Chapter 26 #2
She glanced around the rest of the room. “There’s so little of it here. You’ve been here, what, a year and a half?” she asked. She looked sad for me.
I nodded.Vandle and I had arrived about the same time, and Phantom and Karma had been here twice as long, though they hadn’t found a pack until we came along.
Crescent looked curious. “Why don’t you remember before?”
“There are quite a few down here that came from experimentation or trafficking rings that don’t. Vandle’s another one.”
She frowned. “What does that mean?”
“Means there are some people out there that like to gamble with nature, but they don’t like the evidence getting out.”
Another reason to be nervous of our appeal.
Another thing I needed to push away.
She bit her lip. “The world out there… They shouldn’t be able to get away with that. They teach us no one is supposed to be above the law.”
“In the Convent?”
“Everywhere.”
“Do you believe it?”
She peered up at me. “I don’t think so. It just felt like something people say to feel better. Kinda like the sermons…” She trailed off, then her cheeks went pink, and she clamped a hand over her mouth. “I didn’t say that,” she mumbled, her voice muffled.
I chuckled, but her expression was crestfallen. “Don’t make me even prouder of you, Firefly.”
She unwound at the nickname, her eyes twinkling as they held mine.
God, I loved her so much.
I cupped her cheek. “You told me the reason they sent you here was because you got in trouble?”
She nodded. “I was caught sinning with the High Priest’s son.”
I remembered the way she looked at me earlier as she’d told me what that meant. “Did you… want to?”
“I uh…” She trailed off, but I saw the truth in her eyes. “I mean… it was me that seduced him.”
“What does that mean?”
She shrank in my arms. “We were all touch starved—at the Convent, I mean, and our golden eyes could be difficult for the alphas to resist. So going to services we had to put on a glove and a blindfold and wait for someone to lead us down.”
I frowned, something cold creeping up my spine.
They had to do… what?
“It’s not normally alphas who come, but the High Priest’s son came. And then when we were going into the pews, I tripped and touched him.” She glanced up at me as if unsure. “It set him off. When we got back to my room, he lost himself. It was… was my fault.”
Lost himself? I almost growled. “When I came back into our cell when we first found you, Karma had taken you into the shower, discovered his scent match, and gone feral. Still didn’t find him hurting you.”
Her lips parted for a moment, then closed. “I…”
“And I think you did more than touch Karma…” I added.
She wrinkled her nose, giving me a cute, narrow-eyed look. “I licked him, actually.”
I tried to fight a smile at the brattiness in her tone—given the rather unpleasant weight of this conversation. Sure enough, it was only seconds before the tiny spark in her eyes that had lit at Karma’s name, faded.
“They’re different back there,” she whispered, but I could see by her frown she wasn’t convinced.
“Weaker?” I asked.
She paused, a tiny flicker of satisfaction in her eyes as she looked at me. “I suppose that makes sense.”
“Is that really why they sent you down here?”
“I corrupted their son. The High Priest himself brought me here… he was so angry…”
That, I thought, was one powerful Church. Or cult.
I felt my fingers tighten where they were resting in her hair and had to force myself to relax.
His son had attacked her, and then he’d thrown her into Anarchy as punishment?
“Did they know you were so close to heat?”
I remember little of before, but when I’d been tossed down here, it had been impassioned. Out of reasons to continue running experiments on me, I was thrown down here like used-up trash.
For Crescent, it had been vindictive.
“No—” she cut off, lip trembling. “I just mean…” Suddenly she couldn’t meet my eyes. “The High Priest injected me with something before he put me in.”
He… what?
The words took a moment to untangle themselves in my mind, and when they did, I almost lost it. My heart was beating out of control, a storm surge of fury in my veins.
It didn’t settle.
One moment, I could see her, then my vision was fading for crimson. I felt like violence was trying to burst from my chest, demanding an outlet—
“Sin!”
I blinked, and my sweet golden-eyed firefly was cupping my cheeks, looking afraid.
It dragged me back from the brink.
“Where did you go?” she whispered.
“N-nowhere…” My voice trailed off, my soul feeling a million miles out of place.
“We don’t have to talk about this anymore. I’m not… I don’t need to think about it, I have you all, now.”
“We can… I just…” Everything was wrong. I needed to fix it… I wasn’t whole until I had—
“Tell me more about what you want to do on the other side?” she asked, eyes pleading. “I want to know it all.”
“We don’t have to—” I cut off again at a pinch and blinked to see she’d sunk her teeth into my shoulder. She looked annoyed as she glared at me.
“I want to know.”
I smiled weakly, trying to ground myself. I’d tell her everything I could think of, but none of it would change the new truth.
The poison that was seeping through my heart. The real reason we had to make the appeal.
What they’d done to Crescent—even before they’d forced her heat and thrown her into a prison of feral alphas—made my stomach turn.
We had to get free of Anarchy, because I had alphas to hunt.