Chapter 40 Mo
Mo
Icome to, and dread fills my body as we approach the old pack compound.
The trail curves south around a ridge I used to climb as a kid, back when climbing things was fun and not a survival skill.
The stream below it is the same one where Sophie and I caught tadpoles.
I know these hills. I know the way the trees change from pine to birch as the valley opens up.
I know this land, even when it’s changed so much that I almost don’t recognize it.
Home. Or what used to be home.
The compound comes into view, and my stomach drops because it’s the same place, and it isn’t.
The bones are the same. The main hall where we used to eat together, the row of cottages along the eastern ridge, and the clearing where the kids played.
But everything has been stripped bare. The communal garden my mother tended is gone, replaced by a dirt yard.
The cottages look neglected—paint peeling, windows dark.
High fencing has been added around the perimeter, with guard posts at the corners.
It wasn’t always like this. I remember when this compound was full of noise and laughter.
When the alpha who led us was tough but fair, and the pack felt like family.
That was before the challenge. Before the new alpha showed up with his men and took over, and turned everything rotten.
I was eleven. Sophie was fourteen. Overnight, the place we grew up in became somewhere we had to survive.
And I’m dragged by one of the males and the boy who used me to win a bet and upend my life, leading the way.
We pass through the main gate. The guards nod us through, and their eyes slide to me, appraising, smirking, and I want to rip those eyes out of their skulls.
The few people I can see move with their heads down. Shoulders hunched, eyes on the ground. I recognize some of them. Faces from my childhood, older now, hollowed out. Nobody meets my eyes.
Stuart leads me to the main hall. The same building where we used to eat together, where Sophie and I sat on the floor and listened to stories when we were small. The door is heavier now. Reinforced.
“Where’s my sister?”
“Inside.”
The door opens, and I walk in.
The head alpha is sitting behind a desk.
I recognize him immediately. Older, greyer, thicker through the shoulders, but the same man.
The same cold eyes. The one who challenged our alpha and won, and started taking everything apart—the one who crushed Sophie’s throat.
The one who mutilated my body and locked me in a cell for weeks, then sold me to the highest bidder.
He looks at me the way you look at a missing piece of inventory that’s been returned.
“So,” he says. “The omega who cost me a fortune. You’re smaller than I remember.”
“And you’re exactly the piece of shit I remember,” I say. “Where’s Sophie?” I demand.
He tilts his head. A small shadow from the side of the room moves toward him.
She stops beside his desk. Hands clasped in front of her. Head slightly bowed. She’s wearing a grey dress that hangs off her frame because there isn’t enough of her to fill it. Her wrists are narrow and scarred, the marks of cuffs worn for years.
But it’s her eyes that destroy me.
She looks at me. Looks right at me. And there’s nothing there. No recognition. No surprise. No joy or fear, or anger. Her eyes are flat and distant, the eyes of someone who left a long time ago and forgot to take their body with them. She looks at me the way she’d look at the wall.
“Sophie.” My voice breaks on her name. Three years of carrying her ghost, and she’s ten feet away from me, and she doesn’t know who I am.
Nothing. A slight tilt of her head. Her brow furrows, barely, like she’s trying to place a sound from a long time ago.
“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 being dragged. 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.