Ransom: The Unchained Omegaverse Read online

  Ransom

  The Unchained Omegaverse

  Callie Rhodes

  Contents

  RANSOM

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  About the Author

  Also by Callie Rhodes

  RANSOM

  Once there were boundaries…but now that their chains are broken, these alphas refused to be contained.

  Eight years ago, Ransom was only a teenager headed for the alpha territory of the Boundarylands when he was captured and held prisoner by a power hungry madman. Since that day he’s been kept deep underground, subjected to experimentation and torture.

  But now his prison has been to reduced rubble, and there’s only one thing he wants more than freedom…revenge.

  Gretchen Conrad is following a story about an explosion at a remote government site when she discovers something terrifying…something impossible—an alpha outside the Boundarylands. But even though Gretchen knows she should be afraid of this scarred beast, she can’t deny the primal pull she feels when he comes too close.

  But the more time she spends with Ransom, the more she feels herself changing…until she’s no longer sure if she’ll ever be the same again.

  Chapter One

  Scorching yellow and red flames spiraled up from the crater in the center of the vast, empty grasslands. Acrid black smoke rose into the sky, climbing high above the plains of rural Nebraska before being caught by the wind and carried west, tendrils of toxic inky fumes drifting far into the distance.

  Other than that, it was a beautiful day.

  Butterflies danced on the summer breeze that rippled through the tall grass, and bees lit on the sun-dappled petals of yellow and white wildflowers. The slim pale trunks of aspen trees in the distance swayed in time to a melody all their own, shaking their leaves like castanets. Yes, Ransom Forester thought, this was the most gorgeous day he’d seen in eight years.

  Of course, that wasn't a hard bar to clear, given that he'd spent every day of those eight years as a captive in a windowless prison—the same one that he was currently watching burn to the ground.

  It was hard to decide which was the more satisfying view: the boundless countryside or the inferno consuming his old torture chamber. Not that it mattered, since Ransom had plenty of time to enjoy both. Only moments had passed since his escape from the Central Infectious Disease Research Facility, and he wasn’t going anywhere until he got his vengeance.

  Ransom took his time walking across the field away from the fire. There was no reason to rush, since it would take a while for the first emergency crews to reach such a remote location, leaving him plenty of time to choose his vantage point.

  He found it half a mile away among a scattering of poplars next to a dry creek bed. The waters had carved a deep path into the earth, but the trees and tall bluestem grass obscured the steep-walled gully until he was nearly on top of it. He jumped down into it and found that the earthen walls served as perfect cover, letting him vanish from view—quite a trick for a seven-foot-tall alpha.

  Ransom settled in to wait, propping his elbows on the bank of the gully and parting the grass to give him a clear line of sight to the fire.

  For nearly an hour, he watched the deceptively modest building burn. The flames reduced it to a skeleton in half that time, but the inferno continued to bellow soot and ash from the center as the first responders finally arrived.

  Ransom smirked as highway patrol officers and sheriffs from two different counties came in hot with lights and sirens blaring, trailing huge plumes of dust behind their SUVs. He wondered why were they in such a hurry—it wasn't as if they could arrest the fire.

  But even when the firefighters figured out how to get their rigs down the miles of rutted dirt road, they were going to have a hell of a time putting out this beast of a blaze. Ransom looked forward to seeing the expression on their faces when they discovered that this government facility reached far beyond the unexceptional two-story building on the surface, extending twelve floors below the earth.

  They'd get another surprise when they found that the blaze had been triggered by a cache of grenades, mortars, RPGs, and an impressive SAB 250-200 bomb, all of it packed in bricks of C-4.

  Before they made that discovery, though, the fire would have to burn itself out, and that would take days, maybe weeks. Even if every fire department in a 50-mile radius responded, there was nothing they could do about the huge stores of fuel burning in what was now just a cavernous pit.

  Ransom had discovered the facility's armory during his escape. None of the alpha brothers he'd been with understood the potential of such a treasure trove of weapons—but he did.

  Born into a family with many generations of military service, Ransom and his twin brother Ryan had been obsessed with combat from the moment they could walk.

  He almost felt sorry for the beta government functionary who'd have to explain why a research laboratory, ostensibly housing some of the deadliest pathogens on the planet, needed so much firepower.

  Of course, there was only one living beta who could answer that question, and Ransom knew that bastard would do everything in his power to make sure that the public never found out.

  But that didn't mean that Roger Fulmer would escape justice.

  Ransom would see to that. It was why he'd set the blaze in the first place.

  As cathartic as it was to watch the facility burn to the ground, the satisfaction of destroying the hellhole where hundreds of kidnapped alphas had been tortured and subjected to experimentation against their will wasn't the only reason Ransom had blown it sky-high. As far as he was concerned, its destruction was just a happy accident, a fortunate side-effect.

