Rae made sure the rest of her tears had dried from her face. She focused on her breathing until her heart stopped pounding so sorely. Finally, she could think. “About a week ago, Ruby took me to a forest. I had never seen such a place before. The green was impeccably natural. I don’t think I realized it at the time, but it was a life-changing experience,” she said. “Ruby shot a blackbird. It was the first truly innocent creature I witnessed die, and it felt… eternal.”
“Who are you becoming? Are you like them now?” Vash asked with contempt lingering in his voice.
“I am your queen, wife, as well as the mother of your three darling children,” she said. And then, she placed her palm across his face. Sweetly, she ran her thumb across the faint outline of his tears, drying him adequately. “I know life is painful. I know it is full of mystery and traumatic events that lead us to more misery, but there is beauty within it all. Even when there isn’t, we have to stick together.”
Vash nodded, piercing deeply into her eyes. They hadn’t connected in so long. None of them had, really. There hadn’t been any time. If anything, Killian’s sudden disappearance was a wakeup call to slow down. Things didn’t need to be solved in a day. The mending of their hearts was more important than anything else.
“I can’t bear to lose you again,” he said. “He was practically my brother, and he was the strongest man I knew.”
“I am the strongest woman in the world. If he is still alive, I will find him,” she said.
Above all, she hoped she didn’t sound arrogant. All she was trying to do was stay strong for them, but she knew how it looked when women took control of the reins.
Lucas walked slowly toward the two with Virgil by his side. “You can’t expect to put every piece together by yourself.”
“It’s her story,” Vash said. “It’s hers. Not ours. I understand that now.”
Appearing disgruntled, Virgil walked ahead of them and let out a short scoff when he reached the door. Without warning, he pounded three times and waited. Before it opened, he turned and said, “You’re both wrong. It’s no one’s story,” he said. “And that’s why I’ve made it a habit of staying out of harm’s way.”
The handle of the knob turned, and Rae felt her muscles tighten with sudden worry. She turned and grabbed ahold of Vash, saying, “Wait. We need to turn back!”
The door opened, and the rush of wind came out of the entrance, the smell of sweat and much, much worse. Severin walked through the door, and Virgil bowed like a loyal rat. “Sir,” he said. “The prisoners and the queen… here they are. I have done good for you and Ruby.”
“You came. I can’t believe you actually came here,” Severin said.
The look of soreness suggested Virgil might cry, but no tears came out. His face was dry, and the lines of age seemed even more pronounced than before. All of the hope Rae stored inside her breast dried in an instant.
“No,” she muttered, eyes fixed on the old preacher. She closed her eyes and prayed—she prayed a god would come down and crush them both. “You hoary bastard, no!”
“Where is the other one? He is the most important,” Severin said. He walked forward, confidently taking Rae’s hair and dragging her closer to him. She fought back, but every scratch she gave him was of no consequence to him. He merely stepped on her ankle, forcing her to submit.
“He is… missing,” Virgil said.
“Why do you need him?” Rae asked.
Severin shoved Rae’s head toward the concrete, letting her go at the moment of impact. The blow knocked her nearly unconscious.
“Missing?” he asked his servant.
“Stand the fuck down,” Lucas warned.
Both alphas had their eyes set in the crosshairs of the weapons. The trigger was well-thumbed with no hesitation. “It’s going to feel real good killing you,” Vash said.
But Severin allowed for a smile. He was not worried about dying tonight, it seemed. “Virgil, I’m going to need you to close your eyes. Can you do that for me?”
“I can, sir,” he said, confidently.
“Fuck this, let’s cap this asshole!” Lucas shouted.
Severin held out his hands and closed his eyes. At the same time, he inhaled through his nose, triumphantly. “Then, allow us to pray for a moment. Will you not join us, alphas?”
“To obey is better than to sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams,” Virgil said.
“Louder!” Severin yelled, gritting his teeth with undeniable new strength. “Scream it toward the heavens! I want to feel those words, glory, glory, hallelujah!”
And, like a shot to the heart, Virgil obeyed, even smiled through the prayer. “For rebellion is like the sin of divination, and arrogance like the evil of idolatry. Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, he has rejected you as queen,” Virgil said.
“Okay. Time is up,” Vash said. He tightened his finger and, there was the silence before gunfire and the power it usually offered from the kickback. Only, this time, there was nothing, spare the cold clicking noise from the trigger.
Lucas quickly removed the magazine and gulped. “Vash, it’s empty.”
Severin suddenly opened his eyes and lowered his hands, even kneeled before them without fear. He finished Virgil’s passage. “I have sinned. I violated the lord’s command and your instructions. I was afraid of the men, and so I gave in to them.” He laughed to himself. “Notice how it is the lord’s command? It is not up to women to rule. Even Ruby knows this.”
“You are wrong about everything,” Rae said, hurt but not destroyed. They could never destroy her completely. “In time, you will realize your errors, but it will be too late. By then, a blade will have ended your worries.”
Quicker than the alphas could act, Severin shot them with tranquilizers. They fell numb almost instantly. “Nothing will end my worries,” he said.
