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But he loses his gumption rather quickly. His throat moves in a swallow as he slowly drops the stick to his side, the rotting stench of fear surrounding him.
“Don’t kill me,” he whispers. “Please.”
I wait for my conscience to interfere. I should show some mercy, right? That’s what Hetty would want me to do. She’d say I’m too honorable for this type of thing. Maybe that would have been right at one time or the other, but not now.
No, now thoughts of Hetty remind me that I’m angry, and this man is just another obstacle on my way to finally having a bit of peace with my mate. Besides, I really want to kill him.
So, there’s no choice about it. I lift my hands, preparing to strangle him, too.
But before I can send out that fatal energy, his eyes go wide and blank, and he falls forward, stiff as a board.
Dead.
A whooping sound resonates from within the thick dust, and my eyes dart up to find Rill. He looks like a maniac—two straight red lines flow down his forehead, and his left arm gushes blood like a fountain. He doesn’t care, though, smiling like an insane person as he saunters toward me.
“Hell, yeah!” he yells enthusiastically. “That was amazing!”
I flinch as he walks around the bodies to smack me on the back, his eyes surveying the three bodies on the ground.
“Oh, you finally got Cass, huh? I bet that one felt good.”
“Are there more out there?” I ask, ignoring him and nodding in the direction of the gate.
“Just a couple,” he replies, jumping off the large green box. “There were a ton, but we got most of ’em. These two must have slipped through.” He jolts his head toward the dead men, releasing a low whistle. “I’ll tell you what, Noah, they weren’t expecting us. They were dropping like flies. Still, we lost a few. Chris, Tor, and—hey! Where are you going?”
“Leaving,” I yell, walking away. I don’t turn around—I wouldn’t be able to see him, anyway, lost in the smoke and the dust. “I’m going to find my mate. Get her out of here.”
“You don’t want to celebrate?” he yells, his voice muffled by the distance. “We won! Or more precisely, I won because all Goldenrod would be dead if we hadn’t showed up. You know that, right?”
I don’t want to tell him that, at this point, I could care less about Goldenrod. I don’t give a damn about anything except finding her. Vaguely, I hear his voice call out behind me again.
“I really hate you, you know that?” he yells. “Why can’t you be normal?”
I don’t know the answer to that question, so I ignore him.
I just need to get to Dogwood Street.
I need to get to Hetty.
To find my peace.
49
Me Now
Hetty
When I was a child, I hated that my grandmother always made me keep my hair covered. It was bad enough that Stella didn’t have to, but it wasn’t even something that the other beta servants did.
I have a vivid memory of being about nine years old, sitting on the cold cement floor of our bedroom. Gran sat behind me on the lower bed, her legs straddling my shoulders as she painfully worked through the knots with a plastic comb.
I cried and complained relentlessly. “Why do we even have to comb it? No one ever sees my hair. They won’t be able to tell if it’s tangled or not. Just leave it!”
“You can either cover it or cut it short, Henrietta,” she said with a particularly hard yank. “It’s your choice, but you won’t be a slob.”
But the thought of cutting it was unimaginable. I knew when she said that, she meant shaving it close to my scalp like a boy. That’s how a lot of the other female betas wore their hair to avoid having it interfere with their work.
“No!” I insisted, thinking of how Stella would tease me. She wore her black hair flowing down her back or in a neat braid. “But why can’t I wear it like Stella?”
