Alpha Betrayed: A Dark Shifter Romance

Juliet

At least things can't get any worse.

In the past two years, I've come to hate that phrase.

Things can always get worse. As a member of Gorey Pulitzer's Circus of the Strange, it's the one thing you can count on.

"Please, tell me what you heard," I beg, reaching a hand through the bars into the pitch black of the cell next to mine as the train rocks slowly side to side, hustling our caravan of horrors east, away from Calgary.

Gorey's handlers moved me into the night car with the vampires two months ago as punishment for stealing food for the fairies they're starving in car three-the men who come to watch the Fae dance enjoy a skeletal look-but I don't care. I prefer it here. I like the privacy afforded by the darkness. I'm sure the two vampires, with their heightened, nightwalker senses, can see me just fine. But I can't see them, and there's a little relief in that.

A little relief is the best you can hope for around here.

A little relief, a little rest, a little break in the agony before your captors devise a new way to exploit, t*****e, and humiliate you.

I know that, but still, a part of me thought they'd reached the end of the road in my particular case. What could be worse than throwing me into a ring every weekend to be ripped apart, helpless prey for whatever shifter won the "Friday Night Bite Fights" that evening?

I'm a shifter, too—it's the only way I can survive the brutality-but the audience doesn't know that. They don't know I'm a phoenix, kept from my animal form by an implant my father had fixed into my wrist as a child. All the audience sees is a slight woman with haunted blue eyes and nothing but a thin sundress to protect her from the claws of the monster set loose to hunt her.

But that's why they come to the show. That's what they want.

The people who attend the "after-party" in the main tent crave violence and depravity. They're the kind to sit in giddy silence as a girl screams for help and runs for her life, breathlessly awaiting the moment when her futile attempts to evade her attacker come to a bloody end.

Once, a few weeks into my captivity, I tried to cheat them of that, at least, to rob the sick f***s in the audience of their foreplay. As soon as I entered the ring, I laid down in front of the wolf shifter chosen to brutalize me that particular night and opened the buttons on the front of my dress, baring my stomach.

It cut the show time to thirty seconds.

The audience didn't have time to finish their drinks, let alone their popcorn.ConTEent bel0ngs to Nôv(e)lD/rama(.)Org .

Some even demanded a refund, and management was pissed. My handlers "corrected" my behavior by strapping me to the bed of nails in the t*****e car for a week. Nearly two years later, I still have the scars on my back. In most cases, shifters heal quickly and completely, but if the damage is bad enough, sustained enough...

I've been terrified of being forced back onto that bed, but even that would be better than this.

Paloma must be wrong. She must have misunderstood.

"Tell me the rest," I beg again, wiggling my fingers into the shadows. "Please. Tell me everything you heard. Exactly as you heard it."

"Why? It won't change your fate." The vampire's voice is weary, defeated. Paloma's been here even longer than I have. She's one of the original "cast members" from ten years ago, back when Gorey still called this a freak show and moved around in buses that broke down every few hundred miles. She gave up on hope of liberation years ago, but I refuse to do the same.

I will get out of here someday. I'll bide my time, wait for one of my captors to make a mistake, and slip free.

I have to believe that.

If I stop believing, I'll go the way of Daphne and Delilah, twin lynx shifters who used to be the closing act for the late-night events. One night Daphne grabbed a gun off one of the men in the audience. By the time the handlers made it to the ring, she'd put a bullet through her sister's head and then her own.

I didn't know whether to grieve or to be happy that the girls were finally free.

They were only fifteen when they were sold to the circus by their older brother, punishment for refusing to marry the much-older men he'd chosen for them as mates. I was twenty-one. I had a chance to graduate from high school, take a year off to travel, and start college. Most of my family is garbage, but I have a grandmother in France and good friends. As soon as I get out, the people who love me will hide me until I'm strong enough to fight for what's mine.

