With only the sound of movement and four women working in silence, the damned place was eerie. There was an air of heaviness, tension, a subtle scent of pain and anger and an underlying chill that he couldn’t put his finger on.
Anya lifted her head from the bowls and ingredients she was working on. Her eyes were dark, and perhaps there were shadows under them.
“There are cold cuts in the fridge if you need a sandwich,” she told him. “I’ll have egg and assorted meat biscuits in an hour if you’d like to wait.”
“You don’t have kitchen duty.” He hardened his voice.
“No one has kitchen duty.” She shrugged. “Cleanup is a far cry from making certain there’s actually food on base and certain items ready to eat when your teams get hungry, Del-Rey. There are well over sixty soldiers here at last count with several dozen more coming. Someone has to make certain supplies are kept up with.”
“Add it to the duties with rotation,” he ordered her.
He watched her pour milk into a huge bowl of flour and begin working it in. Her head was lowered, her expression calm and composed, when he knew she was anything but.
“Doesn’t work that way.” She shook her head.
“Then make it work,” he bit out. “We have things to discuss that require both our attention, not you standing elbows deep in a bowl of flour.”
She looked up at the clock on the wall. “You can table your discussions for two hours,” she decided. “Pencil me into your schedule after that and let me know what time to meet you where.”
“So we’re scheduling in f**king now?” he snarled, ignoring the other women.
Her head jerked up, a flicker of pain crossing her face. “If that’s the discussion, then I guess that’s what we’re doing.”
He felt almost helpless. He remembered that feeling clearly from his youth. So clearly it punched into his brain and left a growl rumbling in his throat. With a steel cage surrounding him, he had watched, so many times, as his brothers and sisters were murdered before his eyes. Coyote Breeds that were considered flawed, because they had mercy, because they reached out to one another. Children no more than babies that cried for attention or for food when there was none left. Cut down before his eyes. And if he tried to fight, if he tried to save them, then others died as well. They hadn’t been kind enough to go ahead and kill him and put him out of his misery.
They beat him. Lashed him with a whip. Hooked electrodes to him after chaining him to the wall, and tortured him with the electricity they flayed his body with.
He was an example to the others the same as the killings were. They meant to break him, to destroy that mercy he had inside him and prove that a Breed had no soul, honor or principles.
They had failed. But in some ways, they had won as well.
“Excuse me, Alpha.” Ashley moved around him as she stepped from the small closet that held countless cooking implements.
He glanced down at her, saw her shorter nails and frowned.
“Didn’t I just send you to the damned salon?” he growled.
Her eyes widened. “I had dishes last night. A few popped off.”
“What do you mean you had dishes?”
She fidgeted in front of him and looked to Anya.
“It was Ashley’s turn to load the dishwasher and clean the pots and pans,” Anya answered.
“I have a f**king rotation for kitchen duty.” His voice was harsh, primal, causing the three female Coyotes to flinch.
Anya shrugged. “When I checked the closet, the dishes hadn’t been cleaned well. They’re soldiers, Del-Rey. Men. They don’t understand rinsing first, nor do they understand cleaning. Sharone, Emma and Ashley spent hours in here fixing it. Your rotation isn’t working.” Her head lifted. “Unless the Felines are doing it. They seem to have a clue. But I imagine Alpha Lyons wouldn’t be pleased if we used the Feline Breeds for kitchen duty only.”
She dumped her flour mess on the counter and began working it into a ball. A huge ball. He glared at her.
“You are not a servant,” he snapped. “This is not where you belong.”
She paused, stared at the dough and lifted her head. Her gaze was shuttered, but God, what he felt coming from her. Emotions were almost locked inside her, giving him only the smallest hint of the roiling, overwhelming anger, fear and need that twisted in her dark blue eyes.
“I’m busy, Del-Rey,” she finally said. “Schedule a time and I’ll be there. Until then, let me finish if you don’t mind. Or is this something else I need your permission to complete?”
Fury slapped him. He could feel it building inside him. The need rose inside him to force her submission, to carry her back to their rooms and f**k her until she didn’t have the energy to defy him. And another part, a saner part, the human part, paused as he sensed more than the animal wanted to see.