“Tell them.”
His jaw works. He looks at the ground.
“He bet his friends he could get the feral omega to sleep with him,” I say, loud enough for the guys to hear. “And then he collected his winnings and laughed about it. And when his father, the head alpha, found out his omega had been touched,” I continue, “he didn’t punish the boy who did it. He punished me. He put me in a cell and sewed wolfsbane wire into my skin when I was just sixteen.”
I stand up, looking down at Stuart, and I feel something I didn’t expect.
Nothingness.
He’s nothing. A coward on his knees in the dirt, and the power he had over me is just gone.
“You’re pathetic,” I say. “You were pathetic then, and you’re pathetic now. And I’m done letting you live in my head.”
I turn away from him and stop in front of the alpha. Stuart, I can dismiss. The head alpha is something else entirely.
He looks up at me with those cold eyes. No fear. No calculation. He looks at me the way he’s always looked at me. Like I’m something small and inconvenient.
“You cost me a great deal,” he says calmly.
Something white-hot ignites inside me. “You destroyed her,” I say.
He raises an eyebrow. “She was always fragile.”
“She wasn’t fragile. She was kind.” My hands clench into fists. “She was the kindest person I’ve ever known, and you took that, and you broke it. Because breaking things is the only thing you know how to do.”
I step closer, looking down at him. “You crushed her throat. You let her think I was dead. You kept her in a room the size of a closet for three years. You starved her. You restrained her until her wrists scarred over. You took everything from her. Her voice. Her mind. Her will to live. And you’re looking at me like I’m the one who owes you something.”
His expression doesn’t change. That’s the worst part. No guilt. No flicker of humanity behind those cold eyes. He’s not even sorry.
“She was mine to do with as I pleased,” he says. “As were you. As is every omega and every subject in this pack. That’s the natural order.”
I smile down at him. “And now it’s time for you to know exactly what that feels like.”
This male cannot be allowed to walk away. Not given a second chance to slither back into the world and find another pack to devour.
I turn to Darius. “He’s the one who sewed me with wolfsbane.”
Darius steps forward, and his scent shifts. Sharpens. The air around him thickens with something powerful, something that makes every wolf in the clearing lower their head.
Every wolf except the one on his knees.
“You know who I am,” Darius says. “Who they are.” He points to the guys standing behind me.
“Ten years ago, I let you live. Because I thought if I showed you mercy, you would learn to do better. I sent you into exile, and I thought that was enough.” He pauses. “It wasn’t.”
And then it hits me.
These males. The ones who showed up at my pack when I was eleven. The ones who challenged our alpha, won, and turned everything rotten. They came from the north. From a pack they claimed had driven them out.
From Darius’s pack.
These are the males who staged the coup and killed my mates’ families.
“You took that mercy and used it to destroy yet another pack,” Darius continues. “You killed, you enslaved, you tortured. You did to others exactly what you did to your own pack. You took my mercy and used it to defile another pack, to raise yourself up from the mud. And I bet you would have kept doing it until someone stopped you.”
He takes a breath. The clearing is silent. Every wolf in the compound is watching.
“This time,” Darius says, “I’m stopping you.”