Page 35

Colton

There isn’t a single collar glowing on anyone’s neck.

A scan of the thoughts around me finds that the collars disengaging caught everyone by surprise only a moment before the siege.

Those from the academy I know best are inside the building, and so are Willow and Caius.

While I fire controlled shots from my assault rifle, Rai and Aubs are at my back, Aubrey shouting and sending soldiers flying, some cracking their skulls clear open against walls and trees. Rai’s eyes glow white as he wields some bit of tech he’d built. It’s wrapped around his right hand and arm, and whenever a spark pops in his eye, bolts of electricity leap from the device, coming to life, moving to envelop any nearby soldiers, causing them to convulse and froth at the mouth.

I am in awe of the control of my packmates. And a little jealous.

When Mira arrives on the back of a polar bear, my jaw nearly drops to the ground, especially when I see who’s with her.

Tomlin.

Mira jumps off the bear and turns back to Tomlin. “We’ll meet you inside.”

He nods at her, and the bear runs to the stairs leading to the academy entrance.

One look at Mira, and I know everything. Our minds are one as our thoughts meld.

He’s a Cursed Alpha. Willow’s mate.

It’s not long before my pack is back to back, soldiers pouring in on us as we attack in every way we can, firearms and power. There are more soldiers than I ever imagined. More than there’d ever been at the academy before.

Then the helicopters come, and I can feel the thoughts of hundreds more soldiers.

Also, Councilman Ivanov, whose dark thoughts I’d recognize anywhere, even if I can’t understand the words he’s thinking.

We have incoming, I push into my pack’s minds, then push harder to reach as many Cursed minds as I can. We have a lot of incoming!

I can feel all kinds of emotions, from fear to resignation to determination.

My pack is exhausted, all turning to their firearms to defend when the helicopters start landing outside the wall. I stop counting after five land as soldiers rush in through the broken gate, wielding guns and collar control boxes. I don’t know if they’ll work when the main control unit in the academy has been shut down, but I don’t want to find out.

Aubrey and I run out of ammo first, then Rai throws his handgun at a soldier’s face hard enough to knock him out before Mira, breathless, turns her empty gun into a dagger of ice and shoves it into the nearest soldier’s eye. When he drops, we’re surrounded.

Throughout my life, I’ve been scared many times, most of which were during my childhood. Fear of the voices in my head, of being abandoned before it actually happened, of being put into the system where I’d live the rest of my life. But the fear that grips me now is on a level I’ve never experienced.

My pack. My Omega. The people I love more than anything in this world.

I won’t let them die.

There’s movement at the gate, and I feel Ivanov there, his foreign thoughts smug, but I also pick something else out of his brain. He’d sent his Cursed soldiers away. He did it so they couldn’t see our uprising.

He’s scared the rebellion will spread.

Something shifts in my chest, the beast that used to feel foreign but is now a part of me. It growls with me, and my brain is on fire. My gaze sweeps over the nearest soldiers, and they’re frozen mid-movement, eyes wide and vacant. I push harder with my mind than I ever have, reaching for as many of these Beta pieces of shit that I can, and finding them. Finding so many of them all over the grounds and inside the academy walls.

It’s like the world has stopped spinning, all their movements halted in the middle of whatever they’d been doing.

Then, with all those minds firmly in my grasp, I whisper three words.

“Kill each other.”

Silence. Then, two soldiers in front of me face one another, aim their guns, and fire. A hot mist covers my cold face.

Four more heads explode. Six more. Gunfire and more gunfire with increasing speed and quantity, reaching further away, the sound of bodies dropping all around us.

People scream.

Chaos explodes all around and then stops just as quickly.

One sweeping gaze confirms a sea of black-clad bodies on the grounds, blood pooling everywhere.

My head snaps to Damir Ivanov, his expensive suit covered in gore, his face ashen, eyes wide with delicious terror.

He doesn’t know real fear. Not yet.

I step closer to him, slow and easy, not taking my eyes from him. He wants to step away, his eyes flicking nervously, his mouth twitching, but I hold him in place with my power.

I control your mind, I tell him softly. Calmly. So I control your body.

A sound rises from his throat, but I don’t care what he has to say. I can see it all now. I can understand it all, as though I were born speaking Russian. Our minds are at one, and his is a mind I don’t want to spend much time in.

I knew he was a bastard, power-hungry and hateful, but I had no idea how much influence he had over the Beta Council. He’d been instrumental in so many barbaric events other than the executions here just days ago.

I prod and pry, the whole time he whimpers, unable to move a muscle. My probing is painful. I can feel his distress. I could end the pain, but I don’t.

I’m vaguely aware of the growing audience around me, no one but my pack daring to get closer.

Then I find it. His secret.

I knew he had one the moment I first saw him. I didn’t have the power to find it then, but when I grasp it now, a roar escapes my chest, all fury and rage. He screams in his throat, mouth forced shut like I’ve sewn it, and I make him see. See her. Over and over again, the Cursed Omega he’d loved, the one who hated what he’d become, the one who spurned him for another when he joined the Council, the one he locked up after murdering her lover in front of her. The one he would visit again and again in the night, pumped full of chemicals, and force himself on whenever he pleased. Until she ended it by taking her life in a rare moment of clarity.

He’d seen the surveillance footage, how her dull eyes looked straight into the camera, and she whispered a message just for him before slicing her throat.

My hand whips out and grasps his neck, squeezing hard enough to elicit more panic, but not hard enough to end him.

I pull her voice from his mind. “ Ya bolshe nikogda ne budu tvoei.”

I will never again be yours.

It repeats over and over, and his pulse quickens as I send images into his psyche from his buried memories. From the first time they met to the brutal aftermath. The first time he saw her dance, the day he murdered her lover in front of her. The day he smiled to himself as she drew laughter from the children around her by creating a rainbow of tiny fireworks in the sky, the day she looked into the camera as an unrecognizable woman, and ended it all.

I draw out his pain and even guilt. There’s remorse for what he did hidden deep within the confines of his mind, but instead of this changing his ways, he quadrupled-down on evil, murderous hate.

I burn these memories into his mind, the images and her last words echoing on a loop until his body convulses, foam seeping from the corner of his mouth, and he collapses.

Death would be too good for this one. So I make sure he’ll live, comatose, locked in his memories for all time.

Forever isn’t long enough, but it will have to do.