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I’m about to tell her to fuck off, but the Berserker beats me to it. He whips around and holds up his hand, middle finger and thumb pressing together, his other three fingers lifting up. It’s not a gesture I’m familiar with, but it seems to scream shut the fuck up more than any other hand gesture I’ve seen could.
“Quiet. If she needs another eternity here, you’ll give it to her. If she needs the shirt off your back, you’ll fucking give it to her. No one commands my Omega but me, you fuckin’ got that, scavenger?”
Merlin snarls, but her face still turns pink. She lowers her goggles from her forehead to cover her eyes and turns back to the other Betas. “I don’t have time for this,” she grumbles. “Get back to work, all of you. We have a shipment to fulfill.”
“Shipment?” the Berserker and I say simultaneously. We share a glare before turning our attentions back to Merlin.
She snorts, literally tilting her nose up at us. “I don’t answer to you.” And before the Berserker can bite her head off, she twirls her right pointer finger in the air and whistles between the gap in her front teeth. “Alright, scavengers, to rendezvous point G. We’ll leave the Omega here to her pity party.”
I want to cuss at her, rage and roar, but my chin is quivering too bad to say anything at all, which just makes me feel like a pussy. My left arm and leg don’t hurt so much as throb and the stitching in the right side of my neck has already started to itch. It feels bruised down deep, not sliced open anymore, but that’s only thanks to the pocketful of drugs I’ve got handy. I try not to think about how they’ll run out eventually.
“Bye, Echo. I hope you feel better,” fuckin’ Angel has the gall to say.
“Fuck you, Angel,” I say and my sniffling is worse now. This is the last time, dammit, I swear!
The Berserker is glaring at me again, his irritation at Trash City transforming as effortlessly as he can into irritation with me. “Wanna stay here?” he says, voice incredulous and disgusted, even more so when I nod. “You’d rather stay in a pile of garbage than come to Dark City with me?”
So heisthe Dark City Berserker.
…
Fuck. Iknewthat, but hearing him confirm it…just…fuck.
My chin wobbles even more.
He grabs it, physically stopping the wobbling with his fist. His eyes narrow. His expression turns feral. He whips his head and hand back and snarls, “Don’t wanna corpse, told you that already. I’m not gonna abuse you. I fang fucked you once, but that’s because I thought I was helping you. I was wrong. Won’t make the same fucking mistake again. We get to Dark City, you don’t even have to talk to me if you don’t want. You’ll live good. You won’t want for shit. Sit pretty and come to a few events. That’s it.”
I don’t believe a word he fucking says and that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Because I don’t want to go back into Paradise Hole. With or without him. And even if I did, I still wouldn’t want to make it to Dark City to live the rest of my days as a prop. I wantmore. I don’t know what it is,ifthere even is, but I want it. And if there’s not, then I want to spend my whole life searching until I know for sure.
He leans in again, even closer now. So close his mangy beard brushes my jaw. “You’re braver than this. I’ve seen it.”
I slap him. I don’t know where it comes from, and I know it doesn’t hurt, but it still leaves a splotch of red on his cheek and the neon sign in his eyes flashing murder. “I don’t wanna go back into Paradise Hole,” I squeeze out in a single puff of air.
His reaction is horrifying. His face transforms, eyes widening, caramel lashes parting wide, eyebrows lifting, mouth softening, diamond cheeks relaxing. He moves one hand onto my forehead, the other onto my knee. I don’t like it and tense up. It doesn’t draw anger out of him though, not like it has in the past. Instead, his hands do that awful flinching thing again and he lets go of my leg and combs my hair behind my right ear.
I bat his hand away, the slapping sound echoing, but he still doesn’t get mad. Instead, he says in a low, lethal voice, “I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you up there.”
And I lose my mind. “Youarethe bad thing that happened to me up there.”
And whatever grace he’s given me ends. He fists my hair at the nape of my neck and drags me up to standing. He pushes me towards the ramp leading up to daylight and tosses me out into cold, wet air.
6 | Dark City Berserker
Paradise Hole
“Fuck.” Nothing about this is going as planned.
She has the fuckin’ audacity to snort at the predicament we’re in. I kick my motorcycle, my fucking baby reduced to ripped metal and rubble, and toss aside one of the cracked propulsion canisters I’d mounted to it myself. It’s empty now, having spent the last of its gas on blowing up the scavengers who tore her apart. Three of ‘em lie dead around my motorcycle now, but clearly, others got away and they stripped ‘er aeverything. Every. fucking. thing. Down to ‘er worthless plastic coating, down to the bolts.
“Is this where you fought the other Alphas?” Her voice startles me. I don’t hear it very often and I never hear it unless it’s warped by anger. Now, it’s tinged by curiosity. Her gaze sweeps the glade speckled with bits of my motorcycle and other metal parts of the bikes and trucks the other Alphas brought with them. There’s blood on the soil, marking the battle that was fought.
I nod. “Yeah.”
“Did you eat them?”
“The fuck?” I stare at her, blinking while she just watches me with those large, brown eyes that are impossible to fuckin’ read. The only time I can is when she’s a little bit vulnerable. I fucking ache for that vulnerability. Makes every instinct in my body come alive with a desire to tear the world down around her and lay it at her feet.
I shake my head when she doesn’t say more. “No.”
