Page 102 of The Florist and Her Alphas

Ninety miles an hour through city streets that thin out fast once we hit the highway. The tablet on the console keeps the green dot steady, thirty-five minutes ahead, moving with the flat, unhurried patience of men who think they’ve already won.

We will close that gap before the sun is down.

My hands are steady again on the wheel.

Beside me, Ezra hasn’t opened his fist. His knuckles are still bloodless around the ring, his eyes locked on the windshield like he can see thirty-five minutes down the road if he just stares hard enough.

“It’s all my fault,” groans August, his eyes shut, his forehead pressed to the cold window glass.

“Listen to me,” I say, and all three of them go quiet. “When we get there, everyone has a job. Julian, you’ll break the lock on any door we come across. August, you’re the runner. The second she’s clear, you get her out, and you don’t stop moving until she’s in the car. Ezra and I will fight anyone who gets in our way.”

Nobody argues.

“We bring her back alive,” Ezra says quietly. “They’re all dead to me.”

Ezra opens his hand and looks down at the ring lying in his palm for a long moment, turns it once between his fingers, watching the stone catch the gray light through the window. Then he closes his fist around it again and slides it into the inside pocket of his jacket, against his chest, where I know he intends to keep it until he can put it back where it belongs.

My foot goes down harder on the gas.

The road ahead has gone empty and gray, the sun already dropping toward the tree line, and on the tablet between us the green dot slows, and finally stops two miles ahead.

My chest feels like something is tearing itself loose behind my ribs with every second that dot doesn’t move. Every second she is there and not here is a second I cannot get back.

Twenty-Seven

LIANA

The chemical smell hits me as soon as I open my eyes.

Where am I?

My head pounds.

A deep, deep throb happens behind my eyes and makes the light hurt. I try to bring my hands up to press against my temples, but my hands don’t move. They’re behind my back, wrists crossed, bound by something thin and hard that has bitten into my skin while I was unconscious.

It feels like zip ties. The plastic has cut two shallow grooves into my wrists, and when I flex my fingers, fresh blood wells and goes sticky against my skin.

I’m lying on a thin, lumpy mattress on a wooden floor.

The ceiling above me is water-stained, a wide brown ring blooming out from a central point like something rotted from the inside. The fan in the corner sits motionless, blades furred gray with old dust.

The wallpaper along the far wall is a faded pattern of hunting dogs and pheasants, yellowed and peeling at the seams, so ugly I remember hating it. The crack in the window pane runs the same diagonal it has run for years, a thin silver seam catching what little light gets through the boards nailed over the glass.

I know this room.

This is where Magnus broke my left ring finger when I was twenty, because I cried too loudly at dinner and he said an omega who cries at the table embarrasses her pack. This is where Silus pinned my wrists to this same bedframe when I was twenty-one and bit into my shoulder hard enough to leave a scar, competing with his father over whose mark would finally take. This is the room I slept in for almost three years of my life.

The air smells like them.

My breathing speeds up without my permission. I can’t stop it. My chest goes tight, a vice cranking closed around my ribs, and my vision narrows at the edges into a gray tunnel.

I am hyperventilating.

My body remembers this room faster than my mind can catch up to it — the bites, the nights when every alpha in the pack took his turn with me in this exact bed while my face was pressed into this exact mattress, and no one could hear me because the cabin sits two miles from the nearest road and the trees swallow every sound. I remember Magnus’s mouth at my ear, telling me I was being a bad omega. I remember Silus’s hand clamping over my mouth. I remember each failed marking attempt and the slow, sick weeks it took for each wound to close, if it ever fully closed at all.

For one terrible moment I am eighteen again:

Magnus carries me up the gravel driveway, his big arms locked around me, after my entire family is dead.