Alluvial. Valos of Sonhadra Book 1

Chapter 14

RYAN

He had her FUCKING bra and panties! I'm cursing every one of them and their mothers when they haul me into the bedroom of their underground lair, but the breath leaves me when I see Preta, naked, raped unconscious.

Pain slices through my chest and the rage makes it impossible to see her for a moment—snarling at the creatures that are carrying me like the invalid I fucking am, I suck air in through my teeth and try to get my head on straight, and look her over for injuries. What I feel in this moment doesn't matter. She—

I stare at her.

"MOTHERF—!" I might be hitting a high note on this one as my leg gets jostled. The asshole setting me down right now wasn't even trying to be an asshole—even hurt, boiling with aggression, and yes, fear, I can tell that much. He tried to go easy.

And Preta...Her... She looks...

Healthy.

She looks fed. Not that greenish just-got-injected-with-serum-and-I'm-about-to-hurl 'fed'—she looks even better now than the day I first saw her, this must be what she looked like before the research team took an interest in her.

Initially, I'd been relieved as hell when I'd gotten the transfer from the men's levels to the women's. I assumed reassignment to their part of the 'hood meant, among other things, that it'd be less dangerous.

For me, it was.

For the women? I did not fucking know women could be so damn evil. My first day there, I broke up a broomstick party. The shit those bitches do to the newbie and weaker inmates is sick. Not that men are any better, it's just that there's this expectation that women are the gentler, fairer sex.

What-fuckin-ever.

A few hours of their cat-calling me—an event somehow as equally disturbing as when the male inmates did it—and I was of the opinion that there should just about be a prison-wide wipe. Almost none of these freaks deserved to live—

I caught sight of Preta.

She didn't see me; she was with two other women. Quiet. No active, harmful activity. Technically, they weren't doing anything interesting at all, and THAT was the part that made them stand out. They were softly laughing, smiling; they looked so normal in their issued garb.

By pure chance, Preta glanced up, and caught me watching. As soon as her eyes met mine, my boots might as well have been locked to the floor; I was stunned—she was so pretty. She however, looked away quickly, and whatever she muttered to her pals had them giving me looks so discreet that if I hadn't already been staring so hard, I'd never have noticed they were doing it. She told them not to look—I'm sure of it. She probably said, "The new guard is watching us." I sure was. I kept watching too. She was my job. The rest of them could be damned.

Every shift, I watched her try to buoy her friends, Quinn, Lydia, and Zoya, and watched them comfort her too. I saw a woman who was trying to make the best of her circumstances.

Basically, I creeped on the 'criminal' with a heart of gold and a million-dollar smile.

Not that she ever turned it on me. She tried to ignore me, but I saw her flash it easily at her pals.

Then they took her friends away, and I watched her become needy—not for replacements, she knew the other women would never be her friends—but she couldn't help it that her system was jonesing for a unit. It was exactly the outcome they wanted to see from her, their little experiment.

Experiment. That's exactly what she is: lab-made. We're talking crates of serum and a special, chemical-laden, specifically nutritionally designed diet with a friggin' team of medical professionals who were assigned to dole all that out, and monitor and keep her system in order.