Page 103 of The Delta’s Rogue (Crescent Lake #4)

I barely have time to react as Sarina launches herself towards me. Her hands slice through the air, and I dodge out of her reach just in time so her claws swipe across my shoulder instead of through my throat.

Before I can hiss in pain or staunch the blood, she’s on me again.

I duck and somersault, but she grabs my ankle and drags me backwards.

I flip to my back as she dives onto me. I wrap my hands around her wrists to keep her claws away from me, and we grapple on the ground, where we roll, twist, and spin to gain the upper hand against each other.

Through it all, tears stream down Sarina’s cheeks. Her teeth grind together. Pain and remorse shine in her eyes, and the utter helplessness she felt the night of the auction—the brokenness we worked so hard to heal—leaks back into her soul.

“What the hell?” Reid hovers at the edge of our fight, looking for an opening so he can intervene. “Why is Sarina attacking you?”

“I don’t know!” I gasp, locking my arms to keep Sarina’s body in the air.

“My blood.” Her voice is fuzzy and strained in my mind. “Someone is controlling me with my blood.”

“It’s her blood!” I repeat out loud to the others. “Someone is controlling her!”

“But Brenna gave you her blood!” Rune says.

“I kept some.” The sharp, proud voice comes from everywhere and nowhere, magically amplified across the entire pack.

“Amara,” I snarl.

Her phony-sweet laugh echoes .

My eyes dart around, searching for her, and my thoughtless reconnaissance costs me.

Sarina twists and knees me in the groin.

I curl in on myself, and she raises her claws to strike.

Her arm descends, but I roll to the opposite side and her claws scrape through the dirt instead.

I scramble to stand and spin to face her as soon as my feet are underneath me.

She darts forward, and I brace for her strike.

Reid and Nolan sprint closer and grab her, but they are thrown from her body. Reid lands flat on his back. Nolan spins in midair and rolls across the grass. Both of them gasp for air, overwhelmed by the power behind the unseen force.

Amara’s magic, or maybe a protective barrier around Sarina, prevents them from touching her.

Whatever it is, Amara wants this to be a one-on-one fight between Sarina and me.

As Sarina flies towards me once more, an idea sparks in my mind.

We’re out in the open, which means Amara can see us from wherever it is she’s hiding. But if we’re in the forest…

At the last second, I sprint towards the trees. I run faster than I have in my life. The entire time I run, I scan the battlefield.

Warriors fight off the dwindling numbers of traffickers. Maya, her mates, her mom, and Rune’s mom all watch over the unconscious or dead witches Dominic took out. Levi and his dad, Dr. Russo, tend to our wounded.

There is no sign of Amara.

Or Lyall.

I kick up an unbelievable amount of grass, dirt, rocks, twigs, and pine needles as my feet transition from the open field to the forest floor. Amara keeps Sarina’s sprinting footsteps close behind me, but I don’t give it a second thought. It doesn’t distract me. It doesn’t deter me.

I know this forest. This is my forest, and I will use it to my advantage.

“Find Amara,” I mindlink to the others. “Find her, get the blood from her, and put an end to this.”

“We’re on it,” Wes replies.

“You’ve got it,” Reid adds.

“What about Lyall?” Dominic asks .

I shake my head slightly. “He’s probably hiding somewhere, waiting until the last minute to reveal himself.”

Dominic exhales. “I’ll look for him.”

The mindlink goes quiet again, and I turn my focus to my plan.

Run through the forest. Keep Sarina close enough that she follows me but not close enough for her to attack me. Distract Amara so the others can find her and take her out.

I weave through the trees, changing direction every few yards. I leap over a rock here and vault over a fallen log there. Periodically, I drift closer to the gaps in the trees, ensuring Amara glimpses me from wherever she is so she’ll continue to keep Sarina on my tail.

The fading light darkens the forest, but the nights I spent traversing the grounds when the packhouse felt too much like a cage help me navigate them with ease.

Every turn I make, every obstacle I intentionally alter my path to include, sets Sarina slightly farther back from me.

She catches up between them, but each one assists me in my plan to drag this out.

“Why’d you attack us?” I yell once I’ve led us deeper into the forest on the opposite side of the lake.

I don’t know where Amara is, if she can hear me from where she’s positioned or through her control of Sarina, but I hope she can, and I hope she takes the bait.

