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Soren was good at making plans. He just knew what to do whenever something was going wild. He’d known since he helped me all those years back, without any sign of worry, he carried me almost. I was limping, but he took me into his home where he made me a bed, and through all of my scowls and trying to keep to myself, he broke through. He broke me then, he broke me now, and he would break me again, breaking the shroud in front of my eyes like an iron curtain, the chinked chains snapping to show me everything I already knew.

Soren was my mate, and he needed saving.

The machine he was hooked up to probably needed someone with a little knowledge of how they worked to operate them, but where I failed at that, I knew that a machine couldn’t work if it wasn’t plugged in. I yanked the wire from the socket and the machine stopped its whirring.

I needed him to speak to me and tell me what I needed to do now. He had a tube down his throat and monitors on his skin. And one injectable in the back of his hand. I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t have long to decide.

The throat tube was first. I began pulling on it and the length of it surprised me. But the moment I pulled it out, Soren began sputtering and coughing. His eyes partially opening. “Hey,” I whispered. “Hey. Are you ok?”

He sucked in deep breath and as his eyes opened slightly, they were rolling back.

With a hand pushed under his back, I lifted him slightly hoping it would help him take in more oxygen with each breath. I didn’t know what I was doing, and I didn’t like not knowing. It was scary. “Hey,” I whispered. “Come on. Let’s—” I remembered the advice he gave me. “Slow, deep, purse your lips.”

Soren was listening, he followed my instructions which were in turn his own instructions. “What—” he let out with a pant. “The fuck is going on?”

“Ok, you’re ok.” I stroked the side of his face and planted my lips on his skin to embrace him with a kiss. “I need your help.”

He smiled. “You need my help?” he coughed up as he laughed.

“Yes. I don’t know what they’ve done to you, and you’re much more knowledgeable about this stuff than I am.”

He stared at me with a big smile. “I was worried there for a minute. I could hear you all talking. I thought they’d done something to you. I didn’t think you were going to come back to me.”

I pressed my nose and forehead to his. “It was weird. I was me, but I was also watching myself. I kinda bit you again and that’s when I really felt everything slot back into place. So, I might not have come back, if it wasn’t for that bite.”

Soren lifted a hand, tssking his teeth in pain. “They were dosing me with something,” he said, slowly pulling at the needle embedded in the back of his hand. An immediate spurt of blood followed it.

“No you don’t.” I licked the wound clean on the back of his hand. I wasn’t going to waste good blood, especially not Soren’s. Although I was entertaining briefly the idea of putting his blood in each of their bodies to see if it would have the same effect as it had on me. I didn’t want them infected.

“How long have I been out?” he asked.

“No idea. I just woke up, and felt like everything was the same. We don’t have a calendar around, so it’s impossible to tell.”

“I need to get out of here and back to my car,” he said. “I have to check in with people. If I’m off the grid for too long, they’ll come looking for me. I always tell them not to, but they’re not going to leave without me. And I don’t want them to come here. They’ll end up like them.” He gestured to the docile yet lucid sputtering of the omegas in the beds at his left. “We’ll come back and save them.”

I closed my eyes briefly, seeing the time we’d spent together, everything from the moment we’d been in bed to the conversations we’d had. I knew he wanted to rescue the omegas, he was adamant about not leaving until he could leave with them, but now, he was acting different. “They haven’t done anything to you, have they?”

He shook his head. “Not that I know of. What do you think they’ve done to me?”

“I—I don’t know, Soren. But if we leave, I don’t think we should come back. The Syndicate will eat you—us alive if it knows what we’re planning.” My brother probably wouldn’t kill me, but I could imagine the torture he’d put me through, mainly because I’d already been living in his torture chamber, which was to be used and unable to take any real control over myself. “We can get them all out. There are vans. We can take them, drive as fast as possible until we reach a major city.”

Soren’s big eyes looked into mine as he smiled. “Look at you now, making the decisions,” he said. “I can’t say I’m surprised. That was my idea, so I’m gonna take credit for it.”

I nodded. “Please. Take credit for it, but I’m not going to let you give up now. I’m not even going to let you look defeated right now. We’re going to get out of here with all these omegas, and you’re going to be hailed in the papers.”

“Oh, now you are reading my mind or feelings,” he giggled and then sighed. There was a pain in his chest, I felt it reflected in my own body, a tightness, constricting him. I suppose having a tube rammed down his throat hadn’t helped with things.

I rubbed a hand against his chest. “We need to get you dressed as well.” He wasn’t completely naked, but I wasn’t even going to think about them undressing him. My knuckles turned white as they wrapped around the metal frame of the bed. It was too late, I was pissed off.

