60. Epilogue
Epilogue
Halley
I’m back on the road to Blackgate.
Smoke chokes the mountain and saps all color, turning the world gray. My rifle is clutched in my hands, and gunfire rattles through my arms and into my bones as enemy soldiers pour toward me in an endless, faceless tide, their mouths open in screams I can’t hear over the roar of the battle.
I fire because I have to.
One drops at my feet, and his face snaps into focus.
He’s young, with soft cheeks, freckles across his nose, and blue eyes wide with terror until they dull as death takes him.
I falter, but then another is already on me, and I fire again.
He falls hard, one hand skidding across the blood-slick gravel, tearing his skin.
There is a wedding ring bright on his dirt-stained finger, and laugh lines crease the corners of his eyes, and for one horrible second, I imagine him smiling at the one who loves him and is waiting for him to come home.
Another soldier lunges through the smoke.
I kill him too.
His blood splashes across my boots as his body folds. He has a crooked front tooth and an old scar across his nose, eerily similar to Knox's. He looks terrified.
I kill a woman with a heart-shaped pendant bouncing against her uniform.
A man crying for his mother as he dies.
Another tries to speak around the blood filling his mouth, but the words drown before I can make them out.
The bodies pile up in front of me, and the battlefield changes with every death. The horde isn't faceless anymore; they're men and women with freckles, scars, shaking hands, old bruises, bitten fingernails, and eyes that stay open after the life drains from them.
I keep fighting because stopping means my Pack dies.
I keep killing because Blackgate falls if I don’t.
Still, every enemy I drop becomes a real, actual person at my feet.
When I finally use my Omega Command, the road goes silent.
The waves stop, the gunfire fades, and I stand alone among my dead with blood dripping from my hands.
I don't feel relief, only deep sadness that I know I'll never shake in my lifetime.
Suddenly, there are stiff fingers hooking into my clothes, my arms, my throat, dragging me down as their mouths open all around me.
"Murderer."
The word is shouted from every corpse at once.
I wake with a choking gasp.
"Halley."
A hand closes gently around my shoulder, grounding instead of restraining, and I jerk upright with a broken inhale that burns all the way down my throat.
The nest comes into focus in pieces. It’s dark and warm, and blankets are twisted around my legs.
Blaze is asleep facedown behind me beneath a pile of pillows, dead to the world after five nights away from Blackgate.
Viper is curled along his other side with one arm buried beneath his pillow, while Knox lies across the foot of the nest with one hand closed loosely around my ankle. None of them stir.
Shade is leaning over me, his expression tight with concern.
"Hey," he says quietly. I can barely hear him over my heaving, ragged breathing. "You’re safe."
It takes me a second to realize I’m half fighting him, my fingers locked around his wrist so hard it probably hurts.
I loosen my grip, and Shade settles his other hand against my cheek, giving me his steadiness.
"Bad dream?" he asks once my breathing slows.
I swallow against the lingering taste of smoke and blood at the back of my mouth and nod once.
Shade studies me for another beat, then scoots closer to me and holds his arms out in offering.
I don’t hesitate and curl into him immediately, pressing my face against his chest while he wraps an arm around me and pulls the blankets back over us.
His heartbeat is slow and even beneath my ear.
It helps bring me back to reality. Shade is alive and real, and we're not on the road to Blackgate, fighting for our lives anymore. That was months ago.
Shade keeps one arm around me while the other rubs slowly up and down my back, patient as it takes a long time for the fear to leak out of my muscles and for my breath to stop quaking.
"What was it about?" he asks quietly.
I stare at the blankets tangled across my lap for a long second before answering.
"The battle."
Shade hums to encourage me to keep going, never stopping the reassuring rub.
"I was back on the road to Blackgate," I say. "Fighting and killing." My throat tightens around the word. "At first they didn’t have faces. Then every time I shot someone, I could suddenly see them properly afterward."
"I couldn’t stop," I say, hating how thin my voice sounds. "If I stopped fighting, everyone I loved died. So I just kept..." I swallow hard. "Kept killing them anyway, even though I could see they were people just like us."
Blaze shifts in his sleep with a rough exhale, oblivious.
"I know they would’ve slaughtered us without hesitation," I murmur. "But sometimes I still think about how many people I killed, and it feels like there’s something wrong with me that I can live with that."
