Chapter 30
Five days until appeal
VANDLE
“...Red eyes…”
I woke the next morning to pounding pain assaulting my temples, but this was fucking important. There was a reason my fragmented memory pushed this in my direction.
It was the second night I’d woken with nightmares, but this time, there were words that came with it.
“...Danger…”
Sin.
A bond mark corrupted…
There was something… I wasn’t remembering.
I groaned, rolling over in bed only to hit my elbow on the metal bar keeping me from falling off the top bunk. That jolted me awake with a muttered curse, my elbow aching even more than my head.
I squinted around, the colourless room forming in the dimness, as I absently searched for the ink spill of colour.
There she was.
A spot of warmth among the grey.
Phantom had beaten me to Crescent last night. He was sandwiching her into her nest with Sin, and the three of them barely fit on the bunk with all the pillows.
One of Phantom’s legs was falling off, his foot on the floor, and Sin had wedged himself between Crescent and the cold stone wall, but I couldn’t see more than his arm draped over Crescent’s sleeping form.
I was the only one awake, and it was early enough in the morning that the doors were still locked.
The sheet beneath me was drenched in sweat; my body was sticky and sore, my head heavy enough it was a challenge to hold up.
My vision blurred if I tried to delve too deep into what memories my dreams had unearthed.
I thought, maybe, it had been triggered by seeing Sin in that cage with Crescent.
I couldn’t get them out of my mind.
Her eyes were that stunning gold… Yet, his stuck out for a different reason.
A red I’d never experienced in colour until that moment when he was so close to my scent match.
There was something different about him; always had been, but I’d been too lost in ruts to notice. But now, seeing him and Crescent together, remembering the pull of the dark bond command from yesterday… something was nagging at me.
Pain lanced through my head, and I hissed, fingers pressing against my temples. I’d been gone so fucking long, it hurt to try to remember before.
The place I’d come from—it was dark and agonizing.
I needed a long shower.
Trying not to let the bunk creak too loudly, I swung my legs over the edge and climbed down.
Pain or not, I needed to dislodge some of these memories because alarm bells were going off—and I couldn’t get that one word out of my head.
Danger.
PHANTOM
After a day of hunkering down in our cell, we were all a little less tense than we had been the first time we’d seen the threat on the wall. None of us were relaxed, but this morning the cell wasn’t completely vibrating with tension.
Five days more to survive.
I was drying myself off post shower, when I heard footsteps. I turned to see Vandle leaning against the wall beside me. Crescent’s giggles were loud from the cell, contrasting Karma’s deep, gruff tone, and Vandle spoke quietly enough they wouldn’t hear.
“There might be a problem with our appeal.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.
Problems weren’t an option. Not with Crescent. Keeping her safe until our appeal call was hard enough, but trying to keep her to ourselves if we had to wait for the next pack member’s call?
We’d all end up dead, while Crescent and Sin would be taken and abused.
“What kind of problem?” I asked.
“Not sure.”
I opened my eyes and waited for him to continue, grabbing my sweats from the countertop and sliding them on. Surely he knew that wasn’t anything I could work with.
When I was fully dressed and he still hadn’t fucking elaborated, I glared at him. I liked him a lot better when he was fully feral.
“That’s useless to me. You know that, right? Are you trying to stress me out for no reason?”
“I had a dream,” he said, ignoring the way my eyebrows shot up.
A… what?
“I’ve been getting flashes of memories, and I don’t know. It’s about Sin. His eyes, there’s something…” Vandle winced, like thinking about it pained him. “Something wrong.”
Sin’s eyes were an anomaly, but we’d always put it down to the experiments he’d lived through, or a genetic mutation. I didn’t know how that would threaten our assessment when we got to our appeal.
But now, there was the fact that the dark bond had flipped, too. He shouldn’t be able to use the commands on us—but we also shouldn’t be able to even have two omegas with a dark bond.
It was all strange, and if Vandle had a bad feeling, we’d be better off looking into that.
“Wrong how?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but I can’t shake this bad feeling about the appeal. There’s a library in here, right? Have we got anything we could trade for books?”
