He was insane.
Staring down at the helpless, terrified research technician before him, Gideon acknowledged that fact with a sense of aching, bitter regret.
His sanity had been stripped from him with each day, with each injection, each slice of the scalpel against his flesh as Phillip Brandenmore’s monsters conducted their experiments on him.
So many years. So many broken bones, so many demonic experiments.
So many times he had prayed for death and death hadn’t come. Insanity had come instead. Insanity, and the overwhelming thirst for the blood of his enemies first, then for the blood of those who had betrayed him when they should have allowed him to die.
Crouching down to the floor where he had stretched his victim out spread-eagle, Gideon tilted his head and stared at the panic in the research tech’s wide hazel eyes.
Gideon had injected him with the same drug that had been used to paralyze the victims in the Council and Brandenmore labs.
The same drug that had been used on him.
Scott Connelly had been a particularly sadistic bastard to the research subjects he had been assigned to. The evil that had existed inside him had gotten off on ensuring his charges felt as much pain as possible.
And they had felt pain. An agonizing, horrible pain that could never be forgotten.
All but one. Only one of those innocent victims had been spared his cruelty, his insanity. The one Gideon considered his ultimate prey.
Vengeance for the night death had been ready to receive him with gentle, comforting arms, only to be torn from them. To be given blood that had tainted his own, that had created a fever inside him he couldn’t endure. A feral rage he couldn’t exist within.
Gideon tensed at the memory, still so clear and vivid, the agony of so many years ripping through his senses and causing an involuntary growl to pass his lips.
His muscles bunched as if preparing to move in for the kill and he felt his mouth water for the taste of blood.
An enemy’s blood.
A primal snarl rumbled in his chest, scraping his throat as he bared the sharpened canines at the sides of his mouth.
He was rewarded with a whimper of terror, and panic. The fear scented the air around him but did nothing to ease the primal violence swirling inside him.
Control was hard won. It was won only because it was now his turn to inflict the pain. His victim awaited him. The scent of his terror wafting through the room. Though it was an addictive aroma, it did little to appease the rage building inside him.
Gideon twirled the scalpel between his fingers as he rested his arms on his upper legs, his wrists lying over the edge of his knees as he watched the former research technician. He barely felt the rasp of his denim jeans against the underside of his arms where the sleeves of the white shirt he wore were folded back. Normally, the thin white scars that lay over that flesh didn’t tolerate the rasp of clothing well. But this time, he barely felt it.
Blood would spray, he thought as he contemplated his victim. It would stain the shirt and jeans, but stealing more clothes wouldn’t be a problem.
“Gideon, please,” Scott wheezed from his position, flat on his back, naked to the chill of the air conditioning that Gideon had set at its lowest setting.
Any sensation that touched the flesh or the organs would be amplified because of the drug. Reactions to each sensation would be purer, stronger, allowing the scientists to better predict how each wound affected the body.
The bastard couldn’t even shiver, though his teeth did chatter on occasion. That sound was another sign of success, of hard-won vengeance, and helped to restrain the animal prowling beneath the flesh.
“Please what?” Gideon rasped.
The sound of his own voice never failed to enrage him.
How many times had it been broken from his screams of pain?
How many times had he begged, pleaded, and cried for mercy?
He was a Prime, a primal male Breed. His pride was as intense as his natural strength and inborn animalistic abilities. To be driven by such agony, such horrific torture to beg, to shed tears and plead for death, had broken that pride to its core and all but destroyed it.
Even in the labs he had been created within there hadn’t been such horrific pain that the Breeds were driven to beg unless the scientists intended death to be the final conclusion to that experiment.
The scientists that had created the Breeds in the Denali Labs in Alaska had prided themselves on the strength and power that filled their creations. They’d had no desire to bow the shoulders of their Breeds by damaging them to such an extent.