light, feeling, all rushed back again, dragged through me by my rapidly increasing pulse. It felt like I’d gone from a standing start to sprinting, where before I was strolling along listlessly. The sound of scraping metal wheels, complete with a high-pitched squeak had my eyes screwing down tight, my hands clapping down on my ears. I still heard them talk through.
“Get him onto her gurney.”
“Putting her on his would be easier.”
“Another wolf is a good thing, but not more important than her. If we lose him, there’s plenty more where that came from down in the valley, but her… My predecessors chased her grandmother to this area, but never brought her to ground. To find a young, potentially fertile specimen of an animage… It beggars belief.” That hushed, reverent tone soon disappeared. “Focus on her, not him.”
I cried out when I was jostled, something large and hot and hard placed against me. I wanted to pull away, cringe back as a heavy thing was thrown over my ribs. I yelped, the sudden contact hurting, until it didn’t.
Jai… my mind provided feebly. With it came a rush of something…hot, sweet, not exactly pleasure, but close. Comfort, my mind supplied belatedly, that was it. I felt the muscles inside me unwind slowly, ready to clench tight again at a moment’s notice. But I needn’t have worried.
“That’s a girl…” a voice said soothingly. “She’s evening out already. Skin to skin, she’s accepted him as her mate.”
“Hmph…we’ll see. I’m not sure he’s the best breeding material. I like Caleb’s lineage. Enough alpha to show strength, not enough to cause us undue problems when the children are born.”
“She’s not going to accept Caleb on your say so. I keep telling you, this is a more complex process than you think. In my study—”
“Yes, yes, Stuart. I read all about your ‘studies.’ Well, now’s your opportunity to test some of those fertility drugs you were tinkering with before being brought back to this backwater town. Cutting edge stuff, several small populations of endangered big cats have been brought back from the brink by your work. You now can put that work to the ultimate test.”
“I won’t hurt her.”
“You already have, dear boy. Let's not start listening to the pangs of your conscience now.”
I swum up, up, up out of unconsciousness and instantly regretted it the minute I opened my eyes. I wasn’t lying face down on the dirt and grass at home. As my eyes snapped open, I saw a deep sleeping Jai, my face buried in his chest, but as I pulled free in a series of sluggish, awkward movements, I could see we were nowhere near home.
I’d watched Buffy slavishly when I was young, as the romances between a paranormally talented girl and hot, hot supes was enough to suck me in, hook, line and sinker. So when I looked around at the glass walled pens that held us and all the other inmates in what I assumed was some subterranean level of the institute, my heart sank. We weren’t the only ones here. I half fell, half climbed down from the gurney, seeing the other prisoners move when I did.
Stuart Wilson, my former boss and I thought friend, looked at me from the other side of the glass, eyes dropping down to a tablet he carried, lots of little animations playing on it that seemed to be giving him information on my vital signs. My eyes dropped down, seeing the white hospital gown I’d been changed into, no shoes, no clothes, no phone, just this. I looked down the front of it, searching for some sort of sensor.
“It’s been implanted, Shannon,” Stuart said, not looking especially pleased, but I knew this face well. This was the look he gave patients when they brought ailing pets in. His tough love face that would tell them either they needed to spend a whole lot of money, or say goodbye. I just never expected it to be directed at me. “We took some samples, checked your general health—”
“Without my fucking permission,” I snapped. I slammed my hands up against the glass, but it didn’t give a millimetre. I looked up, then down and saw the walls were slotted into reinforced grooves that were set in the concrete floor. “What did you do?”
My voice came out as a low snarl, the other prisoners shifting restlessly in their cages, but Hollings-fucking-worth just smiled that smug fucking prick smile of his.
“Blood, hair samples, vaginal secretions…” His eyes slid