Page 267 of Awakened
Too besotted by a pretty face. Too susceptible to all the ways she knew how to use my biology against me.
Too stupid to keep my fucking mouth shut.
My shovel hits another root, and the impact shoots up my arm and into my elbow. With a biting curse, I twist my tool and use the sharp edge to saw through the foliage.
Next to me, Vae mutters something low, and Riven laughs. I know they’re talking, but I can’t hear the words. All I can hear is my shovel digging through the packed soil, the sound of my own breaths sawing in and out of my lungs. And her voice.
Always her voice.
“Please don’t leave me.”
“I won’t. I promise.”
Gods, I was such an idiot.
“What’s your name, Omega?”
“Elsbeth, if it pleases my Lord.”
Elsbeth. A gentle Omega. One of ours. The youngest daughter of a noble house. She told me that first night that she’d never even set foot off her estate, content to spend her days caring for her ailing father. Her mother died in childbirth, and she was running the household in her place.
“They took me when I was walking through the garden. I shouldn’t have been out. I just so wanted to feel the fresh night air on my face after days spent cooped up inside.”
I felt terrible for her. This small, sweet, naive Omega, only twenty three. She was beautiful and innocent, and I’d fancied myself some kind of knight in shining armor, riding in to save her from the Severed.
I kept her to myself, tending to her and promising to contact her family. She whined—one of those piercing Omega sounds full of distress that made the Alpha in me want to swaddle her in soft things, purr, and promise her the world. Then she told me the Severed had killed her father when they took her, and she was too afraid to go back to his estates.
For four days I looked after her—ignoring every duty I could get away with. Letting the rest of the Bastards and trainees handle the other Omegas. We rode on horseback all the way back to London, and by the time we were on the outskirts of the city, I thought I was in love.
I was so excited to tell Vae and Caelan. So excited to introduce them. She wasn’t our Fated, but what were the chances we’d ever find our Fated Mate? Surely we weren’t meant to wait around forever. What harm was there in courting her?
The wind kicks up, whispering through the swaying fronds and cooling me down for a brief, wonderful moment. Leaning back on my knees, I swipe the sweat from my brow and do my best to ignore the blisters forming on my palms.
I’m a vampire. An Alpha. A Warrior. I can heal from damn near anything so long as I’ve consumed enough blood.
Except for beheading.
And fire.
I woke that final night on the road back to London with the thick scent of smoke in my nose. At first, I thought it was the wind shifting smoke from a campfire. Annoyed, I rolled back over and did my best to ignore it, telling myself the wind would shift soon and take the smoke with it.
I hit another root and bend over wrapping my hands around it and using my enhanced strength to snap it in half. When it comes loose, the dirt around it shifts, tumbling back in the hole.
The Severed swarmed our camp the same way. Coming out of the fog like ghosts given flesh. I’d only fought them twice before, and both times we’d greatly outnumbered them.
Not this time.
There were only five of us. Five Bastards, and ten terrified, traumatized Omegas.
I remember racing through camp—sword in one hand, slashing and hacking at anything without a soul. Through the smoke, all I could hear were screams. All I could smell was rot and decay.
And under that, the sickening scent of burnt flesh.
Fifty Severed to our Five, including me. We never stood a chance. It was a fucking slaughter.
They killed the Omega’s first. Burned them alive in their bedrolls, trapped in their tent with no way to escape. The sounds—Fates, the sounds—five hundred years later, and I still hear them in my nightmares.
After that, the Bastards were cut down one after the next. They put up a good fight. Took down half their ranks until only one of us was left standing—me.
