Chapter 36
Are you refusing?
He’s watching me. I can feel it. It’s funny how you can become so attuned to something, so hyper-aware of it that even years after, as soon as you feel it again, it’s like you are right back there in that situation.
The Beta’s Fang ruined me so completely that I can feel his gaze on me like a malevolent, heavy weight that is pushing me down, whispering threats in my ear, reminding me with ghostly pain what is awaiting me.
I’m so scared I’ve stopped thinking, so scared that my body is on autopilot, that I’m back in that cell, buried hundreds of feet beneath the earth in the dark, with no way out.
He comes into view, and I almost exhale in relief. Even though I’m scared of him, it’s the anticipation and build-up in my own mind that I hate the most. The pain is bad, but it ends. Eventually.
“I’m very mad that you got away,” he murmurs and runs his hand up between my breasts to my throat where he squeezes until I’m unable to breathe. “You got away and evaded me for years, so we have so much to catch up on.”
The knife comes out, gleaming in the light. He brings it down, cutting through my skin. One long cut above my breasts, not where it will do any damage, but where it will hurt and burn.
He hums as he grabs a bandage.
I squirm, watching it warily.
He slaps it down over the wound. Nothing much happens, and then it erupts in fire. I writhe and finally open my mouth, screaming.
All I can hear are my screams; everything else is silent.
“Salt, so simple and easy to find and so, so painful,” he says, laughing at me.
He pulls it off, but it doesn’t help; the salt is still in the wound, and my body is still afire.
He picks up his knife and slices again on my stomach. I listen to the silence and my breathing and turn my head to the side. The Warden is watching me with an impassive face.
“Walker,” I mouth his name, remembering him in a different time.
His jaw clenches, and he closes his eyes.
Another bandage is slapped over the wound. I howl, my toes curling, back arching off the table. He leans over me, laughing. A nightmare that I thought I’d escaped.
Jarek is dead.
I spit at him.
He recoils and stills, staring at me.
“Did you…did you get some fight while you were out there?”
I turn my head away, but he grabs my jaw painfully, digging his fingers in, grinding my cheeks into my teeth. I taste blood.
“Have you found yourself, snow? I really hope you have because I’m going to take it all away before I kill you.”
“You can try!” I hiss.
I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I don’t care anymore.
If I’m to die here, I’ll die here. I don’t want to crawl, and I don’t have anything else to lose.
Jarek is dead, and it’s my fault. Mordecai betrayed me.
Cadel…he’ll get out. They are beyond my help now.
So, to hell with fear. I choose not to have it.
“Beg me,” he murmurs.
“Go to Petition!” I hiss. “Let the gods judge you and find you wanting.”
“There are no gods, only one.”
“They’ll rain their hate down on you; they’ll hate you for everything you’ve done. You’ll never find a kind word, a place to sleep, or a scrap of bread. You will hunger and thirst and feel every wound you inflicted!” I scream at him.
My words echo around the factory. A noise rumbles, growing louder and louder until I realise it’s a cheer. The omegas and alphas are cheering for me. The alphas without hope, the omegas who are nothing but fear, they hear my words, and they cheer, screaming back at our captors. Repeating my words.
“I will not surrender. I won’t stop fighting. I’m not yours!” I scream in shrill hysteria. The sound of my rage echoes around us, pushing him into a contemplative silence. “I am Kaida Keres, and I am an omega, and I will not be silenced, not in this life or the next.”
He stares at the cages of alphas and omegas. “I wonder if they would be so excited by your words if they knew what happened to the last people who defended you.”
I stare at him, my aggressive words sticking in my throat and choking me. What? What does he mean?
“Do you want to know what happened that day? When you walked into the citadel like a lamb for slaughter?” He leans down over me, so I can’t see anything but him. His dark eyes are pits into madness.
My gaze flicks to the side where I can see Walker watching.
“You came, and as soon as you were secured, I personally took the Beta’s Claw, and we went to your old neighbourhood and stood there in the dark, watching the bustling movement as they prepared to flee.” He bites his bottom lip and leans over me so his face is only half a foot from mine.
“They were too slow. We waited with the place surrounded, and they walked straight into our trap. There was an old woman with steel-grey hair. She was tall and carried a staff in her hands. I believe she was…what was it, oh, that’s right. She was blind, wasn’t she? Your grandmother, right?”
My jaw trembles, and I clamp it shut. He reaches out and brushes my tears aside.
“No, not your grandmother, just another one of the scum who live there. But there was another woman, one clutching an infant in her arms. She had pale hair the colour of straw. I remember thinking she resembled you.”
Aunt Rae?