Soren was defeated, it was written all over his face and body. He was one are you ok? question away from breaking in front of me. This wasn’t the person who threatened me, this was someone who’d nearly surrounded to everything this place was putting him through.

I tried my best to talk him around. I knew it was going to be difficult, the bond we had was here to stay. It said everything on his behalf. If I could’ve said or done the thing that helped him out of this, I would’ve done it. But there was no miracle cure to the funk he was in, not like he was the miracle cure to everything in my life.

The doors opened and the three soldiers that had left with the doctors arrived back in. They rushed over to us, questioning what Soren was doing awake.

To my feet, I stood in front of him. “Who undressed him?” I asked. “It’s a simple question. Who put their hands all over his body to undress him?”

They looked to each other, raising their hands to point, none of them pointing to the same person.

“They all have to be undressed,” one of them said. “It’s one of the rules.”

With fists formed at my waistline, I was gearing up to bring them to the sides of their heads where they would wish they never set a finger on Soren’s precious skin. “This one is mine,” I told them. “So, which one of you did it?”

Two of them pointed to the third. He stumbled as he took a step back. “He did it,” they said.

I didn’t care anymore. “Pick him up,” I said.

My soldiers, my lackeys. They did as was asked of them, grabbing him from the ground and pulling him to his feet until he was stood in front of me. They all seemed to have excuses as to why they weren’t the one who touched him, and I didn’t care for any of it.

Just as I was about to show them how little their life was worth. I heard a crunching from behind. I didn’t have time to turn around before I saw Soren with the metal bar from the side of the bed. He thrust forward, impaling the soldier in the middle on the end of it. The sweet spot of the belly button, not protected by the small protective vest all the soldiers wore.

I snapped my fingers. “Don’t move,” I told them.Soren’s shaking hands were wrapped around the steel bar, hesitating whether to push it further through him, or pull it out. “And don’t look at him.” His full naked body on display. I didn’t like him being displayed to anyone but me. If they wanted to see him naked, they would have to pay with their eyes. That was the current price of admission.

The decision was made the moment it crossed my mind. Their eyes had seen too much, and fresh on my mind from that poor omega who’d gone feral plucking its own eye out. I released an inner rage I’d bottled up for far too long. A rut that could’ve beaten down a complete concrete wall to rumble.

In the past, when an explosion of energy ran through me like that, I wouldn’t have much memory of it. It made sense now why I didn’t have those memories, but similarly, I went into a rage and locked in on my target.

It can’t have lasted that long because we were leaving the room before anyone else was on their way to it. The soldiers bodies were pinned to the wall with their faces caved in. Soren had been covered in blood before he shifted and cuddled up inside my inside jacket pocket.

Minutes later and the alarm sounded.

The bodies had been found.

In my room, an exhausted Soren flopped around on the bed, stressed by all the commotion and an inability to think. At least, that’s how my brain was interpreting his emotions like a static fizzle from an old television unit.

“They’re going to be looking for you,” I told him. “We have one option, and that’s to leave before they find us.”

He shook his head, slamming it back against the pillow on the bed. “We have another option. We could both shift. We could both slip away and plan our attack from somewhere else.”

I sat on the foot of the bed and grabbed his ankle, tugging his naked body down the bed slightly. Blood from my hands staining his skin. “You need to stop changing your mind.”

“I’m not. I am. But I’m not. I’m just—”

This wasn’t good. His thoughts were bleeding into mine, and mine into his. We had competing ideas, and just like polar opposites, one of us was always going to have a different want to the other. “I’m saying I agree with your first plan. Let’s leave, you can contact who you need to contact and let them know you’re ok. Then, we can come back here, plan, and get these omegas out.”

The continued blare of the alarm was like a pressure, forcing us to decide our next action.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m—”

“You’ve been through a lot. But you were always the best at making decisions,” I said. “And I think whatever you want to do, we’ll do that, and I won’t second-guess it. So, tell me what you want to do, Soren. Please.”

“I want to kill your brother,” he said.

Of all the things he wanted, it was the one thing I hadn’t even thought of him suggesting. “But—”

“He’s the head the Syndicate. If he dies, the Syndicate will—” He stared at me, I knew he was hoping I’d finish the sentence, but it was as simple as that. There wasn’t a definitive answer, and I know he wanted me to say I would take over, but in reality, it could’ve been anyone now that all those omegas were primed to create more Rotmor infected serpents.

I shook my head. “It’s not me,” I told him. “We can kill him, but we need to—”

“You just said whatever I want, we’ll do.” He sat upright and glared at me. “So, that’s what I want to do.”

“Fine. We’ll kill my brother.”