Chapter 48
FORTY-EIGHT
A SOUL MATCH
A connection stronger than a scent match. Soul matches are destined for each other, feeling the others’ pull like a magnet. The scent of a soul match is a fresh lightning storm.
It is a physical impossibility for soul matches to kill one another.
ROGUE
I thought this had to be true madness.
Seeing someone else with their hands on my Omega, unable to do anything. My mind had reached a cracking point, and I thought it might be best to die, killing a few of them rather than suffer this.
Maybe, if I made a big enough scene, she could flee…
Flee where, though?
If they caught her, would they torture her as punishment?
But as the Alpha in the ballroom pinned her down, pushing away her robe with one last chance to beg, I felt myself coming apart, logic failing to make sense.
But the decision was never made, as a distraction in its own right manifested by itself.
The front door of the ballroom flew from the hinges so violently that splintered wood exploded through the air.
Someone, or some thing, crashed through the main entrance of the room, bringing with it the sound of clinking metal and a low, rolling growl that echoed through the room.
It was a person—of sorts—one that drew every eye and stilled every hand.
With it came a scent I might once have recognised, only it was redwood and roses in a firestorm: unhinged, unadulterated fury. Even with the familiarity of the scent, my brain scrambled to catch up.
Ace Maverick was alive.
And he was utterly feral.
A mask covered his face from his eyes down, a metal skull like something out of a horror movie. Around his wrist were cuffs attached to chains, both of which had snapped, each a few feet in length. By the blood drying down the metal links, there was no trick to that. Pure, relentless madness, it seemed, was to blame for his freedom from wherever he’d been bound, and nothing less.
He wore torn, dark jeans, and no top. His feet were bare, and across his torso, was dust and blood, skin that looked burned from the sun, and a mess of scars across his arms and back.
Ace was nothing like the Alpha I’d last seen, adjusting his cufflinks and delivering death sentences as he sat in this very room.
This creature belonged to nature.
No…
Not nature, I realised.
Those scars were familiar—Thistle’s marks.
Her nesting.
He… He belonged to Thistle.
It was a truth I knew to my bones—from the other shadow in the bond. The one that didn’t make up a full human, tethered to her like a shield.
But he’d… hurt her. My own instincts were running wild. I knew Ace had hurt her. Yet, he was alive, and in this bond with us.
My first thought was that I would kill him myself.
But I shoved that back. Right now, he was the distraction I needed.
And I don’t know if he needed killing. He was feral and heat bonded. Living my worst nightmare— his worst nightmare—from the little I knew of him.
She’d chained him completely, that mad fucking Omega. And now he’d come for her.
“Bunny…?” Her frail voice cracked, sightless violet eyes blinking up, as if she didn’t know what was happening. “You… came back?”
Feral, glacier-blue irises locked on the broken Omega curled up on the floor, and the storm became a tempest.
That was his Omega, shivering, vulnerable, and pinned by another Alpha.
And there was nothing in the world that would get in his way.
Shock had gripped the room since the moment he’d entered; a fist, strangling movement, sound, and breath, but with her desperate whisper, the spell broke.
The feral Alpha threw everything into chaos. A gun to her head suddenly meant nothing. This creature would listen to neither threat nor reason.
And as the first Alpha in the room raised his gun to Ace, I found my cue to pull the trigger.