Reborn (Alpha's Claim Book 3) (17 page)

There were more of his kind, she found them around almost every turn. Most shrank from her, from the light of her screen. They cowered against the walls and wept, as if she had come only to cause them pain. Some tried to stalk her through the twists and turns. Fortunately for Dane, she had more bullets than they had life to spend.

These men were never supposed to be set free. Shepherd had left them here for a reason.

Saturated in the stink of human waste, of things far more rotten than any corpse aboveground, Dane plodded forward. She went North, always North. It took an hour to reach the gate she assumed must block this sector from the city center.

All that metal, all those gears and locks, someone had thrown them open.

Sniffing the air, Brigadier Dane hesitated. Something was not right. The citadel was on the other side of that door, of that she was certain, but the smell of Omega was here.

The sound of screams, the very horrible music she had been subjected to. Dane began to listen.

She heard a sobbed name buried in the noise. Someone was screaming for
Shepherd
.

Corday could hardly believe what he was a party to. The rebels had done enough damage that outcome of the battle aside, millions would die from exposure. Subsequently, just by coming to this place, he had betrayed the resistance. Everyone was doing harm to everyone else.

There was no
right
path. Not in Thólos.

It was so cold his fingers were losing feeling, the rebels around him buried under layers for warmth—because, unlike him, they had known what to prepare for.

It was as Brigadier Dane had said: Leslie had purposefully concealed the details of her battle plans from the pair of puppets she used to distract Shepherd’s men.

What else had she hidden? Was it as Shepherd’s second-in-command claimed? Was she Svana?

Had she been the one who’d assaulted Claire all those months ago?

The seed of doubt had burst and blossomed. It was hard to admit, but Corday
believed
the Beta who’d invaded his house, and he hated himself for it.

He had helped the woman seize power. He had helped her plan, gathered items used to craft the very bombs that had shattered two segments of the Dome. She had used him, and he had come to where the rebels mustered, knowing Shepherd’s second-in-command was still out there somewhere, watching him.

“Where is Leslie?” The words came in a rush, Corday pulling his body up the last segment of the ladder. The roof before them held ten men, Leslie’s men, all standing atop their perch, watching the city devour itself.

“We were told to hold position.” A man grizzled in appearance and unruffled by the situation said, “Lady Kantor will arrive once her mission is complete.”

“What mission?”

Jaw covered with a red, bristled beard, the man turned his eyes to Corday, and said nothing.

His reply, it was something Dane would have barked. Mouth in a firm line, Corday chastised a man who’d only recently been recruited, “I will remind you of your rank in our forces. While you were warm and fed, protected in the Premier’s Sector, I was running missions, risking my life so this day might come.”

There was a brief instant the man’s composure slipped. He stood abashed. “Her mission was classified. We don’t know where she is. All communications went down twenty minutes ago, so we wait. Chances are, she moved to another position.”

As if it were his place to command, Corday pointed to the youngest in the group. “You, climb down and run to the team at sector G. If she is there, update us immediately.”

“I am afraid that man already has his orders, Corday.”

Corday rounded, looking for the source of Leslie Kantor’s voice. She had snuck up right in the midst of their collective, not one of them having heard her crest the roof. “Leslie?”

She smiled to see him, remaining at a distance. “Our plan is advancing exactly as expected. Every rebel was prepped and knows their duty. The disruption of the communications network changes nothing.”

His fingers were so close to the gun holstered at his hip. “Leslie, why didn’t you tell me our men were going to blast holes in the Dome?”

From the absolute steadiness of her expression, it was obvious Leslie had been prepared for and unconcerned by the question. “The airstream surrounding the Citadel is a countermeasure in case Shepherd unleashes the virus before our bombs might cleanse it from existence.”

The virus was airborne, heavy winds would only spread it faster. Her excuse was so lacking in substance, that Corday could not contain his feelings of despair. “Without protection from the elements, it will grow uninhabitable in the city. You’ve condemned our people to the Undercroft.”

“Really, Corday... you can be so dramatic.” Waving him off, Leslie marched to the edge of the roof, assuring the only way Corday might hear her continued explanation was to follow at her heels like a dog. “Yes it will be difficult at first. Given the state of manufacturing and resources, projections show it will take four years to repair the damage. In the meantime, citizens unnecessary to the immediate reconstruction of the Dome will be
safe
underground. Those key to the effort of restoring our city will find sanctuary in the Premier’s Sector.”

Some would live in grandeur and luxury while others wasted away in the dark. “I see.”

She hesitated, looked him in the eye. “This was the only way to ensure change. Sacrifice must come from all of us.”