“No! What did you do to them?” I howl and struggle. He pulls back and then, before I can think, slices another long, deep wound into the spot above my hip.
He applies the salt, but this time, I don’t scream, I shake and grit my teeth so hard I think they might break, but I don’t give him the satisfaction of making a single sound.
He waits until I’m shaking and panting for breath, and then he removes it, sits down, and strokes my sweaty hair back from my face.
“I personally killed your aunt Rae. Your neighbours were only too happy to point her out. She screamed and screamed as I peeled the skin from her body. It took hours for her to die, and I made them all watch. We killed them one by one.”
I stare at him wide-eyed. “My mother escaped,” I say it defiantly.
He hits me. The blow is so sudden that I don’t even have time to flinch. The right side of my face goes numb. I spit and, this time, spray red mist onto his lower jaw and mask.
“But your cousin did not.”
I freeze. The agony his words cause has me howling, ignoring the pain in my face.
“You monster. She was a baby.”
“Omega filth,” he spits.
A dangerous fury fills me. “I will never stop fighting you. I will join with whoever will work against you. With my last breath, I will bring you down!” I howl.
“I hate to remind you, snow, but you’re the one tied up right now.”
With effort, I bank my temper and focus my sight on the ceiling and a particular hole that reminds me of my aunt’s stove. She liked to sing while she cooked, and she always made enough for the rest of the neighbourhood.
People came to her when they were sick or hurt. She never turned anyone away. Rae was always smiling and whistling, and she loved those children that blessed her in her later years more than her own life.
My chin wobbles as I remember cuddling my cousin for the first time and watching how Rae softened.
Her nightmares got stronger, and she would wake us with her screams. She didn’t want anything to happen to her babies. She was fierce.
So strong.
Poor baby Aelyn. And where is her son? What happened to Caelyn? I dare not even ask.
“Where?” I stutter over the word.
“Pardon?” he says, laughing.
“Where are their bodies?”
He grips my jaw, turning my face so I have no choice but to stare at him. “Do you remember the room we’d take you to occasionally when I’d let the alphas knot you?”
Bile races up the back of my throat. I shudder. The flashbacks are so vivid I almost cry out.
“I remember,” I whisper.
“We stripped the flesh from their bones and hung them on the walls. To witness your downfall. You paid such a steep price for their freedom, and the whole time,” he stops to cackle madly, “they were right there with you. Every. Single. One.”
I let out a wild scream. It’s haunting and full of more pain than any physical wound he could ever give me.
He doesn’t stop me, just keeps watching until he gets bored and sticks his fingers in my wound, wiggling them around. My scream changes. I choke and seize under his hands, my eyes bulging, my heels drumming on the bench.
He pulls his fingers out and puts the digits that are slick with my blood in his mouth.
“So good, Omega. It’s like I can taste your despair and pain in your blood. Delicious. Now, I’m going to go and find a friend, and then we’re going to come back and see if we can break you.”
He vanishes, and I lay there still shaking and blinking up at the ceiling until I remember him. I turn my head to the side and stare at him until he looks up.
You did this.
You did all of this.
He drops his chin without saying a word.
I don’t know how long passes before he returns. The alpha stands at the end of the table, staring at me like he’s going to puke all over me.
“Knot her!”
The alpha trembles and shakes his head, stepping back.
“Excuse me? Are you refusing?” The Fang asks loudly, drawing eyes from everywhere.
“I…I…I can’t.”
His eyes are wide and his face pale. He’s older than I am, with dark scruff, but he’s got a kind face. He’s going to die, and we all know it.
The Beta’s Fang grabs him by the back of the neck and drags the alpha’s head close to his.
“Are you telling me you don’t want to lay with an omega this pretty?”
“That’s Kaida Keres. No one in here will touch her,” the alpha says confidently.
“Is that so?”
The alpha swallows hard and flinches before finally nodding. “We can’t. It’s Kaida. She escaped.”
“She is caught.”
“It doesn’t matter; she’s the omega who escaped. She is our hope. She is proof that you are wrong and fallible.” The alpha’s voice is getting stronger and louder with every passing moment. I want to tell him to stop, to shut up, but I can’t find the energy to speak.
“I can’t touch her,” the alpha says with confidence, with victory.
The Fang moves with the suddenness of a striking snake. His knife sinks deep into the alpha’s stomach and then, with both hands on the handle, he rips up.
The alpha gasps, mouth open, blood exploding out.
“Fine. Die, then.”
He pulls his knife free and turns back to me without even waiting to watch the alpha fall.
I can’t take it anymore. I struggle and finally open my mouth and roar at him, letting all the hate and rage I feel out in a sound that I can’t stop.