"There’s nothing wrong with you."
Shade says it immediately, firm with no room for semantics.
I finally look up at him. "Omegas don't kill people. We're supposed to be nurturers who value peace above all else."
"You survived a war." His thumb brushes slowly along my side through the blanket. "You did what you had to do to save our people. You know that, baby girl."
The words settle heavily between us.
I shake my head anyway. "Sometimes I think I was meant to find a way to use my Omega Command without bloodshed. I stumbled my whole way through discovering it, and by the time I could use it to its full capability, it was too late to avoid a fight."
"Maybe, but that's not on you alone. How could we have ever known what the Omega Command was capable of? We did our best with what we had."
"I killed so many, Shade. I'm a bad person," I whisper into the dark.
Shade studies me for a moment, calm and steady in his special way that always makes me feel like he’s seeing deeper than everyone else.
"The fact that this still haunts you tells me everything I need to know about the person you are," he says quietly. "Bad people don’t lie awake grieving strangers. They don’t dream about the faces of the dead."
My throat burns.
"I used Omega Command to make them kill each other," I whisper. "Right at the end, when I thought we were about to die, I got desperate and it was so easy."
"You did what you had to do to save your people." His hand slides up to cup the back of my neck. "Halley, they came here to wipe all of us out. You didn’t start the war, and you didn’t enjoy what you had to do to end it."
I close my eyes.
The nightmare still clings to me like smoke, but holding onto Shade feels solid and I can finally breathe past it instead of drowning underneath it.
We sit in silence for a while after that, tucked beneath the blankets while Blaze, Viper, and Knox sleep heavily beside us and the fortress settles into the quiet rhythm of the middle of the night.
Shade’s fingers comb slowly through my hair.
My body finally starts unclenching around the nightmare, but my mind keeps circling the same thought it always lands on lately.
"I keep thinking about what Everlyn said," I admit softly.
Shade’s hand stills briefly against my scalp before continuing again.
"The test?" he asks.
I nod against his chest.
The words feel strangely difficult to say out loud, even now. We haven't spoken about it since we found out the results at the end of the battle. I didn’t feel like it was the right time with so many of our dead to bury and everything still uncertain in the weeks afterwards.
"I’m not pregnant."
The confession settles heavily between us, and even after my horrible nightmare, talking about this somehow feels more frightening.
"I thought I’d feel sad if the test was negative," I say, tracing shapes with my finger through the brown hair on Shade's arm. "Or devastated. Like I was supposed to mourn it."
Shade says nothing, waiting me out.
Instead of pressure, I remember the feeling that hit me when Everlyn spoke.
Relief.
It was not despair or sadness, but rather pure relief.
My stomach knots.
"I’m not disappointed," I admit quietly for the first time out loud and let it sit in the room with us. Shade doesn't react or rush to fill the silence. He simply sits with it beside me.
"Shade?"
"Mmm?"
"I don’t think I want to be pregnant," I say all at once, gushing out of me like I can't hold it inside for a moment longer. "Not now, and maybe not ever."
There is a pang in my belly, a curling of anxiety that flares to life as the words leave me.
My entire life, Omegas have been spoken about like our bodies belong to our future children before they ever belong to us.
Fertility, breeding, babies, and children are all treated as the ultimate purpose of an Omega’s life.
I brace myself for even the smallest flicker of sadness from Shade through the bond. A hint that my words have affected him in the way I've dreaded for the last few weeks.
It never comes.
"Listen to me carefully, Halley."
Shade’s hand slides from my hair to my jaw, guiding me to look up at him.
"There is nothing wrong with you for feeling that way," he says gently. He tilts my head up with an index finger under my chin and holds me there carefully so I can't avoid his eye contact. "Absolutely nothing."
I lick my lips and try to push down the cacophony of self-doubt that has been rising in me to listen to my mate.
My hand curls against Shade’s chest, and I think about how strange it is that my body has belonged to so many other people before it ever truly belonged to me. My father, the Fathim military, General Stone, the Pack.
"For most of my life, I thought pregnancy wasn’t possible," I say quietly. "At first it crushed me. I was so young and hopeful." My throat tightens briefly. "Then eventually I learned how to live with the shame."