There are options waiting for me on the outside. The twins didn't have that. They had a childhood in the remote wilderness, raised by an abusive older sibling in a militant shifter community, and the hell on earth that is this circus of the damned. Who could blame them for taking their only way out?

"Please," I beg again. "If I could hear exactly what they said-"

"I only told you so it wouldn't be a surprise," Paloma cuts in. "I hate surprises."

I do, too. Or maybe I just hate them because the only "surprises" we get around here are bad ones.

"Why would he sell me?" I ask, trying another tack. "I'm the only 'damsel in distress' he has left. He doesn't have anyone else who can survive being ripped apart and heal up in time for a show seven days later."

An ugly laugh rumbles from my other side. It's Lance, our third cellmate in the night car, and a raging a*****e in cockney British form. "Just when I think they've tortured all the naïve out of you, you go and surprise me, Precious. It would be cute if you weren't so stupid." "Shut up, Lance," I snap.

He laughs again. "Of course. Not a problem. I'll let Paloma tell you about the caboose. You secretly enjoy being the bearer of bad news, don't you, love?"

"F**k off, Lance," Paloma says, but her voice is still a tin can run over by an eighteen-wheeler. Even Lance, the jerk who got them both captured in a drug deal gone wrong a decade ago, can't get much of a rise out of her anymore.

"What about the caboose?" I ask. "They aren't keeping hellhounds in there again, are they?" I thought they would have learned their lesson about that last time when the hellhounds banded together to set fire to their kennels and escape. They incinerated three cars full of supplies and expensive performance props while they were at it.

"Not hounds, no," Paloma says, before adding in a whisper, "Girls."

"Human girls," Lance adds gleefully. "People are catching on to the ruse, sweet Juliet. Repeat customers complained they would have sworn they'd seen the same girl killed twice." He chuckles. "Looks like dying your hair wasn't the stroke of genius Gorey thought it would be."

My hand flies unbidden to my head, fingers threading through hair made heavy with dye. I'm a natural blonde, but I was a redhead last year and just became a chocolate brunette two weeks ago.

"But they can't," I sputter, some part of me refusing to believe even Gorey and his crew would sink to that level. I'm under no delusion that they're decent human beings, but you can't murder a human girl every Friday night and get away with it. Not for long. "They'll have the police all over them within a month. Two tops."

"Doubtful," Lance says. "I'm sure they've procured the right type of girls, the ones no one will miss. Runaways, s*x workers, addicts." He pauses before adding in a taunting tone, "Some girls' families will even sell them into slavery themselves for a price. You think those kind will bother reporting their sweetie missing to the bluebottles? Not bloody likely."

I clench my jaw, refusing to let him get a rise out of me.

Because yes, my family is the reason I'm here. My father is a monster and my stepbrother a chip off the old block, even though they aren't actually related. The men who pulled me from my dorm room two years ago said Ford, my stepbrother, was the one who had given the order to sell me to the circus, but my father must have signed off on it.

Hammer Zion, dear old dad, was seventy years old at the time and near retirement, but he wouldn't have let his successor get rid of his daughter without his approval. He could have stopped Ford if he'd wanted to.

But then he would have had to find some way to justify not passing control of the pack to his oldest child by blood, as our law demands. He and the pack members who refuse to be governed by a "freak" with deviant DNA who doesn't "understand what it's like to be a wolf," have wanted to get rid of me since my forehead started smoking on the day I was born.

As soon as it was clear my shifter form wouldn't be a wolf, like my mother and father's, the whispers started.

Maybe I wasn't the Alpha's biological child, after all. Maybe my mother was a whore as well as a weakling, easily done in by the trauma of childbirth. Once that was proven false by multiple paternity tests, people spread other rumors. That I was crazy, unstable, a disaster waiting to happen like every other phoenix shifter, despite the fact that I've never actually shifted into my animal form.

My dad had the implant put in when I was barely two years old, to protect me from my own, potentially destructive power. Once I turned eighteen, I elected to keep it in. I didn't want to risk losing myself. Phoenix shifters are powerful in their bird form, but they tend to burn themselves up in the process.

