Corrupted (Alpha's Claim Book 5) by Addison Cain (read more books txt) 📕

with their bright colors and zest for life. Strange-looking multitudes dressed in gray jumpsuits—characterless, colorless drones going about their day—in a creepy harmony of boring absoluteness.

Two more days, she watched in solitude, forgetting to sleep, to wash, eating her food without tasting as she stared into a mundane, endless caricature of life.

It was sad to see. It was confusing.

The monitors were no longer a game; they were work. There were no trysts or secrets to devour. There was conformity and peace.

As if he sensed the moment Maryanne was at her lowest, the darkness parted, and a massive walking nightmare appeared. “Your feed is now keyed to Bernard Dome, located in the former country of France.”

France? There had been some information about the place when she’d been the terrible student of her childhood… a history of something? Maryanne could not recall, yet she knew the name and had tuned her ears to the song of a language she did not understand.

Strange as it was, behind the accord and utter boringness of the display, beautiful things made up their architecture and squares. Fountains, cobblestone streets, white, glittering buildings. And she had watched without sleeping. Because the people did not represent the art of the structure. Same haircut, same pasted blandness of expression. Same uniform.

Where were the pickpockets? Where was the lust?

A clock rang, and everyone stood in unison, marched to eat, marched to shit, marched to work, marched to eat.

Did they march to fuck?

Where was that monitor?

A sweet Beta lover she had once been faithful to for over a month had called Maryanne’s eyes enigmatic. He had loved her eyes, not just because they were beautiful, but because they were devious. Playful.

Beyond her pouty lips, they were perhaps her best feature.

How long had it been since she’d seen mascara or fluttered her lashes at some potential paramour?

Why did it feel ugly to lift her gaze to acknowledge Shepherd, knowing he found nothing about her appealing? That it didn’t matter that her eyes were enigmatic, just as it didn’t matter that his whole person was basically disfigured by Da’rin.

Both of them were basically hideous, outward appearances aside.

Acknowledging that for the first time, more than a year into her sentence as Shepherd’s indentured prisoner, Maryanne had finally grown a semblance of a spine relating to this man. There was only so much she had left to lose… and it was starting to look more worthless by the minute. “I saved your life in Thólos. I dragged your huge, lumbering body to your men.”

As if he might actually be offering comfort, the walking terror put a single hand on her shoulder, reciting a speech as if he had memorized the day they landed on this new ground. “To save yourself and only yourself, Maryanne. Yet I live. Subsequently, Claire lives, so you serve your sentence in luxury. You possess a soft bed outfitted with blankets. From your taps flows clean running water. Unlike your few months in the Undercroft, you have a toilet, a bathing cubical, and a purpose. Daily, you are fed a perfectly balanced diet, delivered to you three times a day, when you are not unwell.”

If they were going to talk truths, then she had a word or two to add. “I hate it in here.”

“Good.” Shepherd didn’t care, would never care about her impulses or her urges. In fact, there was an odd respect for how well they understood one another in that sense. The conqueror, the king, held all the power. She held all the resentment. Should she not survive the years of her sentence, Maryanne would die alone, forgotten, with nothing but screens and her hand to see her through.

The idea had flittered through here and there over the ages under Shepherd’s thumb. But she had always brushed it off, because there was an end date. There were passions to pursue.

Glorious irresponsibility waited on the other side of that door. She would eat and drink and fuck her way through Greth until the glory of this new place was saturated into her cells.

She would steal things, because she liked to. She would let people down, because it made her remember she was strong.

And some other poor fool locked in a room with screens would watch her every move until an accident cut her down in her prime.

Her useless, pointless, vapid self wiped away as if she had never crossed the ocean on a transport and abandoned her home to desiccate in the arctic snows.

What was she really going to do there? Live in her house while everyone died? Run out of food after a few years of hermit-hood? She was going to wait for a savior to clean up the mess and immerge chubby cheeked and ready to wreak havoc?

She would have died, just like everyone else died. Just a little later.

Completely alone, without so much as a watercolor painting on her wall.

“I won’t help you invade another Dome, Shepherd.” Wow, had she really just said that?

The weight of his hand still on her shoulder, the man failed to acknowledge her statement. “Impress me, and you will have total control over Bernard Dome surveillance. Fully learn their language. Translation will only be offered by computer for three months. If you fail to attain fluency, these screens shut down forever. You will die in here, well fed, with clean water, withering and pathetic. Exactly how you would have died in Thólos.”

Her host hit too close to home with that zinger, the first-rate bitch who made her her rearing her beautiful head. “My sentence only carries five more years.”

She might survive that in solitary confinement. It’s not like this Dome was going to be ravaged, cracked, and infested with the virus. She could have made it five years in Thólos too. Though she’d had books and COMscreens. There had been sex toys and distractions.

Shepherd nodded once. “True. Yet, I never claimed that you would leave this room alive. In fact, I have ordered every last Follower to assure that you do