43. Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Three
Halley
'Incoming, ' Blaze's voice echoes in my mind.
I snap my head up just in time to see the enemy line buckle.
An officer stumbles out of the crush below us, shoving through his own men with a face twisted in fury and terror. His boots skid through blood. His shoulders wrench back while his legs keep dragging him forward, his body split between the order driving him and every instinct trying to resist.
Then Blaze’s will hits him again.
"Go to her."
I feel the Alpha Command through the bond even though I don’t hear it aloud.
It carries Blaze’s particular brand of force, reckless and brutal, impossible to mistake for anyone else's.
My breath catches as I realize my Command is not the only one that can pull strength from what ties us together.
Blaze has channeled the Pack's support into his Alpha Command.
The officer lurches forward.
Human soldiers grab for him at once. They shout over one another, yanking at his vest and reaching for his arms, but he tears free and keeps coming.
His rifle hangs loose from one hand. His jaw works around words he cannot force out.
His eyes stay locked ahead, wide and panicked, because Blaze has him now.
Then I finally spot my Alpha.
Blaze appears behind the officer in the smoke, half buried in bodies, his rifle raised and his teeth bared.
Blood runs down the side of his face and darkens his armor.
A bullet strikes his shoulder. Another hits his ribs.
He staggers, catches himself, and shoots the Humans trying to stop the officer from coming to us.
"Come on, Blaze!" I shout, urging him on.
Blaze looks up.
His gaze finds mine through the gunfire.
They're so close. The officer is almost through, and Blaze is right behind him. It'll take just one more big push, but we can do it. If we can just reach them, then this will all be over. The killing and violence will end.
Yet, it's as if the Humans know it too. They can sense our growing desperation, and they're whipped into a frenzy by it.
Another bullet hits Blaze. His body jerks, but he stays on his feet and slams the butt of his rifle into a Human’s face when the man lunges for the officer.
More Humans close around him. Blaze shoots one, kicks another back, and throws himself into the space the officer leaves behind, but he can't keep up.
There is only one Blaze, and dozens of Humans.
Still, we don't stop. I've lost count of how many people I've shot, too busy trying to stay alive long enough for all of this to matter, but it feels endless.
Finally, the officer staggers into the center of the Pack's defensive circle and drops to his knees at my feet, choking on air, his whole body shaking from the Alpha Command that dragged him here.
I search for the flash of black armor that should follow, but Blaze doesn't come through.
"Blaze!" I shout.
No answer comes back. I try using our bond, but it's as if I'm shouting into a void of pure chaos.
I try calling his name in the bond, but I can't feel Blaze clearly.
The battle's energy mirrors his typical chaotic energy and he's lost in the miasma.
My head feels scrambled, and the bond is there, but it's a mess of emotions pouring from all of us, and I can't seem to find the right frequency to give it order.
Knox catches the officer by the collar and holds him steady at my feet, still using his other hand to fire his pistol. Viper starts fighting harder and faster, to compensate for Knox and me becoming distracted. I can hear Shade behind me, his rifle kicking against his shoulder.
I look back into the heaving mob and search for any sign of Blaze. He was right there.
The officer made it through, so where is Blaze?
It hits me all at once, the stark and icy truth. He did what he set out to do. Blaze never fails his missions. He got the target to me, but he'd never planned on making it back to us. He chose the mission. He chose me.
Shade knows it too. I hear it in the rough drag of his breathing and feel it through the chaos of the bond, all dread and rage forced into motion because he cannot go after Blaze while keeping me alive.
Viper’s face is pale under the blood and dust. Knox says nothing, but the look he cuts toward the heaving enemy is murderous.
The enemy surges again, and Viper has to move faster than my eyes can follow to keep them from overwhelming us.
"Halley," Knox barks.
My name snaps through the panic.
Right, yes. I have a job to do.
The Human officer kneels in the muck at my feet, his breath heaving, his face streaked with soot and blood.
He tries to pull his gaze away from mine and cannot.
Blaze’s Command still has its hooks in him.
I feel the shape of it there, the path my mate ripped open through this man’s will so I could finish what he started.
My throat tightens.
This is Blaze's gift.
Whatever happens next, I will not waste it.