A phoenix will rise from the ashes, like the mythical bird itself, but he or she will do so as a blank slate. We won't remember our lives before the fire, not our names or our values or our talents or any of the people we loved.

And while I would have been happy to forget my wretched family of origin, I didn't want to forget my friends or what I'd learned in my college classes, and I couldn't afford to forget my enemies.

It's easier to avoid people who want you dead if you know who those people are.

"They're going to get caught," I say.

"Maybe," Paloma says. "Maybe not. As much as I hate to say it, Lance is probably right. I'm sure they've been careful with the women they've taken."

"And we already know the audience won't tell," Lance says. "If they gave two shits, you would have been rescued years ago. And they'll be even more likely to keep quiet now that they'll be allowed to take home more...exciting souvenirs than a piece of bloody fabric."

"What?" I mumble before I think better of it, then quicky add, "Don't say anything. I get it. I can imagine."

Visions of teeth and fingernails and other tokens easily tucked into a pocket swarm through my head, turning my stomach. If I'd been given dinner tonight, I'd be sick, but I'm only fed Monday through Wednesday. They starve me on Thursdays and Fridays so I'm appropriately weak come showtime on Friday nights.

Which begs the question...

"If they're going to start using human girls, why withhold food from me tonight?" I ask. "You'd think they'd want me looking fit and healthy for potential breeders."

Breeders. Ugh. I can barely spit out the word.

I'm not an animal. And my child won't be livestock, he or she will be a human being, an innocent soul who deserves so much better than what the shifter breeding mills do to the kids born in their prisons.

"You really haven't been paying attention, have you?" Lance says. "You'll fetch a higher price all frail and trembly. Human men are filth. They like their women weak and easy to control."

"That's not true. There are good men out there," I say, thinking of my former boyfriend, Chase, and Seth and Jake and all the sweet guys I called my friends at university. Chase is going to be a human rights lawyer and Seth and Jake pediatric nurses. They're just three of the millions of kind, brave human men doing good things in the world.

I remind myself of that every time I look out into the crowd on Friday night to see a ninety percent male audience leering back at me.

Not all men are like them. Not all men are like my father and stepbrother and the jerks in my pack who shook their head in disgust at me as a kid.

"Maybe there are," Lance concedes. "But you won't be meeting any of 'em. The men here tonight are just looking for a pretty little thing with childbearing hips, one beaten down enough that they'll be able to have their fun with her before they toss her into a pen with a shifter stud to make supernatural babies."

I swallow hard, the thought of that kind of assault making my head go blank.

Being brutalized, traumatized, and torn to pieces has been hell, but so far, I've been spared that breech of my humanity. I've had handlers cop a feel during transport or leer at me in my bed in the infirmary when I'm too weak to pull the covers over my bare body, but I haven't been raped.

My only memories of that kind of touch are with Chase, my boyfriend my sophomore year of college, and how much fun it was to roll around on my twin bed with him. We didn't have s*x s*x, but we did just about everything else, and it was wonderful. So wonderful that those memories are some of the handful I turn over in my mind when the bleakness of my current life threatens to become too much.

Chase and I were never going to live happily ever after-we didn't have much in common aside from a mutual love of music festivals and making out, and he was a badger shifter so my father's head would have exploded had I dared to bring him home-but he a was a sweet first love.

Deep down, I've held on to hope that I'll find my forever person someday, someone who will love every part of me, even the broken and scarred parts.

But that won't happen if I become a broodmare.

Being violated by a man I don't love and didn't choose to be with, followed by the t*****e of growing a baby to be born into slavery, an innocent I'll be helpless to protect from the sick monsters who buy shifter children...

I won't recover from that. Ever.

Which means there's only one option left, one chance to get off this ride before I truly have nothing left to live for.

"I can't," I rasp. "I can't be sold. You have to help me, Paloma, please." I reach my hand back through the bars, turning my wrist over to expose the pulse throbbing there to the vampire. "Please."

