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“Berserker.”
“Berserker.”
“She dies, Trash City burns.”
“That’s what I thought. I need your help. Start washing out the wound on her shoulder. Her arm needs a full surgery. One of the bullets hit bone and shattered it. I’m going to have to cut her open, reset the bone, and insert a plate. When you get back to Dark City, you can have your docs remove it.”
“I’m not going to Dark City…” I whisper, but Lou is already fiddling with the IV and reality is sprinting away from me at a brutal pace. There’s no way I’ll be able to catch it.
My good fingers curl into the sheets and a large, warm hand covers my forehead and presses my head down onto the lumpy mattress.
“Y’are,” he says, his accent thick with that Dark City trademark.
“Over my dead body.” His hands touch my neck gently and I strain my face away from him as far as I can get. I don’t want him touching me. I don’t want him anywhere near me. Not even to save my life.
“Alive and breathing,” he counters.
“Not if I can help it.”
His heat crashes into me and when he speaks, I can feel the brush of his lips against my cheek. His breath smells like blood and river water as it fans over me. “I give one command, and you will.”
Fury makes me choke, “So, why don’t you?”
“Told you already,” he says after a moment, “don’t want a corpse. Don’t have any need for one.”
His hands resume their work as he uses a turkey baster and a towel to rinse out the inside of my bonding wounds that should have but definitely did not heal up. The drugs running through my veins are my new friend now, and they don’t let anything hurt me. Doesn’t mean I can’t still hear the awful sounds of water spraying against my neck, or the Alpha’s frustrated grunts.
Sorry —Berserker.
He must be having the same thoughts I am because he says, “Isn’t fuckin’ right. You defective somehow?”
I laugh —laugh —though I don’t know if the sound can be identified as such. “What? You want to return menow? After you’ve gone and bitten the shit out of me?”
His hand slashes out and grabs my chin. He tilts my face towards his. The strange, out-of-character gentleness he showed to my foot is gone now, that anomaly successfully placed in his rearview like a hit-and-run. “Ibondedyou to protect and heal you after you fuckin’stabbedyourself in the leg.”
I laugh a little more and his grip tightens to the point that I can feel it through the druggy veil.
“Ahem,” Lou says,“if you want to make more work for us, then please proceed. But if you’d like for there to be enough drugs left for us to keep Trash City running until you hold up your end of the bargain and provide us with the supplies you promised, then please loosen your hold on the Omega.”
“With her injuries after the bonding, are we even sure she’s an Omega?” Angel has the stones to ask.
“She’s an Omega,” both Lou and the Berserker say at the same time.
I look up into the Berserker’s eyes. Now that he’s fully in his Alpha form, no beast to be found, they’re brown, not gold and not black either. The color of burned sugar. His pupils are fully blown in the center though, much larger than I think they should be, making the color hard to see. He blinks and I jolt.
“Omega, I’m going to cut open your arm now to reset the bone,” Lou says.
I shake my head frantically, which is difficult, since the bastard I’m trying to get away from still has a solid hold of me. He’s everywhere. His eyes refuse to leave mine, like the residue underneath a stubborn sticker. It’s just stuck there forever.
“Don’t let him,” I huff, totally crazed. I’m giving an order to a Berserker. Hah. What a day.
His left eye twitches microscopically. I don’t win more of a reaction from him than that. Looking into my eyes, he says to the doc, “Alright. Knock her out.”
I feel the dull edge of the knife press into my skin and a moment later, waves of euphoria blanket my bloody, freezing, sticky body and I know that everything is going to be much, much worse when I wake up. But at least for now, Pain has left the building. All that’s left are burned sugar-colored irises, and then nothing.
5 | Echo
Trash City