  What he wanted was revenge—plain and simple. And the fire was a means to that end.

  Not directly, of course. Turning an empty building to ash wouldn't hurt any of his tormentors—the ones who weren't already dead, at any rate. It wouldn't erase the suffering of the alpha brothers imprisoned with him, who even now were scattering across the countryside as fugitives. And it sure as shit wouldn't give Ransom back eight years of his life.

  But it would bring the architect of all that evil flying back like a moth to a flame.

  Because while Ransom knew the beta government would do everything they could to bury the news of a mass escape from a remote top-secret facility, they wouldn't be able to hide that towering spire of smoke.

  Even if the locals somehow missed the initial explosion and the half-hour fusillade that followed as the blaze tore through every last grenade and bomb, the soot and ash drifting for hundreds of miles would definitely grab people's attention.

  And if there was one thing Ransom's enemy hated, it was attention.

  Like all puppet masters, Roger Fulmer liked to stay out of view while he pulled other people's strings. The bastard had run his shop of horrors for a decade without even a whisper of its true purpose making its way to the public.

  The official work of the Central Infectious Disease Research Facility had nothing to do with its intimidating name. From what Ransom was able to pick up from bits of conversation over the years, any research on actual pathogens took place at a sister facility in the Mojave desert. The only thing the skeleton crew at this location ‘r
esearched’ were alphas.

  Of course, the Boundaryland Treaties between the beta government and the alpha population, in place since the last century, made such an undertaking highly illegal. Not that the current beta administration cared much about the law. Instead, they seemed to view the treaties as a kind of challenge. Not about to let any formal agreement impede their mission of eradicating the alphas, they simply took their work underground.

  Literally.

  Twelve stories under a Nebraska field, they'd constructed ‘The Basement,’ a place so highly classified that until today, only three people had ever been allowed to walk out of it alive.

  There, in a secret laboratory, more than four hundred alphas had been sacrificed to Fulmer's twisted experiments—as well as nearly as many beta lives.

  But that long reign of torture and death had ended this morning when Ransom and his brothers had escaped their cages and slaughtered their jailers. Ransom alone had stayed behind to ensure their victory was complete.

  In a stroke of bad luck, Fulmer had left for Washington D.C. the day before. But Ransom knew a control freak like him would never trust his lackeys to contain the fallout. That was the kind of job Fulmer would see to himself.

  And when he returned, Ransom would be here to greet him.

  Until then, the alpha would have to be patient. After all, he'd waited years for this—a few more hours would make no difference.

  For now, Ransom was content to watch more emergency vehicles arrive with their pointless blaring sirens and flashing red and blue lights. Just as futile was the queue of ambulances. If any remains were pulled from the ruins—unlikely given the raging fire—they’d be headed straight to the morgue.

  Ransom amused himself by imagining walking over there and telling them exactly how the fire had come to be. He suspected he wouldn't get a word out before the sight of an alpha so far from the Boundarylands sent their narrow beta brains into a panic. Inevitably, they'd start shooting, and then Ransom would be forced to defend himself.

  Despite how little respect Ransom had for betas, he had no interest in wiping out first responders. He had no quarrel with firefighters and paramedics and police, none of whom had ever harmed him. They were simply doing their jobs.

  No, Ransom was waiting for the black helicopters, the dark sedans with heavily tinted windows.

  He was waiting for Fulmer.

  The monster would come, maybe in the next hour, maybe tomorrow. But he'd come.

  Because true evil was single-minded, and its practitioners never stopped as long as they were breathing.

  * * *

  "Damn it."

  Gretchen Conrad cursed out loud as she sped along Highway 92. She was still a good fifteen miles shy of the tiny town of Arrowhead, but she could already see the towering plume of black smoke billowing into the air.

  Jeremy had been right—that was a hell of a fire burning out there.

  Ordinarily, Gretchen would have been thrilled to get a call from her editor asking her to check out a breaking story for the paper. Until an hour ago, it had never happened, and not just because big stories were few and far between in rural Nebraska.

  Since Gretchen had started at the Omaha Register sixteen months ago, every major piece had been assigned to the male reporters. Gretchen and the other female journalist on staff were relegated to covering school board meetings and human interest stories. Word was that Jeremy was even considering bringing back the Home and Garden section and the recipe column that had gone out of print back when her mother was a cub reporter—and it didn't take a genius to guess who'd get those assignments.

  In fact, Gretchen had been on her way back from covering the Autumn Bridal Faire in North Platte—a hotel ballroom filled with a sea of gowns, crystal and china, and seminars with titles like ‘The Return of Modesty’—when her phone had rung.

  "There's been a big explosion near Arrowhead," Jeremy said excitedly. "You know where that is?"