“Why don’t you just end us? Surely, that would help your cause,” Rae cried.
“I keep my enemies in my back pocket for a reason, princess,” he mocked.
Rae did not stop staring at Virgil. She wanted him to feel the weight of his betrayal. The devil would get him soon enough if she didn’t first. “Is Virgil an enemy, too? Or was this all a coincidence?”
“Coincidence might be too strong a word. There was a moment where I worried you might not show, but it turns out that I’ve hired the most loyal servants over the years. My judgment is better than I considered,” he said.
“What will you do to my husbands?” she asked.
“Husbands?” More laughter fell from his mouth. “They will be kept in the prison, mixed in with the alphas. And eventually, they will come to die here.”
Rae lowered her head and screamed. This conversation was far from over, and she needed to say one more thing before they turned the lights out on her, too. This time, her words were for Virgil only. “I thought of you as a father figure. Stupid, I know. Shallow, too. People are not supposed to choose their leaders, I suppose.” She relaxed her body for a moment, pausing to remember the glitter of light that reflected from the green of the forest Ruby showed her. “You said you would take me to my children. If you are a man of faith, you must know how wrong it is to remove three innocent creatures from their mother. You have acted as God yourself, and that is the most egregious sin of them all. Is it not?”
It was almost like she was begging, but she was ready to claw his throat out. Virgil’s eyelids tightened, and the resolve she saw within him when they first met could be seen again. “Run,” he said. “Run as fast as you can. He will not kill you. He needs you.”
And then, oddly enough, he took Lucas’s hands. “When you find The Furnace, you’ll know… all of this… oh God… Forgive me.”
As soon as Severin reached into his holster, she knew he would bring out the bigger guns, bullets that spelled out only one type of path. Virgil shut his eyes and smiled, but Rae leaped back and started to run. She nearly tripped when she heard the sharp and ringing sounds of bull
ets.
Nearly.
She jumped into the black water, the bitter lake from whence her darkest dreams manifested. She swam and did not turn back.
Chapter Twelve
“Father, can you hear me? Well, I’m speaking, regardless. I never believed in prayers. Never believed in right and wrong. Hell, I never fucking believed that I’d ever find a woman who could change my evil ways, so maybe it’s time I lift my head up to something bigger than myself. No, not you. You’re just the man who spilled his seed in exchange for a possible legacy. Who knows who my mother was? I probably won’t ever reach that level of knowledge… my mind is running circles, and my time is running out.”
The days underneath the ground had been heavy. He was hungry and worn down, but he knew he’d made the right choice to leave the group. There was a feeling inside him, something that urged him to follow his gut.
He saw the gleam in Virgil’s eyes. The man seemed sorry for the pack. That type of glance usually spelled death. He just hoped the man didn’t have it in him to actually kill. No, he was far more devious than their predatory leaders.
When he ducked into the water, he waited and searched for a sliver of light. There were two paths that he saw, and he chose the one they’d neglected to visit. He grabbed ahold of a small, rusted ladder that led to the surface. He pulled his weight and found air. What he also found was an image he couldn’t wrap his head around.
Killian opened his eyes to face an unknown structure of brilliance and beauty, a tall and metallic assembly rising at least a hundred feet in the air. There was more than enough electricity down there to power a whole city, but that wasn’t what shocked him. He kept walking toward the center until he reached the source of light, a blue orb that floated within the metal confines. He recognized it almost immediately as the glass womb those bastards drowned her in on television. Only, this time, it was full of blue luminescent liquid and not her body.
Above the artificial womb was the inscription: EC23.
Killian didn’t know what to say. Rae hadn’t been called that since the days of Cassian, but those programs were shut down. Lost in a trance, he slowly placed his hand against the glass before darting it away again. When he realized it could not hurt him, he reached out again, and, this time, he felt the warmth against his palm. In his eyes, the blue shone bright and innocent like the morning star above a village. Suddenly, he wanted to feel the water, to dive in and never come out again. It was so heavenly.
Killian stared in silent wonder. Like a child, he had nothing to say. The structure was so magnificent in scale, so clandestine in location he almost wanted to applaud its architect. He was just about to climb another set of stairs when a woman’s voice broke the silence.
“They’ll put her back in her place. You know that, right?”
Killian spun around and aimed his rifle, but he did not pull the trigger. A youthful blonde woman wearing a lab coat walked toward him. “Please, don’t attack me. I’m not here to turn you in,” she said.
Killian tossed the rifle aside and faced the woman. She held her hands out as if to say she was a friend, but Killian had too many friends these days and wasn’t in the mood to make any more. “Who the fuck are you?”
The woman bowed politely but did not smile. There was heaviness to the dark gleam in her eye, one that suggested she had gone through a great deal of trauma. How she ended up in here, he had no idea. Part of him never wanted to know. “Helen Kurtfield, specialist,” she said.
“You…” Killian wiped the sweat off his forehead. Now, they were face to face, and he could see her clearer than ever before. Her dainty nose arched perfectly, and even though her eyes weren’t symmetrically set, she carried a certain beauty that threw him off guard. “I remember you from before. You helped clean the corpses of the … the milking chambers.”
