The man sighed. She got a real good look at this one, while the others didn’t like to stand in front of her. This man was tall, lean, far too good looking to be someone who tortured other people for a living. And yet that floppy brown hair that kept falling in front of chocolate colored eyes wasn’t hiding the joy that he got from hitting her. Oh yeah, this guy knew what he was doing.
And he liked it.
He shook his head. “We know you’re lying to us, Mira, and that’s what we don’t understand. We could work together here to figure out what really happened to you and how to help you. How to help our whole city.”
They wanted her to say she was stolen by an undine. They wanted a smear campaign to plaster all over the walls of the city. She knew this game. They wanted everyone in Beta to be living in fear, terrified that they were going to be the next people stolen out of their beds. It gave Alpha even more reason to take ownership over their city.
It would not happen. Not because she cared that much about Beta. The building had been falling apart for ages. But because she would not give them another reason to hate Arges’s kind.
“Go ahead and keep hitting me, man. The story won’t change because I’m telling you the truth!” she screamed the last words of the sentence.
Maybe she yelled to get back at him for that last hit that made her tooth wiggly. Or maybe it was because the louder she said it, the more she believed it herself.
He slammed his hand against the chair they’d tied her to, spinning her around to look at the glass. They had moved her into this room today. Surprising, considering they’d kept her away from the windows so far. She wasn’t all that sure why.
Now, she had a guess. The man leaned behind her, his hot breath brushing against her ear. “We know what happened to you, Mira. There are cameras all around this place. In case you were unaware, we already have the tapes from when you were trying to fix what you broke. And now here we are, listening to you lie over and over again, to keep an undine safe. Why is that? That’s the question I keep asking myself. Why are you trying to protect him?”
He was probably muttering some impressive villainous plan, but she was just looking out to sea.
They were closer to the top of the base, so she could see for miles. There was a pod of whales in the distance, just three humpbacks with a tiny baby in between them. Their tails were so graceful as they lifted and dropped them. Slowly moving through the water together. She wondered if they were seeking warmer waters. Maybe the winter was what made them leave.
A hand slammed down on the chair and tossed her toward the window. She hit it hard, her cheek catching on the glass as she precariously tried to balance herself so she didn’t hit the floor.
He didn’t let her save herself. The man kicked the legs out from under her chair and down she fell. Hitting the ground hard first with her shoulder and then with her face. Groaning, she rolled only to be picked up by the back of her head and a fistful of hair.
“Well, well, well,” he growled in her ear. “I had a feeling if I started hitting you in front of a window, someone would show up. That sure looks like the same undine who saved you.”
She opened her eyes, trying her best to focus on the outside of the windows and... fuck. There he was.
Arges floated in front of the window, all of his lights on full display. His fins were so bright they were almost blinding, and she could see the rage on his features. All his gills were flared out, his black eyes narrowed, and his sharp teeth showing like a shark on the other side of the glass.
The man behind her gave her a shake, ripping out hair in the process. “It sure seems like he wants me to give you back, Mira. Is that what you want? Did you lose yourself to a monster like that?”
“Lose?” she repeated. “I lost absolutely nothing to him.”
“You clearly spent some time with him. I’ve never seen an undine look quite so angry at one of us. Certainly not because we were hurting one of our own.” He dangled her closer to the window, watching as Arges moved closer as well. “You see, we don’t need you to tell us anything, Mira. I can guess what happened. Would you like to know what I think happened?”
“Not particularly,” she ground out through her teeth.
“He took you because he was interested. You were interested, too. Maybe there’s a bit of a slut in that engineering mind of yours. Maybe you fancied yourself to be a pioneer in a new genre of mating. I don’t care what you say about it. Justify it to yourself all you want.” He leaned down, that hot breath in her ear again. “You fucked him. And now he wants you back.”
She bucked in the chair, trying to get away from the monster behind her, and closer to the glass. She wanted Arges to swim away. There was only one direction this was going, and it wasn’t one that either of them were going to like.
The man gave her another shake. “Here’s the thing, Mira. I don’t need you. All I wanted was to see if I could get him here. We’ve been dropping your blood into the ocean for days and that didn’t summon him, but all of a sudden here he is the moment you’re in front of a window. The closer he and his people are, the better. We’re going to light them all on fire and get rid of the problem once and for all. How’s that sound?”
Terrible. It sounded terrible.
But there was nothing she could do, all tied up like this with a man holding her by the hair. She’d always known the hatred between their people ran deep. She had seen it for herself. The years of abuse and greed that had torn this entire ocean apart.
This went beyond that, though. This was an old hatred that made her wonder whether or not this man knew Arges. It certainly seemed like he recognized the blue glowing undine in front of them. And Arges definitely recognized him.
She saw the shaking rage, the undulated gills that were plastered so close to his side now she wondered if he could even breathe. He came closer to the window, pointing at the man behind her ominously.
“Oh, I’m not afraid of you,” the man said to Arges. He had no way of knowing the undine before them could understand him. “I’m going to cut her up into little pieces and feed her to the sharks. Just you wait, undine. I’m not done punishing you yet.”
He was going to what?
She gasped as he shoved her away from the window. She landed hard on her shoulder again, nearly popping it out of its socket as the man followed her. He was laughing. A gleeful, joyful sound that turned her stomach.
Leaning down, he grabbed onto her shirt and dragged her with the chair into the back room. The room with no windows. The room where they had done their worst to her and apparently he was going to do even more.
“I’ve seen that undine around here for ages,” the man said. “Beta sends all their recordings to us, you see. All the cities do. You’ll be happy to know you somehow caught yourself one of the biggest fish in the sea. Or at least, one of the most dangerous. He’s been scoping out our cities for years and doing considerable damage for quite a while.”
She didn’t know that. But Arges was intelligent. It didn’t surprise her in the slightest that he had been successful in every attack he’d made. But what did surprise her was that this man knew him.
Even as the stranger in front of her sat her upright, steadying her chair once again on its wobbly legs, she eyed him. He wasn’t familiar to her. The uniform was clearly Alpha based, too clean and too pressed, but she had never heard of such brutality from Alpha.