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“Gonna be back to fix this,” I tell her, takin’ a step backwards through the door, but as I close it to the sight of her stare, I know there’s no comin’ back from this.
The Fates were right. I lost my Omega.
The Fates were wrong. Didn’t have to die to do it.
I lost ‘er all by my fuckin’ self.
26 | Echo
Dragnovic Manor
Three days go by.Three days go by and I’m stuck to the bed. I can’t get off of it. I can’t get out of it. I’m chained to the whims and will of a Berserker, left behind to be used and abused by him under the pretense of protection.
Three days of plotting and unsuccessful attempts at escape.
Three days of hate.
I hate him. I hate him with everything I’ve got. Ihatehim. I hate him even more knowing that I was so close to giving him a real shot — giving us a real shot. And I hate me for the things I said to him when we were in the back of that car, those lifetimes ago when he stood up for Betas and spoke down to Alphas and promised them things would change — promised me he’d change things because of me. That he’d do anything for me that would take him any amount of will or effort, any sacrifice to his pride, any risk. He’s such a fucking…
No. Calling him an asshole doesn’t cut it. He’s Adam and I hate him with every piece of my broken heart.
I think about what’ll happen when he comes back, replay it in my mind over and over. Think about the things I’ll say to him, what I’ll do when he finally lets me up off of the bed and gives me new clothes. I think about the promise I made him — no, the vow, the threat.
Iwillget out of here if it’s the last thing I do. He’ll have to build a dungeon like the one I’ve heard about in Shadowlands and chain me up to keep me from leaving Dark City because I’m not staying here with the lying Berserker snake, in his bed, in this house he callsmine,pretending to be a wife that I’m not and never will be because Adam is gone. He got bit by zombie Berserkers in Paradise Hole. He died along with them.
What happened in the thing that wasn’t a nest but just a pile of rags on the floor doesn’t mean anything. What happened in the car, out in Dark City at the coffee shop, doesn’t matter either. What happened outside in the puddle he calls a garden matters even less.
My nipples stiffen as my body remembers the feeling of his. It all comes back to me in a blur, but now those memories don’t feel like they did. They feel like scars that cut deeper than the ones he marked me with that very first night.
I shake my head, sitting up and pulling the blankets with me. It’s cold and the breeze filtering in through the window the Beta servant cracked is icy. Underneath the blankets, I’m naked. No one gave me anything to wear after I kicked off my dress considering that, after Balcazar’s beat down, no one’s been willing to go against a single edict of the Dark City Berserker. So far, the only explicit instructions he’s given are to feed me and give me stuff to drink. I have to use a bucket for a bathroom that a Beta servant, standing in the corner, takes away from me after I’ve finished. It’s humiliating.
Tears spring to my eyes and I think about trying to hurt myself. I glance at the lamp on the bedside table. It’s porcelain. I could probably break it or the bulb and try to gouge my wrists open, but even that rebellion doesn’t fill me with satisfaction. I don’t want to die. I have a greater purpose. I can feel it in my bones. I have to get to the man in the cave. I need to find the other Omega. If I run into Trash City and get a chance to break Merlin’s meaty neck, I’ll take it, too. But more than anything, I want to know more about the dead army that the Dark City Berserker said we’d investigate together.
I don’t often get the feeling that I matter, but I feel it now. That, somewhere in this convoluted puzzle, I fit.
I thought, for a second, I might fit with Adam too, and that I might matter to the Berserker of Dark City, just a little bit.
Fool.
The wind whispers through the window and I ignore it, but as time flutters past and the wind picks up, the darkness outside calls my attention. Carefully peering through the cracks in the fluttering white drapes, I can’t see much. Just a grey skyline beneath which my shattered garden glimmers. Flowers still cover the space. Betas have been scavenging them like crazy. They won’t live long though, I don’t think. The flowers I conjured up to cover my own room when the Berserker and I fucked have all died since.
The wind picks up and I twist towards the window fully. There’s a weird sound…I can’t quite interpret it. I sit very still, trying to decide what it is, so I’m caught totally off guard when a swarm of bats explodes through the crack in my window, and flies straight over my head. There must be a dozen of them or more, and they’re allwhite.Shocked as I am, a delayed scream rips out of me that’s cut abruptly short.
The bats redirect to swarm my face. I reach for the lamp and grab it around its thick stem. I lift it up, fully intent on using it to defend myself with, but before I can bring it down, fingers circle my wrist, halting my progress, while another hand covers the bottom half of my face, muffling the word I shout next,“Fruh…”
I blink. It’s Freya.
She sits so close to me she’s practically on my lap, her nose damn near touching mine. She’s as naked as I am and even though I’m made very uncomfortable by our closeness and our nakedness and the fact that she was bats a second ago, she doesn’t seem to mind.
“This is where you have been?” she says, disdain on her tongue. “Acting as the…house pet of a Berserker?” Her voice is stilted, speech slightly odd, just as I remember it.
Her ice eyes flicker between mine like windshield wipers, swish, swish, swish. Maybe it’s just the beating of my blood through my veins, moving triple time. What’s more than triple time? A thousand times too fast for the pitiful body that contains it. And then her words hit me and I rip my head away from her hands and give her shoulders a shove. I don’t push her hard, but she still flies back on the bed, like a sheet in the wind.
I glance over her. Her breasts and ass are small, her hips are wide, but she’s covered in lean, sinewy muscle like she was once a swimmer. Maybe, she was. Or maybe, she’s just a fish. She’s been a fox and a bear and bats, so why not a dolphin? Though I’ve never made it to the ocean, I’d love to see one someday when I’m free of this place andhimand the insidious thoughts I have of him when rare sleep comes for me. Dreams of forgiveness, of returning to the garden where we once lived…
I shake out of it and jangle my chain, sitting up a little straighter. “You fucker. I’m tied up, or are you blind as a bat?” Pun’s very much intended, but she doesn’t laugh at my joke.
She glances at my neck when I gesture to the collar and then at the headboard behind me. “You are…” She hesitates, like she’s searching for words, and her hesitation lasts so long, it makes me wonder if it’s not that she speaks with an accent…maybe she just doesn’t have a good vocabulary in any language. “You areweak. You could have freed yourself…from this…any of the times.”