And what was she going to sacrifice?

He hated her in that moment. Even so, he nodded as if he understood. Staring down at the madness, Corday found that the number of angry citizens circling the Citadel had increased, compacting into a single waving mass working to reach the steps.

Followers were shooting at them like fish in a barrel.

They were dying for nothing, in fact they would all die should Leslie’s bombs detonate. Cutting a glance back to the smirking woman at his side, he knew she saw his distrust. It seemed pointless to continue his charade. After all, he’d already condemned them all.

Corday’s lip almost shook when he asked. “He told me your name is Svana. Is it true?”

The corners of her mouth curved up from smirk to smile. Impudent, she asked, the question coming out as absolute confirmation, “Who?”

Behind them a rough edged voice rang out. “It’s time, Svana. Shepherd has sent me. He wishes to negotiate the terms of his surrender.”

Like Leslie, he’d appeared with no sound.

No longer was Shepherd’s minion dressed in the blacks of Followers. He looked like any other civilian. Or he would have, if he didn’t have such a massive firearm resting in slack arms.

Turning her back to the carnage below, Leslie held up her hand, signaling to her men all was well. Once they had lowered their weapons, she offered a twisted greeting. “Jules, I expected you sooner. Hasn’t this gone on long enough?”

Seeing him in the daylight, Corday found the Beta to be only a ghost of a person. There was something wrong with the way his eyes tracked their movement, a lifelessness to his face. When he spoke his voice was not only disinterested, it was dead. “It has.”

“Fine.” Leslie nodded, crossing her arms over her chest. “Kill these men, and let’s make our way.”

Before the word
kill
had crossed Svana’s lips, the Beta acted. In a blur he’d shouldered his rifle and showered a spray of bullets on Leslie Kantor’s bodyguards. As the untried rebels fell, only two had squeezed off return fire before their death—a single bullet embedding in the concrete at Jules’s feet.

Lowering his weapon, he scowled at the woman, disgusted by the men’s utter lack of skill when it came to actual combat. “You did not train them well.”

Leslie ignored the taunt. Instead, her focus was on where Corday lay. The impact of a bullet had knocked him down, a growing bloodstain marking his thigh. Rattled breath twisted his groans. One hand to his wound, he scrambled to lift his weapon.

All it took was Leslie’s foot atop his wrist to stop the pathetic attempted attack.

Reaching down to take Corday’s gun for her own, she complained. “He’s still alive.”

Jules’s answer was dry. “Shepherd desires that this one suffer.”

“Poetic.” Pointing his gun at his skull, the woman seemed to debate the benefits of letting Corday meet a cold, lonely death on the roof. Maybe it was the way he cursed her name over and over. Maybe it was because he had been her plaything for so long. Either way, she took a step back. “Fine. I will give Shepherd this one last concession.”

On the edge of the roof, standing confident and free, she cut a glance at the Follower and explained her deeper thinking. “He forced my hand, you know. This wasn’t how I wanted it to be. Shepherd made me do this. You understand that, Jules.”

Jules stared down at the panting man, took a long look at his handiwork, and curled his lip. “I gave you your chance to shoot her. You hesitated.”

The smile Svana wore, the self-assured cocky smirk, diminished to the point where her face was blank, chilling. “You would dare insult me now? Not one of you—”

Jules didn’t acknowledge a word out of her mouth. Before she could make any grand speeches, he unloaded ten bullets into her chest.

Eyes bugging out of his head, Corday struggled to scoot out from under Svana’s collapsing body. “What the fuck?”

Jules ignored the inconsequential Beta, choosing instead to tower over Svana’s pretty bleeding corpse. “After some recent thought on the subject, I disagree with Shepherd. I don’t believe we need you alive to take Greth Dome. We only need parts of you to bypass scans—a hand, some blood, maybe an eye. The rest of you is garbage that we will harvest at need. Enjoy your legacy.”

Reaching down, he hoisted the woman across his shoulders, hesitated when her body brushed his face. He crinkled his nose in a deep sniff, and growled once the trace of fading scent registered. His face contorted and he looked as if an ocean of profanities were rising up to his tongue.

As quickly as the rage began, he shut it off.

Jules swallowed, and once again became an empty, hollow thing. Svana bleeding all over him, he glanced once to where Corday grew pale, slumped against the roof’s retaining wall. The Enforcer was dismissed with one derisive glare before Jules climbed down from the roof with his prize.

He left Corday alive.

The grand doors of the Citadel wide open at his back, the city in shambles at his feet, Shepherd looked over his dying kingdom. Sun sinking over a broken wasteland, aging light stretched shadows atop the sea of Thólosen men and women desperately trying to reach their tormentor. His men had done well disrupting pathways by destroying bridges and hastily constructing barricades. The unwise that approached, had only one plausible path to his doorstep.

