him, his stomach heaved. He was disgusted by the things he'd done to his woman.
Well, now he was disgusted. When he'd been doing them... he'd been righteous.
Christ, he should have been more careful. She was a living thing, after all... Shit, what if he'd gone too far? Oh, man... He should never have let himself do those things. The trouble was, as soon as he'd seen that she'd freed the male he'd brought her, he'd lost it. Just splintered into shrapnel that had torn right through her.
He lifted his foot from the gas. He wanted to go back and take her out of her pipe and reassure himself that she was still breathing. Except there wasn't enough time before the meeting of the Primes started.
As he stomped on the accelerator, he knew he wouldn't be able to leave her once he saw her anyway, and then the Fore-lesser would come looking for him. And that would be a problem. The persuasion center was a mess. Goddamn it...
O slowed and wrenched the wheel to the right, the truck lurching off Route 22 onto a one-lane dirt road.
Mr. X's cabin, also the Lessening Society's HQ, was smack in the middle of a seventy-five-acre forest, completely isolated. The place was nothing more than a small log setup with a dark green shingled roof and an outbuilding about half the size behind it. As O pulled up, there were seven cars and trucks parked in a loose configuration, all of them domestic, most of them at least four years old.
O walked inside the cabin and saw he was the last to show. Ten other Primes were packed into the shallow interior space, their pale faces grim, their bodies broad and heavy with muscle. These were the Lessening Society's strongest men, the ones who had been in it the longest. O was the only exception when it came to time served. He had just three years since his induction, and none of them liked him because he was new.
Not that they got a vote. He was as tough as any Prime and had proved it. Jealous fuckers... Man, he was never going to be like them, just cattle for the Omega. He couldn't believe the idiots prided themselves on their paling out over time and losing their identities. He fought against the fading. He colored his hair to keep it the dark brown it had always been, and he dreaded the gradual lightening of his irises. He did not want to look like them.
"You're late," Mr. X said. The Fore-lesser leaned back against a refrigerator that wasn't plugged in, his pale eyes latching onto the scratches all over O's neck. "Been fighting?"
"You know how those Brothers are." O found a place to stand across the way. Though he nodded to his partner, U, he didn't acknowledge anyone else.
The Fore-lesser continued to look at him. "Has anyone seen Mr. M?"
Fuck, O thought. That lesser he'd taken out for walking in on him and his wife would have to be accounted for.
"O? You got something to say?"
From the left, U spoke up. "I saw M. Right before dawn. Fighting with a Brother downtown."
As Mr. X shifted his stare to the left, O was cold-shit shocked at the lie.
"You saw him with your own eyes?"
The other lesser's, voice was steady. "Yeah. I did."
"Any chance you're protecting O?"
Wasn't that the question to ask? Lessers were cutthroats, always jockeying with one another for position. Even among partners there was little loyalty.
"U?"
The guy's pale head weal back and forth. "He's on his own. Why would I risk my skin for his?"
Clearly that was some logic Mr. X felt he could trust, because he went on with the meeting. After the quotas for kill and capture were assigned, the group broke up.
O went over to his partner. "I have to go back to the center for a minute before we go out. I want you to follow me."
He had to find out why U had saved his ass, and he wasn't worried about the other lesser seeing the shape the place had been left in. U wouldn't cause trouble. He wasn't particularly aggressive or an independent thinker, more operator than innovator.
Which made it even more weird that he'd taken the initiative he had.
Zsadist stared at the grandfather clock in the mansion's foyer. By the position of the hands he knew he had eight minutes before the sun was officially down. Thank God it was winter and the nights were long.