  Gretchen hadn't, so she'd pulled over onto the shoulder look it up. While her GPS was still searching, Jeremy kept talking. "Normally, I'd ask one of the guys to go, but you're so close—can you swing by and taking a look? If it checks out, I'll see if Will or Marvin can take it, but I hate to send someone out if there's no story."

  Gretchen rolled her eyes at the fact that she didn't qualify as someone. "Any other outlets on it so far?"

  "I wouldn't be surprised—rumor is that the blast might have been on government property."

  "Okay, I'm on it."

  After two days spent staring at pastel taffeta and teacups and hope chests, tottering around in high heels and skirts, sleeping on what had to be the world's lumpiest motel mattress, Gretchen wanted nothing more than to get home, sink into a hot bath, then spend the rest of the night whispering to her down pillow that she'd learned her lesson and would never cheat on it again.

  But she didn't dare say no. This might be a bullshit assignment, but if she aced it, the next one could be better. One could only hope, even when the ranks of female journalists had been thinned to the lowest numbers in half a century, and a man anchored every big-market news desk in the country.

  So Gretchen had taken a detour fifty miles out of her way to cover a brush fire in the middle of nowhere.

  Except that the closer she got, the more obvious it became that this was no brush fire. The smoke was too dense and too dark, gritty particulate raining down onto her windshield like black snow. To Gretchen's inexperienced eye, it had all the markers of a structure fire—a damn big one too. But what was a building that big doing out here in the middle of nothing but grassland?

  It could be a granary, she supposed, or a warehouse or a processing center. Meatpacking plant, maybe, but she wasn't aware of any out this way. Not for the first time, Gretchen's city background wasn't doing her any favors, even though it was her degree from a top program in Chicago that had landed her the job.

  For the past twenty minutes, she'd passed nothing but pasture, but hadn't spotted a single head of cattle. Not one barn or farmhouse. The last intersection with a rural route was miles in the rearview.

  Even a city girl could tell that something was off.

  Things grew no less confusing when she finally passed the sign welcoming her to Arrowhead. As far as Gretchen could tell, everything was closed up—even the gas station. The streets were deserted, with no sign of anyone gawking at the fire that was practically in their backyard.

  In Gretchen's experience, there wasn't a force on earth that could stop people from rubbernecking, which meant that in the last few hours, Arrowhead had become a ghost town.

  The wail of sirens came up fast behind her, and Gretchen pulled over to watch a caravan of fire trucks and police vehicles tear past her.

  She followed in their wake, nearly losing all visibility when they turned onto a dirt road and sent up a cloud of dust. Her poor old car bounced and groaned in the weedy ruts. Even the four-wheel-drive vehicles ahead of her looked to be having a hell of a time navigating the uneven terrain as they approached the tower of black smoke.

  It wasn't until she pulled up behind them at the edge of an empty parking lot that she realized just how big the fire actually was. Flames billowed up from what appeared to be a bottomless sinkhole in the center.

  She jumped out of the car and rushed to the nearest police officer, waving her press badge. "Gretchen Conrad, Omaha Register," she shouted. "Can you tell me what's going on here?"

  The cop didn't spare her a glance, his attention glued to the inferno. "Something blew up and caught fire," he said, with no trace of the disdain police usually reserved for the media. "Other than that, your guess is as good as mine, lady."

  "Do you know what that building used to be?" she pressed. "Or what was housed here?"

  The officer only shook his head, riveted by the flames rising from below the earth's surface. Even the firefighters seemed dumbstruck, their gear abandoned around them on the ground.

  "Whatever it is, it burns hot," one of the
m told her. "Too hot for us to get near with hoses. Wouldn't do much good anyway—tunnel fires are almost impossible to extinguish. Gotta let 'em burn themselves out."

  Tunnel fire? What the hell could be going on underground out here?

  "Was this some sort of mine?" she asked, yelling to be heard over the roar of the blaze

  The firefighter shot her a look. "With an office building on top? I doubt it. Chief got a call from someone in Washington saying they use the tunnels for storage. God only knows what they had down there that burns like this."

  "Washington? As in D.C.?" Gretchen was shocked that online rumors might be true for once. "You're sure this is government property?"

  "Don't quote me," the firefighter said, finally giving her his full attention. "Shit, don't print any of that. You need to wait for official answers. They said someone would be out to make a statement tomorrow morning."

  "I'll be here," Gretchen vowed, mostly to herself.

  She returned to her car and considered how to frame the situation before calling Jeremy back. If she let on the magnitude of what she'd learned so far, there was no way he'd let her keep the story.

  Instead, when he picked up, she told him that it looked like there might be a story, but she'd need to stay close to wait for it to develop. Unfortunately, the Fort Calhoun Star News had already posted photos online.

  Fifteen minutes of arguing got her nowhere. Jeremy was determined to send a ‘more seasoned’ reporter, even though they both knew he meant a reporter with a dick.