Sold To The Alphas

Chapter 2: Run or Die

Sienna's POV

"Rachel, go ahead and bring her to the exit corridor. The Alphas will collect her there."

Marcus's voice snapped me back to the present like a bucket of ice water.

I watched him and Donovan disappear through the door, practically tripping over each other in their rush to collect their twenty billion dollars. No goodbye. No backward glance.

To them, I was already delivered.

"You have no idea how lucky you are," Rachel said, still staring dreamily at the screen where the five Alphas had been displayed. She pushed my wheelchair forward, her voice taking on that wistful, faraway quality people get when they're living inside their own fantasies. "Five Alphas. Five. Rich, powerful, gorgeous. If I were a she-wolf, I'd be running toward them." She laughed softly to herself. "But I'm just human. So I settle for the paycheck and dream about the rest."

Dream away, Rachel.

While she was busy fantasizing, my fingers found the small syringe that had been left carelessly on the medication tray beside me. My hand moved slowly. Deliberately. I pressed it flat against my thigh beneath the thin fabric of my off-white gown and held it there.

She didn't notice.

Of course she didn't. No one ever really looked at me. Not at my eyes, anyway.

The wheelchair hummed softly against the concrete floor as Rachel pushed me down the exit corridor, a narrow, hollow passage lit by sickly yellow lights that buzzed and flickered like dying fireflies. The cold air grew sharper with every foot we moved toward the end of the hall.

And there it was.

An iron door. Partially open.

Beyond it, darkness, razor wire, and woods.

Freedom.

My grip tightened around the syringe.

We were almost there. Three feet. Two.

Now.

"Ah"

I let the cry tear out of me, ragged, breathless, the sound of someone swallowed by pain. Six years of living inside real agony had made me a flawless performer.

Rachel stopped immediately. "What happened?"

Not concern. I knew the difference. This was the panic of someone worried about damaged merchandise.

"It hurts," I breathed, barely a whisper. I curled forward, one hand pressed to my stomach.

She came around to the front of the chair, kneeling, her brow creased. "Where? Show me."

"Here" I moved my hand away.

The moment she reached toward me, I drove the syringe into the side of her neck.

The precision of it surprised even me.

Rachel's whole body jolted. Her eyes went wide, shocked, furious, disbelieving. Her hand flew up to the needle hanging from her neck.

"You bitch." Her voice came out strangled. "What did you, what did you do to me?"

I looked at her. And for the first time in longer than I could remember, I felt the ghost of something sharp and dark move across my face.

A smile.

"Just giving you a little taste of what you've been giving me," I said quietly. "I hope it works faster on you than it did on me."

"You"

I shoved her.

She went down hard, hitting the concrete with a dull, final thud. The drug moved fast. Within seconds, her limbs would be useless.

I stood up.

My legs nearly buckled. The sedatives still swimming through my blood turned every movement into a negotiation, please, just this once, hold me up. My vision pulsed at the edges. My body felt like it was wrapped in wet concrete.

But I moved.

I have done harder things than this. Every stranger's room. Every locked door. Every night I survived when I didn't want to. This is nothing.

The iron door groaned as I pushed through it.

Cold air hit me like a wall.

Outside, the Chicago night was dark and biting, the sky a deep bruised purple above me. Pole lights cast pale gold circles across the ground. Ahead, a circular perimeter of razor-wire fencing gleamed in the dim light.

Beyond it, trees. Dark, endless, free.

I didn't let myself think. I just walked. Then limped. Then pushed.

The razor wire was not kind.

It tore into me the moment I tried to squeeze through, sharp edges catching my skin, my gown, my arms. Blood ran in thin, warm lines down my legs. My gown shredded. I kept going.

By the time I fell out the other side, I was bleeding from a dozen places, panting hard, kneeling in the dirt.

Get up, Sienna.

I got up.

The woods swallowed me immediately. Dead leaves crunched beneath my bare feet. Branches clawed at my arms. Rocks bit into my soles. I tripped over roots, stumbled, caught myself on tree trunks, and kept running.

I am not going back. Not to them. Not ever.

I'd stopped praying for rescue a long time ago.

What I prayed for now, as I crashed through the dark Illinois woods, was simpler

A cliff edge. A deep drop. A wild animal that's hungry enough and fast enough.

Anything. Anyone. Just let it end.

But death, it seemed, didn't want me either.

Then I heard them.

"Blood. Fresh blood, she went this way."

The voice came from behind me, maybe a hundred yards back, cutting clean through the trees.

My blood.

Of course. I'd been bleeding since the fence. I'd left a trail a child could follow.

I am found.

"There! There she is!"

I ran harder. My body screamed. My vision swam in and out. The ground tilted

My foot caught on a buried log.

I went down face-first into the earth, hard, brutal, final. The impact knocked the breath from my lungs. The world spun. I lay there with my cheek pressed against cold dirt and dead leaves, and I thought

Maybe this is it. Maybe I just won't get up.

"Did you really think you could run?" The voice came from directly above me.

And the world stopped.

I knew that voice.

I hadn't heard it in six years. But it lived in me like a scar, something that never fully healed, that ached in certain kinds of cold.

I didn't move. I pressed myself into the ground and thought, leave my body. Just go. Leave me here.

"Let's see what we bought." Another voice. Lighter. Cruel in the way that enjoys itself.

Hands closed around my shoulders and flipped me over like I weighed nothing.

My back hit the ground. The cold air rushed over my torn skin. Hair fell across my face.

Then fingers, careful almost, which was somehow worse, brushed my hair aside.

And I opened my eyes.

Five faces stared down at me through the dark.

All of them frozen.

All of them wearing the same expression, stunned disbelief cracking open something much more complicated underneath.