“You outed yourselves. Your little blonde hybrid friend somehow broke through my wards with a locator spell. But it triggered my secondary alarm system. As soon as I realized it, I used astral projection to follow the path of her magic back to this pack.”

Fuck. Astral projection.

She found us the same way Reid and Taryn discovered Dominic’s mom was controlling him. We should have thought of that. If we had, I’d have made sure Rune did her spell at Peter’s instead of at Crescent Lake with Maya.

I can’t let the what-ifs slow me down. I need to focus on the present, on distracting Amara by letting her flaunt her win.

“Then you waited a week to attack us?”

“We planned for a week. I had to make sure everyone was prepared so our attack would go off without a hitch. Not that it mattered…”

As she talks to me with her magically amplified voice and I continue running, the voices of my friends and family in my mind overlap hers .

“ She’s over here!” Reid exclaims.

“No, she’s over here!” Maddie replies.

“She can’t be in two places at once!” Wes snarls.

“Shit! She vanished and reappeared ten feet to the right!” Nolan says.

“The one we’re after did the same thing,” Maddie says.

“They’re holograms,” my dad tells them with dawning realization. “She’s tricking us and sending us on a wild goose chase.”

“Fuck!” Reid groans. “We have to find the real Amara.”

My grimace grows with every message sent through the wide-open link between everyone fighting right now. I throw up a block, shutting them out. As much as I want to know what they’re doing, what their plans are, it’s too distracting when I’m trying to be the distraction.

“It wasn’t something I did or said that gave us away as fakes?” I ask out loud, shouting once more.

“No.” Even with her focus split between controlling Sarina and tricking my friends with her hologram illusions of herself, her voice stays calm, cool, and synthetically sweet.

“We knew you were from Crescent Lake. But even after the hybrid found us, I didn’t know for sure that you were involved—not until we showed up here and you were among the first to join in on the fighting, with my sweet Anaís at your side. ”

“She is MINE!” A growl from my lycan infuses rage into my tone. It shakes the branches around us, laced with a pulse of my aura.

“Yours?” Amara mulls over the word. “Yes, I suppose she is yours. You paid quite handsomely for her, after all. But tell me, Sebastian… ” She sneers my name—my real name—and I can picture her sharp eyes glinting with cruelty.

“Tell me: how did it feel to buy her? How did it feel to see her naked body displayed for an entire audience of Doms practically foaming at the mouth with excitement and desire for her? How did it feel to know you weren’t the only one trying to win her, that there was a chance someone might have deeper pockets and more money to throw at her to make sure they were the one to bring her home instead of you? ”

Her taunts land on the bullseye that is my heart. They strike true, like the darts they’re intended to be .

“How did it feel to go through all of that just to make sure no one else claimed your mate?” she adds.

“Shit!” I almost lose my footing.

How did she know?

As I glance behind me and my eyes flick down to Sarina’s neck, Amara laughs. “That’s right. I have to say, that mark on her neck is a rather lovely decoration. Not as gorgeous as a silver collar with a gag attached to it, of course, but still pretty.”

“Ignore her, Seb.” Wesley’s voice breaks through my mental block on the mindlink. “She’s looking for a way to make you stumble. Don’t let her get to you. Don’t fall into her trap.”

“I’m trying,” I reply with an exasperated groan. “I just want this over with. My mate has suffered enough.”

“Can you get through to Sarina? Can she fight it off?”

“I don’t know.”

“I bet she can. She’s strong.”

“How’s it coming with Amara?” I snap, changing the subject.

Sarina is strong. He’s not wrong about that. But all I can think about is how this experience may erase every bit of healing, every huge stride forward.

“Have you found where she’s hiding?” I ask.

“Not yet.”

“Well, keep looking. She can’t be far.”

My mind goes silent again. Or as silent as it can be because even without my friends’ voices in my head, my mind is filled with racing thoughts.

Not to mention the slapping of my feet against the ground, the pounding of my heart, the blood whooshing against my eardrums, and my breaths rattling my lungs.

Beneath it all, I hear Sarina’s gasping sobs and quivering breaths. It twists my stomach into knots. My throat burns from both my sprinting and from the heartbreaking anguish barreling to me from Sarina’s end of the bond.

I swallow against the lump and blink back tears as I push harder and run faster. Angling my body to slip between two bushes at the edge of the forest near the lake, I run straight up the side of the mountain to double back at a higher altitude.

