steadying breath, then stepped out onto the ledge.

All of this having been done so quickly, unit 17C would have outshined her class in efficiency and received a red ribbon of excellence. All of it done with her mind on the plane of emotionless function so familiar, so missed, that she dared not enjoy the splendor of freedom from feeling.

Standing, Brenya towered over Central, the updraft sending her hair into disarray. Her city was at her feet, her people going about their lives, oblivious to Central’s machinations and their Commodore’s flaws.

Exactly how it needed to remain.

Yet Jacques already had a head start.

Fortunately, the palace was intricately embellished with cavorting depictions of the Gods, complicated architectural details offering footholds aplenty. She didn’t even need a rope.

Gold utensils in her teeth and a bag of leftover food stowed in her stolen shirt, she braced her weight on her left foot for leverage… and ascended.

Hands and feet moving from one unlikely grip to another, Brenya moved in a horizontal line, tracking the path Jacques would have had to make to leave his apartments.

At the third window, she glimpsed Jacques moving down a corridor. He would soon be out of her sight. All she needed was a single access panel. Having stood on this balcony, uninterrupted while Jacques stared at her, Brenya knew exactly where to go.

Hand burning with the familiar exercise of holding up her entire body weight, she dangled by a single hand and slipped the knife from her teeth. With the perfect pressure and leverage, the panel popped in.

Slipping into the dimly illuminated maintenance shaft, Brenya stalked the scent of her mate through the air vents as he strolled toward the centralized lift. Guards. Flanking doors as gold as the knife in her hand. She watched them call the elevator as she unscrewed access to the vertical shaft. As if Jacques was above such a menial task.

The lift had already begun to descend before she pulled away the panel. Knife and fork back between her teeth, she sucked a deep breath through her nostrils, wiped her palms on her stolen shirt, and counted to three.

Rocking back on her heels, she jumped.

A moment of blissful freefall. Floating and weightless. Burdened only with gravity and one chance to catch the cables before her.

It was if she had been born for this, the ease in which that rope of engineered steel found her palms. How her skin burned when her body’s momentum continued forward only to be jerked back by a sure grip.

She’d done it!

Of course she had. She was Brenya Perin, who had once breathed outside air and climbed the Dome with one working arm.

She was so much more than a kept pet used to satisfy the sexual urges of a bad man.

The most powerful woman in Bernard Dome.

As the elevator continued its rapid descent, her hair flew upward as she cut through the air, alighted to the cable that bore her weight as if she were the butterfly landing on the side of her beloved Bernard Dome.

Sublevel G2.

The lift slowed, stopped, and Brenya closed her eyes.

All buildings under the Dome followed the same standard engineering code, there were no secrets in design. Making it simple to visualize where she was in regards to Jacques’ rooms.

A map bloomed in her thoughts.

And then she moved.

A short climb down the cable led to a soft landing on the top of the elevator car. From there, she took to the steel maintenance ladder and made her way to the nearest access panel. Spidering through the ducts, unsure of which direction Jacques may have taken, she thought she might have lost him.

Until she heard a male voice, almost imperceptible right below where she crept. Ear to the metal, she made out Jacques’ threat.

“I will have you sedated and fitted with a feeding tube.”

“You can try.”

The voice of Ambassador Jules Havel.

Pulling her ear from the ground, Brenya set her tools before her and strategized.

Unless there was a different maintenance corridor that serviced the room. The ducting in that area had not been designed to be easily deconstructed. Such efficiency in design was only used for rooms that required little ventilation. She didn’t even see plumbing in the tight space.

Even the electrical wiring was scarce.

Ambassador Jules Havel had been tucked into a storage bay.

Ignoring the muffled incompressible sound of male voices below, knife and fork were used to dissect the panel beneath her—dismantling the shaft’s floor as delicately as she would a damaged pane outside the Dome.