Chapter 25
Here we go again
The past
Wilson—twenty-six
“Moros,” I mutter in disbelief as he grips the throat of yet another elder, crushing it with nothing but his bare hands.
I knew he was pissed—I am, too.
Dangerous.
But I didn’t expect him to bathe the walls in their blood in retaliation.
“Boss, stop.” Hooking my arm around his does nothing but make him squeeze harder. Enough that the eyes staring back at us silently beg for release. His screams are silent. And my stomach turns. “Stop, Moros, fuck.”
He growls a deep and reverberative sound that leeches through the muscles beneath my grip and tosses the elder aside like the trash he was.
I try to stop him from slicing through the next.
Force myself between him and another.
He’s just too fucking strong. Full of well-deserved rage for what this group has done to us, to the people of this community.
But the people here don’t know any better.
They’ve only known this desolate treatment. Scraps for food is normal to them. Leaking buildings and limited shelter from the rain is standard.
Moros and I are the only ones beside his father that have seen anything beyond these walls to know that it doesn’t have to be like this.
Fuck, his father is the reason he was out there wandering along, searching for the man that gave him life, when I found him. If it weren’t for Micheal, neither of us would be here.
We wouldn’t have stayed here.
But sometimes, the familiar devil keeps you closer than you’d ever admit.
Moros’s only living family.
Which makes it even more difficult to haul him back when his fingers wrap around another grown man’s neck.
It snaps easily in his hands and my stomach rolls.
Then it growls with the hunger I can’t control.
“M-Moros. Please.”
It’s not until he stalks his father’s path up the stairs to the second floor where the elder’s rooms are that I pin him to the wall.
“I’m going to kill them all, Wilson,” he growls out, those dark eyes swallowed up by the black centers and bloodshot. I’m too stunned to hold him back when he shoves me, my muscles too weak from the infection I’m still learning to live with.
I collapse to my shaking knees as he slips into the room his father occupies, his front covered in bright red blood.
It takes everything in me to claw my way up the wall to stand. All of the breath left in my lungs to follow him. Any energy I have left to fall onto his back, barely catching myself on the scraps of his jacket.
“And who’s going to lead this place,” Micheal ekes out through the grip on his throat. “You two?”
Moros sneers and yanks his father closer. “Anyone else is better than you.”
“Oh, that’s—” Micheal’s words squeak to a pause, his hands clawing at Moros’s arm. “That’s exactly what you must do.”
“Boss, please stop,” I murmur, my vision darkening around the edges as I cling to him.
“No.”
“Who … who else will keep them alive, Moros?” his dad croaks out.
Something seems to click as he spares me a glance, sees me barely hanging on through the sickness that’s coursing through me.
I can’t let it kill me.
Not yet.
That tunneling in my eyes grows, threatening to swallow up the room. Moros. The feelings I have—have had—for him.
My strength fades and my grip slips.
“Let’s make a deal,” is the last thing I hear as I crumble to the floor.