Chapter 23 #2
“He got away with it then. Either no one found out or no one cared. I know my brother Aspen didn’t.
And now he’s getting away with something even worse.
I’m so fucking sick of him getting away with shit.
I have to stop him somehow, but we can’t figure out how to get a step ahead of him.
I know he’ll regroup somewhere, but I have no idea where. He’s covering his tracks too well.”
After coffee, my pack gathers in the library, coming together in a pack pile I desperately needed.
Simon taps away on his laptop, but I know that’s his way of fighting for me, so I don’t resent that it takes him away from the pile and to the desk in the library where he realizes something.
“One of the files finally finished defragging,” he says, staring at his laptop screen.
He taps a key, and an audio clip plays, my father’s voice immediately recognizable.
“Subject was collared to restrain her and prevent her from using her affinity—”
“I’m shutting this down,” Simon mutters.
“Don’t!”
“You don’t need to hear this, Junes.”
“I do. I need to know everything about what my father’s doing if I have any chance of stopping it.”
“If we have any chance of stopping it,” Ian cuts in.
“Play the clip, Simon,” Cassian says quietly, though I know he’d rather our beta do anything but.
“The sedative was administered at the surgical table. Subject fought against her guards until—”
Pain sears through my skull, and I just manage to tell my pack I’m sinking into a vision before it pulls me under.
I’ve only had a vision like this once before, back in the conservatory at Rose Manor.
Instead of playing like a movie clip, it’s like I’m there, seeing the surgical theater through my own eyes.
Three Soldiers force an omega onto the bed.
She shrieks and bucks against them, fighting like a wild thing.
Until my father sticks a needle in her neck and she goes slack, sedated.
He reads out her serial number and her affinity: she can turn anything she can touch to stone and make it crumble with nothing more than a second touch.
“Scalpel,” my father says, and somehow, in some impossible way, I feel the weight of the instrument in my hand, see my arm passing it to him over the omega’s prone body. “I’m now making the first incision—”
I jerk back to the present moment to Luca’s purr as he holds me close, rubbing my back through my tee shirt.
“What was it, my darling?”
I shake my head. How can I tell him when I hardly know? Why did this vision suddenly shift? Was I seeing a part of my own future? I’ve seen those futures before, me being trapped in an omega trap and forced to watch my mates die, but it’s always been like watching from the outside.
This vision felt far too real.
Like I was there with my father, aiding him in his wicked experiments.
I manage a few fitful hours of sleep that night, waking midmorning with a pounding headache.
Ian and Luca are still with me, one on either side of me.
Ian strokes his knuckles down my back as I stir, my nose pressed into Luca’s neck.
I breathe in wine and cherries and turn in Ian’s arms to scent him too.
I nuzzle Ian, layering my scent with his, then turn back to Luca to scent mark him too.
In the chaos the world has been thrown into with Councilor Claude’s assassination, I need to be their peace and for them to be mine.
“Get some more sleep, princess,” Luca begs. “You were tossing and turning all night last night.”
“Sorry if I kept you up,” I say in a small voice.
Luca nuzzles my cheek. “Not at all, Junie. But you should rest.”
Simon skids into my nest at the Leclerc estate, socks sliding on the polished wooden floors.
“Baphomet’s Prince has taken over the airwaves of the Fairhaven News Network,” he says, gulping in a few breaths.
I scramble out of my nest and dress quickly, Luca and Ian following. We dash to the family room where Cassian and his family are gathered around the large TV.
The mask Baphomet’s Prince wears is more refined than the ones worn by the Soldiers of Saint Aldous, but no less horrific for its relative refinement. Thin horns twist over the head of the mask, the leather glinting in the light of wherever he’s broadcasting from.
“I claim full responsibility for the murder of Councilor Claude. She was a scourge, a stain on our society, who had to be removed.”
Gerard swears, clenching his fists.
“But today is a bright new day,” the Prince says, and I can just make out the taunt in his voice.
His familiar voice. Saints, who is he? I can’t place his voice from behind the mask, but there’s something deeply familiar about it.
“Yesterday,” he continues, “you bore witness to the rise of my master race.”
His master race, affinitied alphas. It’s all falling into place in my mind now.
My horrific visions, the facility in New Jersey, the dead councilor, the alpha with the ice affinity who disappeared from the scene of the crime in a cloud of dark smoke.
Saints, my visions are coming true, one by one.
Helplessness and hopelessness lash through me, and my mates must feel it through our bonds because they crowd around me, wrapping me up in their arms.
They hold me up as I fall apart, as I remember the visions that stole my sleep for nights after the Lunar Ball and beyond. Affinitied alphas leading armies of Soldiers. Omegas forced to watch their mates being slain, all before being forced into internment camps.
Saints, I have to get stronger. I’m too weak, too powerless in the face of this fight.
“The alpha master race will rise by the day,” Baphomet’s Prince continues, “and those who stand in its way will be dispatched ruthlessly, and without mercy. My master race will be built on the blood and bones of those who dare oppose me.”