FORTY-FIVE #3
Cold floods my bloodstream. Not sleep. Not immediately.
This is something worse. It’s a heavy, crawling pressure that rolls through my body and presses down on every single instinct at once.
My Omega recoils from it and the bonds flare violently before distorting as if someone has shoved a thick piece of glass between me and the men on the other side.
Ewan’s panic muffles.
Kaito’s rage blurs.
Fletcher’s roar drags long and deep.
I gasp.
No.
No, no, no.
The older guy watches me like I’m confirming something useful to him. Then he says, “Transport dose active.”
Transport. Fucking transport.
The word makes my vision swim. I buck against the hands holding me, but my limbs respond a half second too late. My body is still mine, but the message literally has to crawl through mud to reach it.
A distant explosion shakes the ground.
The western gate.
Zeds groan.
Gunfire tears open the smoke.
One of the men above me looks back and mutters, “We’re out of time.”
“Move her.”
I slam my heel into someone’s shin and he curses. Another tiny victory before I’m hauled into the air and onto someone’s shoulder.
The service hatch gapes open behind the generator shed, a black gaping mouth in the ground where there shouldn’t have been one. Hell, I didn’t even know it existed. They did, though. Of course they did. Because someone handed them the damned map tied with a pretty ribbon.
And that thought leads me straight to Commander fucking Hale.
The thought burns through the drug for one clear second.
Hale, who stood in that conference room and looked at my blood like a problem wearing skin.
Hale, who kept saying duty.
Hale, who missed the Purge Event and only appeared after the fallout.
Hale, who understands routes, gates, patrols, and hatches.
Hale, who thought command meant the right to decide what one woman’s body owed the world.
I don’t have proof, but I don’t need it to hate him. I don’t need it to know my instincts are screaming at me that he’s behind this shitshow.
They drag me toward the hatch but I fight. I hook my boot against the frame and hold.
One second.
Two.
A hand claws at my ankle and I kick it off. Someone punches my thigh, but I still hold.
Then, through a split in the smoke, I see Fletcher. There’s blood on his mouth, his rifle is up, and he’s coming for me like the world itself has offended him.
“Fletcher!”
His head snaps toward me, and for one brutal second, I think he’ll make it. Ewan is behind him, face twisted into something terrified and furious. Kaito cuts through bodies like the world has narrowed to everything standing between me and him.
And Xeon.
Xeon comes straight for me, fast and silent and deadly, frost and steel in every line of his body. My heart lurches toward him, but not through a bond. Through the empty place where one should be.
My hand reaches out before I can stop it.
Not for Fletcher.
Not for Ewan.
Not for Kaito.
But for the silence.
For him.
Zeds pour through the breach between us, a wave of bodies and rotting hands and snapping jaws. There are too many of them. Too many.
The men holding me yank hard and my boot slips.
No.
No, no, no.
Suddenly, concrete scrapes across my back as they drag me down through the hatch. My bad arm hits the edge hard enough to turn my vision white. I claw at the frame, nails splitting, black polish cracking over blood.
For one breath, I catch the lip of the hatch.
I hold.
I fucking hold, because I have survived six years alone, because Maine told me to keep my hair hidden and my scent dead and the doors locked, because my body belongs to me, because I didn’t let Davis take me, because I didn’t let NOVAC turn me into a number, and because I will not let Vector turn me into inventory.
A gloved hand stamps down on my fingers and pain bursts through the joints hot and bright.
My grip loosens and the hatch slams down above me right before darkness swallows the smoke.
The world becomes nothing more than concrete, boots, chemical stink, and the brutal drag of my body down a narrow tunnel.
The bonds stretch.
Ewan screams through his until it feels like smoke shredding my lungs apart.
Kaito’s bond goes sharp enough to cut.
Fletcher’s pulls so hard I feel the essence of him trying to stand between me and the dark even from too far away.
Three bonds. Three voices without words.
Three hands reaching through a wall they can’t break through fast enough.
And under it all, the quiet place splits even wider.
No frost.
No steel.
No thread to follow.
Only silence where Xeon should be.
And that hurts so much worse.
The drug drags me under inch by inch. I try to fight it. I try so fucking hard. I fight until my body stops obeying properly, until my head lolls, and until the tunnel lights smudge into one long ugly streak.
The last thing I hear is not the man telling them to hurry.
It’s not the Zeds above.
It’s not the hatch sealing me underground like some fucked-up tomb I can’t crawl out from.
It’s one of my bonded Alphas roaring my name through the bond so violently that I feel it in the depths of my soul.
Then another.
Then another.
Three bonds screaming, and one silence answering.
And then Vector takes me into the dark.