To his loyal Followers armed on the overlooking fragmented causeways, he ordered, “Fire at will.”

A wave of gunfire erupted, an upsurge of enraged citizens falling under the stampede of their rabid neighbors. More protestors climbed over the growing hill of the dead—like locusts they kept swarming, hour after hour.

All Shepherd could do was clog the path, and keep the masses, and Svana’s bombs as far from the Citadel as he could.

He had broken down the odds, added up all known variables. Soon those desperately trying to climb over the dead would be hungry and thirsty. If he were lucky, they would make it until nightfall, where violent winds barreling through the Dome might drive Thólosens to seek shelter in the Undercroft, as every COMscreen under the broken Dome suggested. But the colder it grew, the more arrived in mass to shout and throw things across the divide separating the Citadel from the city.

There was a greater unresolved issue beyond the insects gathering at his doorstep: Svana

She was yet unaccounted for. The ships that had already launched would be stuck hovering out of range of their intended target until they had their key to Greth Dome in hand. His men, his mate, would be trapped out there just as he was trapped in here, if Jules failed to find her.

Until she was delivered, those same ships would not be able to return and gather the army waiting for freedom. Unless the transport ships returned soon, a second round of evacuations would be impossible.

There was no hope left for those deserted in Thólos. His men knew it.

Should Shepherd have the opportunity to lay eyes on Svana again, he would be hard pressed not to reach out and tear her limb from limb.

Claire had been right; he had created a monster in Svana just as she had harnessed the violence in him. As a team, they had been unstoppable. As adversaries... they knew one another so well, it was like fighting against one’s shadow.

Moves and countermoves, and they were still at an impasse. She knew he would not unleash the virus so long as there was even a chance his men might survive. That’s why she’d given it to him, a final taunt he’d been too foolish to recognize.

Even armed with the greatest weapon in history, he was powerless.

She held control, her absence aside.

He’d put her on that untouchable pedestal himself. In tormenting Thólos, he’d created for her the perfect fodder to fling at his wall. Svana knew what to look for in the hearts of men, and had used her experience to her ultimate advantage. Worse, she had done it right under his nose.

Jules, Claire, had both tried to warn him.

No matter the roaring ice of the wind, Shepherd stood like a beacon atop the steps of the Citadel and fought for the brothers who’d offered their devotion and the woman whom he loved with every fiber of his being.

He’d felt Claire’s panic through the pair-bond for hours, and ached that he could not comfort what he knew must have been frightening for his mate. She was calling for him through their link so loudly that Shepherd was almost certain he could hear her voice caught in the shrieking gale. More than once it had stolen his focus, but he had persevered in his duty.

The hours defending the Citadel were hard fought, but they had survived the siege through almost one day.

Looking at the battle below, Shepherd knew his men would not make it one more. There were millions tearing at the barricades, hastily constructing rudimentary brigades to reach the Follower’s sanctuary. Some had even begun attempting climbing the sides of the Citadel with ropes flung over anything that might hold the weight of a man.

There were too many.

His men were outnumbered, and though those who stood by him had superior weapons, the savages below with their kitchen knives and swinging pipes no longer seemed to care if they lived or died.

The herd was slowly breaking through the barricades, using the dead as shields as they crept closer by the minute.

There were not enough bullets, not enough men, to take them all down.

Sooner rather than later, it would all be over.

Shepherd took a deep breath and took his eyes away from the line of filthy citizens rushing his gates, turning his attention to Claire’s sky. It was a beautiful sunset, a small flurry of snow falling lightly. His mate would have enjoyed such a glorious view. He would have enjoyed standing next to her while she looked at it.

It pained him greatly that she was so distraught. Longing to feel her comforted, he tried to send her love and reassurance through their bond, a thing he had done for hours.

Shepherd wanted to give her more. But he could not.

All he could do was punish the city for ruining their future and forcing him to leave his mate and child alone in the world. All he could do was take Svana from the city she wished to rule.

He would break any who made it up the steps with his bare hands, watch them bleed, and smile.

Then he would unleash the virus and die for Claire.

The grand doors of the Citadel wide open at his back, Thólos in shambles at his feet, Shepherd tensed at the sound of running feet behind him.

Breathless from running, a Follower rushed towards him. “Svana has been collected.”

Shepherd almost closed his eyes when a wave of warm relief ran over his flesh. At last. “Report.”

