Fury grimly regarded him. “Is this too difficult for you to discuss? I really would like to hear it but I don’t want you to suffer.”

Darkness shook his head. “The female was hired to have sex with me. I didn’t want to touch her but she started to cry, informing me they’d kill her and her family if she didn’t do her job. Rejection meant death. She swore she had two small children being held and that in her younger years she’d shared sex in exchange for money with humans. It’s why she was kidnapped and taken to the camp.”

Fury nodded but didn’t comment.

“It made me less inclined to touch her, knowing it was forced, but I felt pity for her. She begged and removed her clothes, telling me about her young. They were babies, according to her. Both were toddlers. I didn’t attack her. I just stood there when she started touching me. I hadn’t had a female in nearly a year. She unfastened my pants and I responded to her touch. It was the first time a female had put her mouth on my dick.”

Fury shifted in his chair. “Understood. That’s something I couldn’t ignore.”

It didn’t make Darkness feel any less guilty. “I didn’t resist when she was brought to me every few days. They’d already taught me how to inflict pain. She was there to teach me how to seduce females into giving up information. That and, according to her, to help keep my aggression levels lower since I was the most dominant of the males. Our brothers took orders from me.”

Fury opened his mouth as if he wanted to ask a question but reconsidered and closed it.

“They did look like us. We were very similar but I was the tallest and most aggressive. They forced us to train together and fight. My reflexes were faster and I picked up the fighting skills easiest. None of the humans would dare spar with me. They were afraid I’d kill them.”

“Was she sharing sex with our brothers too?”

“They brought in other females, never the same ones twice for them and with less frequency. Galina was assigned solely to me. I believe they wanted me to form a bond.” He paused. “It worked.”

“It would be natural.”

Darkness wished it were that easy. “We began to plot how to rescue her young and get my brothers freed from the camp. They took her to the secondary camp where the male in charge of monitoring us was kept. She told me about the tent and the many viewing screens she’d seen. The guards were lax with her since she was a female. I began to teach her how to fight. There were no cameras inside the tent where I was kept. I was as desperate to save her young as she seemed to be. It was her plan, her insistence we could do it.”

Fury leaned forward. “It went bad.”

“Worse.” Darkness broke eye contact and looked down at his hands, resting on his lap. Pain tightened his chest but he held still, enduring the male’s curious stare. “The humans in charge were forcing us to kill other humans. They weren’t American soldiers but threats to them. It was taking a toll on us all. We’d been reassigned numbers, one through four. I was number one. At Mercile we dreamed of killing our captors and the ones harming us but it was different out there. These were strangers. We didn’t know what their crimes were or why we were being forced to kill them. We were given an order, a timed mission, and the collars would blow if we didn’t return to the camp. They would send humans with us who could activate the bomb collars to make certain we didn’t deviate from the mission.”

Fury’s hands on the desk fisted and he lowered them out of sight. “That must have been hellish.”

“It was. It was breaking us apart inside. Four was more sensitive than the others. He hesitated during the killing. We tried to cover for him and hold him together. He grew mentally unstable but we were able to hide it from the humans. Two had anger issues. He enjoyed the killing a little too much. He saw all humans as the enemy. We tried to conceal his flaw. Three was like you, Fury.” He smiled, a fond memory surfacing. “You remind me of him.”

“How?”

“He was very reasonable but he was one to watch closely when he was angry. He’d think about it before he acted.” Darkness chuckled. “He stood up to me and did it in a way I admired. Very clever and always had my back. We were the closest. We would talk often and assess the other two, working as a team to protect their flaws. He could make me laugh. He had a keen sense of humor.” Darkness rose and walked over to the mini fridge. “May I?”

“Help yourself.”

He removed a soda and opened it, taking a drink. He couldn’t sit any longer and paced instead, avoiding Fury’s gaze. Darkness didn’t know how to tell the rest of it. The male’s chair creaked and Fury moved in front of him.

“Just talk to me. I want to hear it all.”

Darkness set the drink down. “I don’t think you’ll want a bond with me after you do.”

“Try me.”

“I trusted Galina. I opened up to her and talked to her. She said she loved me and I felt highly bonded to her. I shared my fears. We were waiting for a human named Darwin Havings to leave her campsite. He had a lot of guards with him and the security would lighten when he was gone. It would give her a real chance at reaching the male monitoring our camp, force him to give her the pass code to unlock our collars, and then we could take out everyone at our camp to reach hers. She’d given me detailed directions on how to reach her. It was only a few miles away. We planned to steal their vehicles from her location. She said she could drive and she had friends who could hide us. We’d work out the rest later.”