Page 35 of Savage Surrender

“I hate you.”

I launch myself at Whitney. We hit the floor clawing and striking, and the screen jumps again. Now the knife is in my hand.

“I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.”

I never said that.

I never fucking said that.

Oh my god, I look psychotic as fuck.

Breathe, Bianca, breathe.

I blow out a deep breath. The spotlights shining might as well be blistering my skin.

On the screen, the knife rises and falls. Somebody has slowed that part down and zoomed in on my face while Whitney’s blood spreads beneath us. Her knife is gone. The part where she stabbed Rebecca is gone. Every second where they were hurting me is gone.

My heart is going to pound out of my chest. Montgomery’s precious omega, his beloved little beast, tearing four women apart.

The room’s noise rattles my teeth. Gasps and whispers, a chair scraping back, a woman near the front going oh my God, oh my God on a loop like a stuck record, and a flute hitting the floor somewhere and shattering.

The bond is going haywire, the tension in the alphas building to a breaking point, even from across the room. I curl my toes inside Montgomery’s shoes and stay upright.

Montgomery isn’t glowing anymore.

“Stop it,” he says off-mic, low and terse, to nobody I can see. Then he wheels around and snaps his fingers at the dark above the lights like a man calling a dog. “Kill the feed. Kill it. Whoever’s in that booth, shut it down now.”

It’s the most emotion I’ve ever seen from him.

He pats his jacket as if the remote might be hiding there, then casts around the stage floor. “Hale. Get someone in the booth. Now, Hale!”

It doesn’t stop.

My stolen voice keeps saying I hate you as I drive the knife down again and again.

It plays all the way to the end, to Whitney going still on that white floor in a spreading red, and I can almost feel the knife in my hand.

The screen goes black.

It’s over, I think, and my knees nearly buckle with relief.

Then the black stutters and Whitney’s face fills the wall.

For a second, my brain refuses to make sense of her. A photo, I tell myself. A memorial slide. Some sick little bow on the package. She’s pale and thinner than I remember, bandages visible above her gown, propped upright somewhere very bright.

Then she blinks and smiles.

“Hello, Daddy.”

Holy. Fucking. Shit. What the hell is this?

“You know how much I love a party.” She keeps an upbeat cadence that’s uncanny, coated sweet. “So imagine how sad I was when my invitation to Bianca’s birthday party got lost in the mail.”

No way. I felt her heart quit under my hands. I checked. She’s dead.

My skin feels too tight. Itchy. My brain is telling me to run.

“I’d have come in person, but...” She lifts one hand from her lap slowly and gestures down at herself and the wheelchair she’s sitting in. The smile never slips. “Travel’s a little complicated for me these days. You understand, Daddy. You’re the one who parked me here.”