Corrupted (Alpha's Claim Book 5) by Addison Cain (bill gates book recommendations TXT) 📗

gift will arrive. Eat, and I will see that you are furnished with a slick-drenched pillow from her nest and a Beta to fuck on it.”

13

It should have occurred to Brenya sooner. In Palo Corps, her duty had been to identify defects and repair them. Rarely was the damage as simple as a poorly fitted connection or faulty wiring. Yet even if it was, when an engineering grunt made the descent, their duty was to know that every moment they risked exposure, everyone under the glass depended on them.

The entirety of the infrastructure had to be considered. During the climb, if dust was found on a solar collection, it was the grunt’s duty to polish it in passing. If the wind had carried some bracken that stuck to the glass, it would be removed.

Mated to the Commodore of Bernard Dome… her days were now spent under the weight of a large Alpha with a constant erection. She braced. Trying to survive—knowing George had suffered, knowing the lives of Annette and her baby might end at any moment, hiding as often as she was able in the mindscape of such utter darkness, Brenya knew what Jacques had failed to grasp.

It wasn’t just George, or Annette, or little Matthieu.

Everyone under the Dome was in danger, and it was Jacques’ doing.

And it had to be undone.

She could have told the Alpha these things, but he had proven himself incapable of listening past his own flawed judgment. Her voice to him only mattered if it was to please his ego, to thank him for something she had not asked for and didn’t want.

That is what it meant to be the most powerful woman in Bernard Dome. It meant diamonds locked around your neck and silence in the presence of Alphas.

White dresses, sweet wine, boredom, unease, and the constant job of supplicating the male who had admitted he hurt her during sex so she would fight back.

Because she had not touched him when he was inside her? No one had told her she was supposed to touch him. Ancil had strictly ordered her to bend over and brace.

Annette was right, there was nowhere to run. Jacques would always follow.

This was going to be her life, until the life went out of her.

And it already felt like she was being pushed to the wayside by Jacques’ mental invasions and Jules’ yawning emptiness. An overbearing presence in juxtaposition to a man whose soul had been scooped out.

Gnawing hunger that grew worse by the day. The dust on the solar collector she had missed. A total failing in her duty to the Dome.

Ambassador Jules Havel was starving.

And she could feel it as real as if it were her own guts crying out for sustenance.

The same man who had witnessed her public warning to Annette not to eat the Beta rations she had been served at his state dinner. The Thólosen terrorist knew the food wasn’t clean.

Jacques couldn’t see the endless unfeeling void of the man like she could. He didn’t understand that poking his rabid dog was going to kill them all. Jacques didn’t know that Jules had a Rebecca.

And if he was even as slightly obsessed with the woman as Jacques was with Brenya, the Dome was going to suffer all the sooner.

“You are tormenting me with your indifference.”

The moment Brenya understood how much she had overlooked by wallowing in her own unchanging misery, she set down her golden fork. Abandoning the remaining pasta Jacques had served for dinner, she couldn’t bear to look at the man for another moment. “I think I am going to be sick.”

The Commodore’s complaints about her lack of engagement when he mounted her and her indifference to his existence evaporated, Jacques rising from his chair as if coming closer to her would be anything other than unsettling.

The purr was loud, forceful—rapid in a way that almost leaned toward panic. Yet his arms were oddly gentle as he helped her stand.

The dinner was deserted to the evening air, the golden fork with so many possibilities forgotten, as it had been forgotten each night. After all, every maintenance panel hidden behind the papered walls of the Commodore’s bedroom had been sealed beyond her ability to open them.

Not that Brenya had tried. She could smell the epoxy.

The myriad of buttons that ran down the back of her dress were undone with hurried expertise, freeing Brenya of another hated dress with the finesse of a man who must have done so for other women many times. Usually, he just rent her clothing from neck to navel. Usually, the Alpha was more concerned with licking cream from her nipples as dessert than he was with treating her clothing with respect.

The man liked to break things, he liked the noises she made when he uncovered flesh in the most violent of ways.

He liked to hold her down in the nest and pour sweet things on skin. He liked to lap and suck and leave marks with his teeth.

But at her statement of illness, she had been offered a reprieve.

Instead of fucking her, again, he pressed her back to the mattress and thought to touch in a way that seemed as if he practiced intimacy. The strokes of his large, warm hands were long. His purr was masculine and determined.

Lulled into a quiet place, cautious that he would alter his intention and use her like he did his napkin at dinner, Brenya floated in mental stillness.

He believed her asleep.

Brenya encouraged this by retreating to that emptiness where she could hide uninvited, eyes closed and breath soft. And a miracle was delivered.

Shifting his weight off the bed as if trying not to wake her, Jacques went to his dressing room. Moments later, he had quietly abandoned the room.

Opening her eyes to blissful solitude, Brenya invaded another man’s emotionless void further. Leaning on the wrongness of Jules to hide what she intended to do.

She slipped from an unsatisfying arrangement of blankets and pillows, bare feet landing on a soft