“Soph. It’s me. It’s Mo.”
Her lips part. Close. Part again. Something moves behind those empty eyes, deep and faint. She blinks.
“Mo?”
I take a step toward her. The head alpha makes a warning sound, and Sophie flinches. Her eyes drop to the floor, her shoulders hunch, and she goes completely still.
I’ve seen prey animals do that in the forest. The ones that have stopped running because stillness is all they have left.
My sister. The strong one. The smart one. They’ve done this to her. Three years of being broken down and worn away until there’s nothing left but the flinch and the stillness and the empty eyes.
She’s not on her deathbed. But it’s like she’s dead to the world.
“Take her to her room,” the alpha says to Stuart, gesturing at me.
Stuart reaches for my arm.
I pivot the way Archer taught me, dropping my weight, rotating my hip, and slamming my fist into Stuart’s throat. He staggers back, choking, eyes wide, and I’m already moving. I grab his wrist, twist, use his momentum against him the way Archer drilled into me for hours in the yard, and Stuart hits the floor on his back with a sound that is deeply, deeply satisfying.
“Don’t fucking touch me!”
The guards rush in—two of them. The first one grabs my shoulder, and I spin and sink my teeth into his forearm so hard I taste blood. He screams and lets go, and I drive my knee into his groin. He drops.
The second guard is bigger. He gets his arms around me from behind, pinning mine and lifting me off the ground. I throw my head back and feel the crunch of his nose against my skull. His grip loosens for half a second, and I wrench free, stumbling forward, chest heaving, blood on my teeth, fists up.
It takes three grown males to pin one omega to the floor, and even then, I’m still thrashing, still snapping, still spitting blood in their faces.
“Fuck you! Fuck all of you! I’ll gut every last one of you shit-stained, motherfucking, cock-rotted—”
Someone hits me. Hard. Everything goes dark. When the haze starts to clear, I realize my wrists are bound, and I’m beingdragged. Down a hallway. Downstairs. Stone walls closing in and the smell of damp and mould.
I know this smell. I know these stairs, but I am still too disoriented from the hit to the head to connect the dots.
The iron door creaks open, and I am roughly tossed in. The bolt slides shut, and I’m in the dark, surrounded by the musty stench. My body remembers where I am before my brain can catch up.
This is the same cell.
The same narrow bed with the rusted frame. The same dampness that seeps through the floor and drips down the stone walls. The same window slot near the ceiling lets in a strip of grey light—the same bucket in the corner. The scratch marks on the wall that I put there three years ago, counting the days until they came for me.
I press my back against the wall and slide down to the floor. My hands are shaking. My whole body is shaking, and my head is pounding. The fight drained out of me the second that door closed.
I wrap my arms around my knees and press my forehead against them and try to breathe the way Silas breathes. Slow. Steady. In and out.
You’re not that girl.
You survived three years alone. You jumped a ravine. You learned to fight. You have people who care about you. You’re not that girl.
The shaking slows. I put three of them on the ground before they got me. It took five to hold me down. That’s not nothing.
Thank you, Archer.
The head alpha thinks he’s caught himself a broken omega. I think the cell and the guards and Sophie’s empty eyes are enough to make me fold. Thinks the story ends the same way it did last time.
He’s wrong.
I’m getting out of this cell. And I’m taking Sophie with me. Not leaving this place without my sister. Not this time.
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