Corrupted (Alpha’s Claim Book 5)

“Show me.”

Skin instantly pricking to the point it stung, the worst sort of unseen, unheard predator emerged from the shadows. Tired of the constant surprises, Maryanne snarled, “For fuck’s sake! Why do you have to sneak up on me like that every goddamn time?”

Isolation had done her few favors. But she breathed, which was more than she could say about the poor saps in Thólos. If they weren’t dead now, they would be soon. And those who might still linger? They probably wished they’d died quickly in the siege.

Most of them had been assholes who’d had it coming. She didn’t owe them a goddamn thing.

Didn’t think about it.

Look forward. Stay alive. Stay in place…

Always in the same three rooms.

This keeping place, this prison, the accommodations were larger than her crappy dwelling back in Antarctica. But no windows. Her vitamin D came from specialized lamps and a daily dose of healthy food. She was little more than a tended houseplant.

Unless she suffered punishment, she was ordered to exercise—the regime boring, exhausting, pointless when there was nowhere to go and no city to explore. Not unless she used the faculties left for her amusement.

And by amusement… her only amusement… Shepherd really meant occupation.

Occupation.

On a multitude of levels.

She, an Alpha female of considerable talents, was in prison just as the entire Dome of Greth was unknowingly imprisoned by a tyrant. Yet not once had she tried to escape.

Because she knew exactly what would happen to her. Shepherd had explained it in gory and glorious detail. In a voice so chillingly calm that every hair on Maryanne’s body stood on end… and remained so for several days afterward.

And those downy hairs still rose each time the Chancellor of Greth Dome appeared from the shadows like the monster he was.

Prick always liked to sneak up on her. Make his demands. Criticize mistakes. And Gods help her if there was so much as a piece of discarded laundry on the floor.

She couldn’t even live in her own rooms! What was the point of crisp corners on bedding when it was her bedding and she didn’t care?

Who scrubbed their bathroom from top to bottom every single day?

No one. No one anywhere did that. And she’d know. She had visual and auditory access to every bathroom in the whole fucking city.

An entire room of her prison was nothing but monitors, feeds, supercomputers, wires, access to anything she might want to look at or hear. But not taste or touch or feel.

Ever.

Lunch had been tomato soup with crackers. Breakfast a bowl of unsweetened oats. Dinner would most likely be some kind of meat, unsalted, unseasoned, unappealing.

While out in the city, there were exotic fruits, local dishes that made her mouth water just to imagine the spices. There was laughter, and drinking, and sex, and fun.

Things meaningless when made to document it all.

Analyze, report. Analyze, report. Analyze, report.

Before she might give the necessary report, a large hand reached forward, the male pointing to one of the many displays of the city. To a market. Adjusting the feed to suit his whim.

Light caught on the gold of his wedding band.

Light dimmed from his eyes.

What he saw in that image. How his expression said nothing. The thoughts that might be going through his head. Maryanne knew better than to guess.

She’d seen that lack of look on his face when she’d been imprisoned in the Undercroft. Foreboding, godly, calculating.

And not for her to question.

He had saved her from the worst prison imaginable. She had saved him from Thólos.

And what did she get for it? This perpetual purgatory and fucking tomato soup.

Stuck with an endless surveillance job. Locked away from the sights and smells of an exciting new place.

At least this prison was safe.

No one ever touched her. Not even Shepherd had brushed against her once in all the hours he came and went.

Slave labor, she’d called it, when Jules first dragged her into this… whatever this room was. The bastard Beta had coarsely laughed at her fit, named it salvation.

A sentence with an end date.

Another reason—the reason she pretended to keep her twitching hand off the door—she had not tried to escape.

A girl needed some self-esteem.

Or as Shepherd would preach: a purpose.

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.