“Sarina,” I whisper into her mind. “ I—”

Metal so cold that it burns wraps itself around my neck before I can finish sending my thoughts of encouragement her way.

My gut reaction is to yank at the metal choking my neck, to tear it away so the sting of the silver doesn’t singe my skin, but it’s clamped on tight. A split second after I grab it, cuffs attach themselves to my ankles and wrists.

I slam against the ground as chains wrench my arms and my legs back. They twine together, and my cheek scrapes through the dirt, my back arching with the force of them latching to the metal collar.

The chains rattle and clank as I’m dragged across the forest floor. I twist my head up and back.

Sarina holds the chains. Her body heaves with each tug. Her lips tremble, and mud lines her face from the dirt clinging to her tears. The chains she holds are stained with blood—Nuncio’s blood.

The shackles and chains on me are the ones we used on Nuncio.

The debris on the ground and the branches of the bushes scrape and scratch my skin as I’m pulled out of the forest and down onto the lakeshore. But the pain from the cuts is nothing compared to the sizzling of the silver on my skin or the anguish in my soul.

“W-why are you doing this?” I ask Amara. “We’ve d-decimated your forces. Just— just give up. We’ve won.”

The skin rubbing against the collar stings with each syllable I utter, and I grimace and gasp throughout my question, tripping over the words each time my throat presses against the metal.

I don’t know how Sarina went so long with these on her body when I can barely handle a few minutes.

“Maybe.” Amara’s reply is cold and detached. “But your death will forever taint this win for your pack. All they will remember is your mate turning on you and tearing out your heart while they looked on with no way to stop her or save you.”

Muffled shouting comes from both sides of the beach, where Wesley, Reid, and Nolan fight against an invisible barrier keeping everyone away from us.

I hold Sarina’s distressed gaze for the rest of our journey out onto the wide-open shore, and with my eyes, I reassure her .

“This isn’t your fault,” I think, hoping with everything in me that she sees in my eyes the words I can’t say out loud or tell her through the bond.

“This isn’t your fault, and you can’t blame yourself.

Don’t let this set your healing back. Be the fierce queen I know you are and come out of this with your head held high. ”

The chains drop to the ground, and Sarina sobs. I yank at the restraints, but the magic keeping them in place is too strong, leaving me utterly helpless.

Sarina trembles violently as she fights against Amara’s control. Her head shakes subtly from side to side, but she crouches and her hands lift, her extended claws shining in the starlight.

“It’s okay.” I continue my mental reassurances, even though I know she can’t hear me. “I forgive you, carino . You may never forgive yourself, but I do.”

The stars blink in slow motion. Sarina lands on top of me.

Her hands fly, swiping over my body—down my arms, over my neck, and across my chest. Her claws scrape across my skin, leaving behind shallow scratches.

None are deep enough to do any real damage, but all of them sting as the blood rises to the surface and meets the air.

Alone, the singular scratches would be like a paper cut—annoying and painful, and gone within a few minutes—but as she continues her attack, as she slices open more of my skin, the pain grows and grows until it matches the ache in my soul and the singeing from the silver shackles.

I’ve never felt a pain close to this. Not even the morning I woke up to Sarina gone was as painful or heartbreaking as this—watching her fight against Amara’s control, tracking the unrestrained tears that stream down her cheeks, witnessing the absolute devastation in her eyes as she attacks me so brutally.

As she’s forced to kill me.

With each strike, the light fades. Tears that match Sarina’s fall from my eyes, and I don’t try to fight back. It’s pointless. Amara has us right where she wants us.

Sarina shoves me as flat on my back as I can be with the shackles binding me. She scratches an X into my chest, right above my heart, then pierces the flesh with her claws.

I scream in pain. It’s not deep enough to hit my heart, but she twists her fist side to side several times before removing her claws .

I sigh in relief, but it’s short lived. She shoves her claws into the same wounds she already inflicted—once, twice, three times. Each time, my scream diminishes, fading with the darkness creeping in at the edges of my vision.

The fourth time she winds up, her arm pulls back further. Her muscles tense tighter, and her lip trembles.

“I love you, mi reina ,” I say into the vast nothingness where our mate bond used to be. “I will always love you.”

Her broken eyes lock onto mine.

I nod once, then exhale on a sob and close my eyes as Sarina prepares to strike a killing blow to my heart.