He was fucking lucky. I’d been building a relationship with the Archiva pack just like Sin built his relationship with the Redgraves.
Karma and I had cut off a lot of fingers for them, given a lot of alphas black eyes or broken arms for disrespecting the books.
I sighed. “Don’t say anything to the others until you know… Well, more than the pathetic information you have right now. Let’s take Crescent with us. The Archiva pack owes me a lot of library books.”
The grin on Crescent’s face when I told her Vandle and I were taking her out was incandescent.
Staying in the cell for a whole day had made her antsy, and after talking it through with Sin and Karma while Crescent took a morning shower, we decided the Library was a quiet enough place to visit with Crescent.
Meanwhile, Karma and Sin would head to the gym with a few allies to blow off some steam.
She’d rushed to grab something from her nest and I heard a faint jingle of metal on metal, but she pushed the object into her pocket quickly, turning to face me.
She was already thrilled.
Would she be this eager when she found out where we were going?
I’m not sure what things Crescent might like to read, but the Archiva pack had acquired a little bit of everything over their years running the library.
“Where are we going?” She bounced on her heels as she trailed behind me.
We were flanked by two members of the Emerald pack, Vandle taking up the rear to watch our backs. With the Redgraves’ protection, we shouldn’t find any trouble walking the halls unless we ran into a particularly feral alpha.
I grabbed her hand, only getting the fabric of her sweater until she yanked the sleeve up and let her fingers tangle in mine. “A surprise.”
“A good one?”
“Why would I give you a bad surprise?” I snorted.
Her cheeks heated. “I dunno. Maybe I did something wrong.”
I hauled her against my side, rubbing my chin across the top of her head to mark her with my scent. It wasn’t the same as when our scents mixed, because her sweet velvet rose and cocoa was smothered by blockers right now, but I loved the claim despite that.
“You could do a thousand things wrong and I would still never give you a bad surprise, Little Omega. Anyone who would do that is an asshole.”
She hit my chest with an adorably weak thump. “Language!”
A grin teased at the corners of my lips, but I didn’t want her to think I was being patronizing. “Sorry, they would be a mean person.”
“I must have met a lot of mean people, then.”
I clutched her closer, giving in to the urge to swing her up into my arms in a princess hold. She stared up at me with wide eyes as I carried her down the hall past cells full of alphas who peeked out to catch a glimpse of her. My omega had met way too many assholes before finding us.
Because really, they weren’t just ‘mean people’. They were fucking dicks.
But I’d keep my language clean for her sake.
Turning down a side hallway without any cells in it, I knocked on the solid metal door at the end.
It had a mail slot labelled ‘returns’ in the middle of the door, and a small square window at about head height.
There was no glass in the window, but it did have a metal backing preventing anyone from seeing inside until it slid open with a creak.
A man with greying hair stared at us through the window, his eyebrows drawn together.
He gave us a once-over, scanning Crescent without any of the hunger most of the alphas had, and then shook his head. “Nah, no fucking way.”
The small window had slid halfway closed before I could react.
“You owe me, Jared,” I rushed to say.
The grizzled alpha’s eyes narrowed, and he opened the window again. “That was before you made yourselves the talk of the goddamn prison. If you think I’m going to risk Tyler’s safety over this, you’re crazy.”
“I just want to get her some books to read, man. Not asking for your protection, or for you to go out of your way. Just books.”
Crescent looked up at me with her lips parted in surprise.
“They have books here?” She sounded so excited, I thought I might just have to kill Jared if he didn’t let us in.
“I was only allowed to read the holy books at the Convent. Are all the books holy here, or do they have…” She slid her gaze to Jared through the window, then leaned in close, like she could whisper quietly enough he wouldn’t hear. “Do they have fairy tales?”
I tilted down to kiss her head. “All kinds of books.”
“And I could get whatever book I want?” she asked.
I nodded toward Jared in the window. “You’re going to have to ask him. He’s the librarian, so he decides what you’re allowed to borrow.”
He glared at me, his aura flaring enough that I could sense it through the metal door.
