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He wasn’t evil.
What he did, he did for good.
But the truth didn’t matter, did it? All that would ever matter was what they thought.
What they wanted to believe.
Hundreds of years wasted, that voice in his head echoed, mocking him. Sorin squeezed his eyes shut and buried his face in the musty pillow, grappling with that unpalatable truth. The message had been wasted. There would be no war. The movement had been stopped before it had begun, and even were the survivors to regroup and want to fight on, Sorin couldn’t allow it to happen. Too many lives had been lost already. He would not let anyone else die in what he knew was a losing game.
But then what would happen to those doomed Pedigree omegas?
He lay there long into the night, thinking of them, grieving, wishing there were a way to save his friends and those omegas both. A way to stop dragonkind from continuing their cruelty. A way to stop the experiment. A way to make things right.
The solution came as morning dawned.
He could continue to fight alone.
It would mean stealth and cunning instead of brute force. It would mean doing and saying things he didn’t quite mean for the sake of the greater good. It would mean assassinating his own character, painting himself as a villain all dragons should fear…
But what did his character matter if his actions led to change?
By acting independently, he could save the surviving members of the Vanguard and Pedigree omegas both. Maybe he could even save Bertram. If he made it seem like Bertram was his enemy, the other dragons would never suspect they had once worked together.
That they were bonded.
In love, as they’d been all their lives.
It was the only way he could guarantee no one else would suffer, because if he was caught, the only one who would be killed was himself.
It was perfect in the way few plans were. So perfect, not even the negative voice in his head had anything to say. He could outsmart a dragon. He didn’t need to be physically strong to make them afraid. And when they were afraid, they would warn each other. Whisper about him. Question themselves. Ask themselves why.
And eventually, the council would listen. They would hear him. They would realize the mistake they’d made, and for the safety and well-being of their kind, they would change their ways. They might not free their omegas, but they would leave them be.
And what better way to make sure those whispers quickly reached the council’s ears than to target the sons of its leader—the mightiest dragon of all, Grimbold Drake.
12
Sorin
Hugh Drake’s lair resembled a modern-day fairy-tale castle, fanciful spires and all. It had been constructed with French influence in mind, and had tall arched doorways and steep hipped roofs with an attractive stone facade that varied in color piece by piece between brown and beige-leaning white. There were sixty-three windows on the first floor—sixty-six if you included the glass patio doors, which Sorin sometimes did—and eighty-five on the second, owing to a number of beautiful glass doors which led onto private, dreamy balconies. In total the home boasted twenty-six bedrooms, thirty-eight bathrooms, two kitchens, an indoor swimming pool, an automotive showroom, a wine cellar, and several elevators… amongst other necessities.
It also had its own ballroom, and of all the rooms in the manor, it was the one Sorin was most interested in, as it was where Hugh intended to doom an omega of his choosing to a lifetime of pain.
Sorin hadn’t come by this information easily. In the time since his decision to distance himself from the Vanguard, he had struggled both with his health and with his dwindling resources. The cash he had in his wallet wasn’t enough to sustain him long term, and while he was wealthy thanks to Bertram, that money was locked away in bank accounts he didn’t dare access for fear Bertram would use his account activity to hunt him down. In the end, he’d elected to visit a nearby bank branch in person and withdraw as much as they’d let him—a cool two hundred thousand dollars—which was as much paper money as the bank had had on hand. One transaction, he figured, wouldn’t give Bertram much to work with, and provided he was frugal, the money would keep him fed and sheltered for years.
But frugal meant he couldn’t outsource help.
All the work, from intel gathering to field missions, was his responsibility alone, and while Sorin had adapted to modern technology quite well, he was no hacker. He’d had to rely on publicly accessible sources—the Attendant’s network, Zillow virtual tours, and Google searches linked to the Drakes—to learn what he had learned.
But the upside was, by the time he found out about Hugh’s meat market of a ball, he knew his target very well indeed.
The Attendant’s network was abuzz about it. Hugh wanted a clutch, they said, and was—for some reason—reaching out to Disgraces near and far in a bid to find the perfect man or woman to lay his eggs and, as unlikely as it was, maybe even become his mate. It was exactly the kind of thing Sorin had been afraid would happen. On the back of the experiment’s success, dragons were conscripting omegas to bed with them and give them clutches. Sorin hadn’t been able to save any of the omegas originally chosen for the experiment, and without the Vanguard’s resources, had no idea of how they were doing, but this development with Hugh confirmed it must have produced results.
He would no longer be the only omega alive who knew the pain of being taken from his children, and without his intervention, countless others would be plagued forever by their babies’ heartbroken, terrified screams.
It made sending a message to the council all the more important.
So, despite the pain he was in, Sorin went to work.