Paloma exhales a shaky breath that hints at how much she wants to take me up on my offer. They starve the vampires, too, ensuring they're thirsty enough to drink from all the humans who pay for the privilege of feeding the "dark lovers" on Fridays and Saturdays. "I can't. They'll lock me in the iron casket."

Lance grunts. "Worse than death, that. I sure wouldn't risk it, not for some shifter princess who thinks she's too good for the circus."

"We're all too good for this," I whisper, widening pleading eyes into the dark, praying the vampire I've come to consider a friend will have mercy on me. "Please. I'm begging you. I can't go to a breeder. I can't watch my children be sold. I'll go mad." "You're already mad if you think she cares," Lance says. "Paloma's as cold as they come. Probably couldn't kill her with a stake, even if you tried. Be too hard to find that shriveled little raisin she calls a heart."

I strain forward even farther, until the bars dig into my shoulder on either side. "Please, we don't have much time."

As if on cue-some terrible, tragic cue-the train wheels squeal and the circus grinds to a stop. Moments later, the door to our car slides open, revealing a starry night and Ben, Bill, and Pierre, three of the beefy handlers who keep the acts in line.

I glance over to the next cell to see Paloma stretched out on her cot, her long black hair hanging like a curtain over the side, and I feel like a fool. She was never going to help me. The only help she was willing to offer was a heads-up that fresh hell was on the way. It's not much, but it's more than most of my fellow prisoners would bother doing. I mouth, "thank you," as the handlers climb into the car and head for the door to my cell with the usual restraints.

Her dark gaze softens. "Anything for a minute."

It's the catchphrase of the prisoner population-You can survive anything for a minute.

When things get really hard, you just concentrate on one minute, then the next, and the next. Don't think too far ahead, don't let your brain start telling stories about how impossible it is to keep going like this.

There is no future, no past. There is just one minute and whatever you have to endure to get through it.

But I won't endure this.

I'm going to find a way out, even if it's Delilah and Daphne's way.

As I'm led through an empty field, toward a barn with glowing windows in the distance, I focus on finding a weapon.

It's time to fight back and put this dark passage in my life behind me, once and for all. I'm so focused on the hunt for a stick, a rock-something-that I don't catch the scent of a Zion pack member until we're nearly at the barn.

When I do, all the blood runs from my limbs to pool in my belly. I stumble and fall, but Pierre jerks on the leather restraints around my wrists, hauling me forward on my knees until I manage to get my feet beneath me again.

"Hurry up, baby girl," he says, in his usual jovial tone, the one that makes every horrible thing he does just a little more awful. Evil with a smile is so much scarier than evil with a snarl. "No time for lollygagging. You're not the star of the show this time. Got half a circus to sell tonight."

I jerk my head back and forth, glancing at Ben and Bill's sober faces on either side of me. I was so busy worrying about being sold into s*x slavery, I've just now noticed their grim expressions. "What? Why?" "Downsizing," Ben grumbles, actually answering a direct question for once, proving this is a very strange night indeed. "Gorey says he's too old for the big top life."

"He's going to start playing opera houses and bars and shit," Bill adds. "Won't need as many acts."

"Or as many employees," Pierre practically crows. "Time for a fresh start all around." He glances over his shoulder, winking at me as he gives the leash attached to my restraints a little tug. "Maybe I'll buy you myself and start my own breeding business. Hear there's a lot of money in it. The sickos love a little kid who's hard to break."

My stomach pitches again, and for once I'm grateful that I haven't had anything but water in nearly two days. I can't afford to be distracted by tossing my cookies in the grass. I have to stay as strong and steady and focused as possible so I'm ready when a way out presents itself.

Maybe there'll be a miracle and whoever is here from my home pack will be a friend. I do have allies in Zion, though they never shouted as loud as my detractors. But there's still a chance this sea salt and sweet grass scented wolf is here to save me. Or to kill me.

I guess I'm about to find out.