The officer’s mouth trembles.
"Please," he chokes, and I can’t tell if he’s pleading with me or trying to resist the grip Blaze’s Alpha Command still has on him.
I crouch to bring us eye to eye, and confidence floods through me like a second heartbeat.
I have no clear plan for the words I’m about to speak, and no neat explanation for how my Omega Command is going to stop an army.
I only know that it will.
The certainty sits deep, below thought and fear. It's not logical or strategic. It's something older, quieter, and far more absolute than either of those things.
I call for my O-space and draw it up from my core into my chest. It spreads through my blood, and the familiar shimmer gathers at the edges of my vision.
The battle keeps raging around me, but it stops reaching me.
Gunfire stretches thin. Shouts drag into silence. The officer’s frightened face becomes the only fixed point in front of me as O-space pulls me beneath the normal rules of time.
And with this, the strange confidence I’ve carried for weeks finally opens into recognition.
Oh. Of course.
The understanding is so sudden I almost laugh at the timing of it.
It's my Omega.
Why didn't I see it before?
This peculiar confidence I've been feeling since I came back from the dead is my inner Omega.
When I came back, it wasn't only my body that had healed, because it wasn't only the part of me that was broken.
My Omega healed.
She isn't frozen anymore, trapped at twenty-one, terrified by that first brutal heat and every violation that came after it.
For so long she felt separate from me, like some wounded, desperate thing I had to wrestle into silence or keep caged before she took control.
Every time I used Omega Command, it felt like standing on a fault line with her beneath me, powerful and unpredictable and just as afraid as I was.
She's not afraid now, and she's no longer lost and clawing at the walls of me in fear and pain.
She stands beside me at last, whole and unashamed.
That is where this strength is coming from. I feel her in my bones, in my blood, in the deepest part of my soul. She is not a burden or a weakness anymore — she is finally what she was always meant to be.
A fighter.
I think I finally understand what she's done for me. Even when she was weak and unable to fully embody her natural instincts as an Omega, she was still there, under the surface.
There has always been something bigger than me buried beneath every stubborn refusal to lie down and accept what the world said I was.
It was my Omega all along.
She has been tugging me forward for years, even when I didn’t understand what she wanted from me.
She was there, giving me bravery when I made my escape in my father's beat-up old truck.
She was there when I was in Barkrood, trapped in the Omega Division.
I still wanted more with a hunger I could not explain.
I wanted motion and a purpose. A future bigger than the cage they built for me and a body they'd already dismissed as broken.
Even then, when I had so little left to believe in, something inside me kept whispering that I was not finished.
When Knox pushed me to my limits with bruising lessons, humiliation, and orders I could barely swallow, she was there telling me to hold on. To wake up every day and give it my all in training.
When I left my Pack, lost my Omegas, and all of my hope faded, she still didn't let me give up.
And she was there when I died. When the white light swallowed me whole, and I crossed to the other side. Even then, she would not let me give up. She pushed me to do the impossible and claw my way back from the dead.
Keep going. Don't give up. Become better, faster, stronger, smarter, wiser.
I never knew where this strength was coming from or why this fight for life kept rising inside of me.
It was my Omega guiding me through my fear and pain and self-loathing, trying to lead me here. Trying to make me whole enough to stand in this battle with my Pack at my back and fate at my shoulder.
She is not broken anymore.
She stands with me now, strong and certain and vast enough to fill every part of me that used to feel insignificant and small.
I know now that I was always meant to be here. On this blood-soaked road. In this last battle. At the center of my Pack, with the fate of my people balanced on how I next use my voice.
The knowing settles into me like a hand at my back.
One last push.
"Listen to me," I Command.
Power pours through the word, and it tears out of me.
This time, my voice doesn't vanish into gunfire and distance. It reaches its target whole, zeroing in until it's just the two of us.
The space between us tightens as the familiar presence of my inner Omega stretches and prowls forward, and the veil of O-space shimmers over my eyesight.
I feel the Command catch, sink its teeth into his consciousness, and pull.
His body lurches as I reach into his core and take possession of his free will and soul. His pupils blow wide, and every scrap of resistance vanishes under the force of my Omega Command.