Crescent shied closer to me, but then she got a determined look on her face as she squirmed to get down from my arms. I let her stand on her own again, crossing my arms over my chest when she stepped up to the window.
She had to go on her toes to see through it, and I was pretty sure Jared could only see her eyes with how close she was.
“Um, hi,” she said.
Then she paused, staring through the window at him. Her panic wasn’t too potent in the bond, so I didn’t want to step in—not when she’d done this on her own—but I monitored her closely as the silence stretched.
Vandle couldn’t resist the urge to intervene, stepping forward, but I put my arm out in front to stop him. I had a feeling she would be better at twisting Jared’s arm than he’d be.
She took a deep breath, then bounced up to try to get taller—unsuccessfully. “Can you please let me in so I can borrow some books?”
Jared didn’t answer right away. I stepped up closer to my omega and placed a hand on her shoulder, lifting an eyebrow at the old grump. Could he really say no to that request? It would be cold.
The window slammed shut on his faint scowl, and Crescent jumped. Before she could let out more than a single squeak, the door swung outwards and would have hit both of us if I hadn’t hauled her out of the way. Vandle’s displeased snarl echoed in the hall, but I levelled him with a glare.
He needed their books just as much as we both needed our omega to get what she wanted.
Jared waved us in, and the guys from Emerald pack stayed outside to flank the door as Crescent rushed forward.
“Dang! There’s more books than I thought!” she exclaimed.
I didn’t let her get far ahead of me, catching her arm in my hand. The Archiva pack were allies of ours, but they were also brutal and vindictive. She couldn’t stray far, or I would worry about her getting herself into trouble with them.
With her eager sprint stopped in its tracks, she turned to Jared and gave him a slightly awkward bow. “Thank you so much. Which books am I allowed to look at?”
The library was an octagonal room with tall shelves on all the walls except where the door was.
They stretched up two floors high, taller than the ceilings in most of Anarchy except in places like the square or the rut cages.
A metal ladder with wheels gave the librarians access to the higher shelves of books.
There were shelves in the centre of the room too, only half as tall as the ones on the wall, and off to one side was a small area with couches and a coffee table. That was where more of Jared’s pack lingered now, their attention swivelling to us from their game of chess.
Tyler, their omega, pushed to his feet, the sound of heavy footsteps distracting Crescent from her question.
She watched him approach, scanning him up and down.
He was an older man too, with grey hair and an unkempt beard, and a scar ran across one side of his face.
The rumours claimed he got it from his previous pack before the Archiva pack killed them all to steal him, but no one really knew what happened.
They stayed private and gutted anyone they caught gossiping about them, especially if the gossip involved their omega.
“What kind of books do you want?” Tyler demanded in a hard tone as he came to a stop, his arms crossed over his chest.
She pressed back against me, and I draped my arms over her shoulders. “Um, sweet ones. Where nice things happen to people?”
“You don’t want fairy tales, then,” Jared scoffed. “Horrible things happen to the people in fairy tales.”
Crescent glanced up at me helplessly. “But… they’re fairy tales. Like, happily ever afters. Why do horrible things happen?”
I looked beside us at Vandle, as if he would know the answer. His expression was as blank as mine. Fairy tales should be happy—I remembered watching Cinderella and Snow White and Rapunzel as a kid. They were all happy. Why wouldn’t the book versions be?
“Well—” Jared started to explain.
Tyler cut off his alpha before Jared got more than a word out. “You want fairy tale retellings. They’re much sweeter.”
“Do I?” Crescent asked.
She looked up at me for confirmation, and I blanched. How the hell was I supposed to know? My reading was mostly limited to thrillers and murder mysteries where distinctly bad things happened to everyone. It was cathartic.
I’d never read a sweet book in my damn life.
Could I trust these asshole librarians not to lie to my sensitive omega?
Clearing my throat, I looked between Tyler and Jared. Both looked serious as fuck, like they probably weren’t lying. We were all good liars when we needed to be in here, though. Especially dweller packs like them.
“Sure you do, Little Omega.” I took a risk and agreed with them. “The retellings are definitely sweeter.”
I locked eyes with Tyler, threatening him with my gaze.
They fucking better be.