“That wasn’t… me. There are many of us here,” she revealed. “We are registered under the same name.”
Killian swallowed, stomach shifting. The hairs on his limbs suddenly stood up. “So, you’re all her copies,” he said. “And above us is that dreadful place my pack-brothers and I saw just days ago.”
She nodded, nostrils widening as she inhaled. The resemblance was off, but it was there. “Yes,” she said.
“I thought all of you were killed during the final raids. I saw the bodies at the nightclubs,” he said.
“We aren’t as stupid as the public may think,” she said. “Did you believe all of us were killed?”
“I doubt the public thinks about the past at all. They seem to barely be able to get through the week,” Killian replied.
“Some of us escaped,” she said.
“But not you. You must have found a way out, but that still doesn’t explain how you ended up here. How were you caught?” Killian asked.
He placed his hand across her cheek and felt the softness of her skin. He was not aroused at all, only disturbed and a little bit confused. An extreme level of shame hit him directly in the heart when a tear rolled down her cheek. She grabbed her blonde hair by the root and removed the wig, revealing the luscious strands of amber hair. Killian backed away, dizzy.
“I remember the night we were brought to the nightclub. Men, very rich alphas traveled all around the world for the experience of a lifetime. For a full year, we were expected to service them and smile. The ones who opened their mouths were beaten until rendered completely inert. It was hard enough watching my sisters die, but it was somehow even harder watching the ones who were spared lose the bit of life they had inside them,” she said, gaze dropping to the floor.
“What happened after the bombs fell?” Killian asked.
“We hid in a pile of rubble until the sounds dissipated. Then we split up. A few of us went toward the sewers underneath the city. I’m sure they were killed, but I have no proof. It’s just something I feel.”
Killian nodded. “I’ve been feeling a lot of things lately.”
“You were an Ouroboros. You were never trained to feel.”
“I was an orphan, ripped from his home and thrown into the trader sectors. I played my role as well as I could, but these things tend to fall apart when the curtain closes,” he said. “When I met their prized clone, I felt love. Maybe you don’t believe me, but I’ve been trying my hardest to change ever since I felt her breath course inside of me.”
“They took your children,” she said. “Yes, I know all about you. I’ve been asking about your lot ever since they locked you up.”
“How do you know who I am?” he asked.
She led him into a long hallway of seemingly endless rows of documentation. “A man used to visit me. He told me things were starting to unfold, that something was on the rise, even if it didn’t seem like it. He would give me updates every week. When he stopped coming around, I knew it had begun. I suppose that was around the time you escaped,” she said.
“Severin?”
The clone forcefully shook her head. “No. He was an older man, a preacher. I only met him one time,” she said. “Here, there is more to show you.”
Killian didn’t betray a frown or a smile. He didn’t react at all, but in that moment, he knew Virgil must have had a lot on his mind during the reformation of the new world. While he was behind a cell door, there were people working to usurp current powers. He was thankful for the help, but it also made him realize how pointless it all was. The system seemed endless, and all he wanted was to escape and find peace with his woman and fellow breeders.
He just wanted a fucking life.
The clone pointed at the rows and stopped at one in particular. “What is this place?” Killian asked.
“This place stores the history of the world. Some of the clones were given the task of documenting everything. As much as Severin wants to confuse and play games, he can’t help but keep things contained. After all, what would a world be without his story? Everything we know about the past has been stored here,” she said. “Welcome to our little ark.”
&nbs
p; “I don’t care about the world’s history. It’s all the same. Rape, death, and endless violence. It all seems so tragic now. Worthless too. I just want my woman, my pack, and some fuckin’ peace,” he said.
The woman was just like Rae from the side. Her pouty, begging lips, her sad eyes, the roundness of her ass as she stood up straight… he left to save her life, again, but he would have been lying if he said he wasn’t thinking about her every second. This was only making things harder.
“Tragic? Maybe,” she said. “But tragedy is necessary. You must learn to adapt, adopt, and learn as all great men do.”
“I just want to be with her. I no longer wish to move astray,” he said.
She reached forward and grabbed a small computer chip. Carrying it carefully between her fingers, she walked slowly to what Killian thought of as the artificial womb, the chamber in which Severin forced her to sink.
“This is the central computer,” she said, showing him some wiring that went into the side of a small box. “It connects into the pod above.”
Again, he placed his hand over the glass and breathed deeply. He didn’t know how to feel about this place. “Severin nearly drowned her here,” he said. “What does it do?”
“We’ve tried to understand it. On some nights, it will light and warm the room with red luminescence. I have seen it turn blue, even,” she said. “Whatever it does, it can’t be good.”
Killian tapped on the glass but anxiously stepped back. “What happens if I get into it?”
“You’ll hear things,” she muttered, eyes suddenly watering to the brim. “Voices. Screams. Sometimes, the light tapping of lips against a woodwind instrument flows from somewhere on the other side…”
This unsettled Killian more than most things. “The other side?”
Born Claimed: A Dark Omegaverse Romance (Broken Angel Book 2) Page 13
