Page 189 of Knot Their Soldier: Part Three

The more that join, the more power is sucked from me, and I hear Viper grunt from the strain beside me.

The voices multiply until so many are uttering the word that the sound lifts off the road and rolls across the mountainside in layered waves.

"Retreat."

It's almost musical, a low hum that fluctuates, rises and falls like a hymn.

Their voices remain serene and reverent, carrying my Command down the packed road, over the dead, through blood and smoke and the stink of explosives. Unlike before, there is no hint of suspicion. No one breaks formation to accuse their comrade of a corrupted mind. They turn toward one another with eerie composure and offer it like a blessing.

The battlefield changes.

Up the hill, the Alphas have finished killing off the enemy at the barricade and are looking around in confusion as the next wave doesn't come.

The hymn is still rising around us, soft voices carrying my Command farther and farther down the mountain, but it is getting harder to hold as more links form in my web of influence.

I feel each fresh connection as it forms. One more mind and body bending to my will.

The burden grows with every passing heartbeat. It has now spread beyond the first barricade and the road to Blackgate. It races down the mountainside into soldiers I cannot even see, and my body pays for every one of them.

There was a time when forcing one person to obey felt like it might split me apart. Now, with the support of my mates and my healed Omega, I'm bearing the weight of far more minds than I had ever dreamed I could touch.

The tremor starts in my hands, then spreads through my arms and legs until my whole body is shaking with the effort. Blood slips warm over my lip, and another drop falls from my nose to the road below. Every breath burns on the way in, my lungs still scorched from the blast, and my skull feels squeezed too tight, as though the force of the Command is swelling against bone.

Still, it keeps moving through me, vast and unyielding, and all I want is to let it go before it tears me apart.

But I can't.

I cannot stop before I know it has gone far enough.

I will not risk failing again.

So I keep holding it, even as my vision blurs and the edges of the world flicker white. Every new soldier who hears "Retreat" lands inside me for one radiant instant before being folded into the whole, and there are so many now. Hundreds. Maybe thousands.

I twist enough to look over my shoulder and find Knox.

He looks drawn, blood drying in rivers from his mouth and down his throat where tendons strain as my Command siphons every last drop of energy and power he has to give. Despite this enormous toll, he is still watching the battlefield like the Prime Alpha he is.

He's always been the one to tell me when it's time to hold, to move, to keep going, and when to put my weapon down.

That is what this is now. My Command is the weapon, and I will keep it raised until he tells me otherwise.

So I wait for him and trust that he will know when it's enough.

I'll hold out as long as my Prime Alpha needs me to.

His gaze sweeps the barricade, the road, the retreating enemy, all the way down to the soldiers still streaming from the tree line in the distance.

More voices join the hymn.

Another pulse of overwhelming pain tears through me, and I bite into my cheek to stop myself from screaming. I let the blood spill over my lips.

Heat floods across one eye, and I know a vessel has burst, yet I stay where I am and wait for him, because I trust him to read the battle. I trust his experience and his judgment.

Another agonizing second passes, but I don't allow myself to falter.

Finally, he must see what he needs to, because his glowing red eyes snap to mine.

I wonder what he sees.