“She’s dead. Jules dumped her body on the transport’s gangway and told us to pack it on ice immediately. He took a med-kit from the ship, sir, and abandoned his post.”

Shepherd had no words to match the look of incredulity that blazed in his eyes. “Where is he now?”

The Follower was grim, shaking his head. “Unaccounted for, sir.”

Shepherd’s lashes flared, the Alpha glaring. “How long before that ship can be in the air?”

“The engines are cycling now. Five minutes to launch.”

They might not have five minutes if the rumbling Shepherd could feel vibrating from the Citadel’s dirty marble floors was any indication. Too many raged outside. There was a finite number of bullets available, and it was only a matter of time before one of Svana’s bombers crept near enough to detonate. If the building was brought down before the ship was airborne, everything would be lost. “Forgo system checks. Launch immediately.”

The order was given just as the building lurched. Segments of the north ramparts began to crumble, one side of the Citadel folding in on itself. Another bomb detonated, Shepherd was thrown, a wall breaking his body’s trajectory and breaking his bones.

Hours had passed since it had begun, hours in which sedation that had been a blessing dulling her panic and pain began to fade. Now that Claire dimly recognized all that had been done, she was far beyond screaming.

She no longer remembered their faces, only told them apart by the way they made her body jerk when they raped her.

Hard and fast, he was the one inside her when her child began to die, when the real blood began to flow... and he had howled like a wolf as if the gush of red fluid easing his way inside her body had pleased him. Then there was short and twitchy, he was the one who rode her the most violently, clawing his nails into her skin, marking her with little bleeding puncture wounds shaped like crescent moons.

Half aware, reeling from another blow when she refused to part her lips for the filthy cock held to her face, Claire blinked gummily and heard it again—the Undercroft prisoners were screaming for her in the halls.

She’d thrown up three times, vomited all the semen they’d shot down her throat each time one of them fucked her mouth and forced her to swallow as she choked on the gushes. She was still lying in it, face down, and it was cold, and pink. Sometimes she cried for Shepherd, when she grew lucid enough to feel the pain. Mostly she just stared at the cell’s only door, watching the feet of monsters shuffle by in their rags, terrified they would turn their attention on her and reach through the bars.

One swollen eye went wide when the third of the Alphas pulled her hair so hard her head was forced back. She heard him grunt savagely, knew him from the others by the way he liked to grope her when he rutted, and felt him knot amidst the bleeding wreckage of her body. There was no sound from her throat, only a strange echo that seemed to seep from a place far away.

“We agreed no knotting!” A growled complaint was flung at the man with his head thrown back, too busy moaning at the ceiling to pay any attention. “It was my turn next, and now you got the cunt stuck on you cock. Pull out!”

The only answer was a low phlegmy moan, the sound more animal than man. A sharp series of tugs shook the knotted pair, one of the men trying to yank the bastard away. It was useless, his knot was locked behind her pubic bone, but it woke Claire from her stupor, encouraged a shrill stab of horrific pain, and though it had been hours since she’d been able to manage it, Claire found another scream. The high-pitched shriek and the sobs that followed were wretched, a thing full of hopelessness and pain.

“Don’t kill her yet, cocksucker. I want this piece to last longer than the last ones.” It was the one who had laughed when her miscarriage began, the cruelest of her assailants who warned. “You’ll just have to wait it out.”

“What’s that noise?” the man who had been trying to pry short-and-twitchy off let go, and moved to the door. “Get the bitch to stop screaming!”

But they couldn’t, she screamed and screamed, no longer human, staring out through the bars as more of those tattered legs came into view, certain the Undercroft demons had come for her.

Claire’s arms stretched until her joints began to burn, she fought the binding again when the monster outside paused and grabbed the cell door in an attempt to force it open. A ragged face appeared, but where she had been expecting lips pulled back to show sharp teeth, what looked back at her was outrageous fury and wide eyed concern.

It was just like Shepherd’s story, the shadow ripped the bars straight out of the rock to come inside her cell. A demon had come to claim her for itself. The noise of her attackers’ panic echoed off the walls. There were grunts and screaming. Like magic, the knot inside her shrunk, and the invading painful thing was pulled out. Another wave of blood gushed from her in its wake.

There was a roar of noise. A great beast stood over her. The rope was cut, gentle hands turned her over in the pool of vileness. She could hardly see, couldn’t understand why she was being lifted from the bed.

The three men who had used her lay naked and blood smeared, sprawled on the floor where they’d fallen.

“My name is Brigadier Dane.” The Enforcer touching her was female, her eyes determined and shaken as she covered Claire’s nakedness with the Omega’s discarded coat. “You’re safe now, Miss O’Donnell.”