My lashes tore apart like Velcro, each separation a microscopic agony. The world hemorrhaged into a fractured focus, convulsing fragments of reality, shadows out of reach, sinister laughter in the distance.
A groan broke from my throat, raw and unfamiliar. My head lolled to one side, and the alleyway tilted with it.
Questions battered against my skull like trapped wasps, but grasping them was like trying to clutch razor blades underwater.I clawed in another breath that scraped my lungs raw—a desperate confirmation that death hadn't claimed me yet.
And slowly, painfully, my consciousness knitted itself back together, each stitch a barbed hook through exposed nerves.
The world flickered in and out like a dying bulb. Concrete bit into my cheek, then vanished, then returned with teeth. My shoulder blades pressed against something rough and wet. A breeze whispered across my thighs, and goosebumps rippled up flesh that shouldn't have been exposed. My right eye wouldn't respond to commands to open; the lid felt welded shut, swollen to the size of a plum.
Blood pulsed behind it with each heartbeat. I tried to form a thought, but it slipped away, leaving only the dull echo of its passing.
I tried to move, but everything lagged behind the intention. My arms dragged against the ground with a boneless heaviness, and my legs might as well have belonged to someone else. When I forced my head up, the world pitched sideways, a nauseating lurch before it settled into a woozy sway.
Shapes moved above me. Dark silhouettes blocked out what little illumination filtered into the alley. My one good eye strained, blinking hard, trying to pull its edges into something recognizable. Slowly, the shadows sharpened into figures. Familiar ones. Broad shoulders. Predatory stillness. Bane’s pack. Still here. Still encircling me like a closing fist.
Then, hands were on me. Multiple hands, touching my exposed skin, fingers trailing across my arms, my stomach, my thighs. Each touch made my skin crawl, made me want to disappear entirely, to sink into the ground and cease existing. I tried to twist away, to protect myself, but my body wouldn't obey properly. The movements I managed were weak and uncoordinated, easily overcome.
Something closed around my throat. Fingers. A hand. Pressure that cut off air mid-gasp and kept it from returning. I felt my windpipe compress beneath the grip, felt my body's immediate panic as oxygen stopped reaching my lungs. My hands came up automatically, clawing at the fingers holding me, but they had no strength. My nails scraped uselessly against skin I couldn't break.
The face above me came into focus slowly. Not Bane. One of the others. The younger one with the scar across his lip. His expression held satisfaction as he watched me struggle, as he felt my body convulse beneath him, trying desperately to breathe. He was kneeling on me, using his weight to keep me pinned, one hand around my throat while his other held my wrist against the concrete.
I couldn't scream. Couldn't call for help. Could only thrash weakly while my lungs burned and my vision started tunneling. The darkness creeping in from the edges felt different from unconsciousness. Heavier and more final.
Through the haze, I saw movement. Someone else was approaching, his form becoming clearer as he got closer. An older pack member. Graying hair catching the distant streetlight. He was holding something, but my oxygen-starved brain couldn't process what it was at first.
Then, the blade caught the light. A knife. Long, sharp, and purposeful.
Terror flooded through me with enough force to momentarily override the suffocation. My body found strength it shouldn't have had, bucking harder against the hands holding me down, twisting with a desperate energy that accomplished nothing except exhausting what little air remained in my system.
I watched the man with the knife approach, watched him kneel on my other side. His free hand pressed against my bare stomach, holding me still. The touch was clinical, like a doctorpreparing to operate, but nothing about this was medical. This was execution.
Bane's voice cut through the muffled sounds around me. I couldn't hear the words, couldn't focus enough to understand, but I saw him. Saw him nod. Saw the permission granted.
The blade moved toward my stomach, and I couldn't do anything to stop it. The hand on my throat had loosened slightly, enough to let me gasp in a fraction of air, but not enough to let me scream. Not enough to cry out for help that was probably too far away, anyway.
The knife touched my skin first. Cold metal pressed against my abdomen just below my ribs. I felt it dimple the flesh, felt my body try instinctively to flinch away from the sensation, but the hands holding me down prevented any real movement.
Then he pushed, and the blade slid in.
The sensation was indescribable. Not just pain, burning, and ice-cold simultaneously, but radiating outward as the knife traveled deeper. It felt like my body was being opened, something fundamental violated in a way that made my mind want to shut down completely rather than process what was happening.
I felt every inch as the blade sank into my flesh. Felt the resistance of skin, then the give as it pierced through. Felt my muscles part around the steel. Felt something deep inside—an organ maybe, tissue definitely—tear as the knife found its depth. The invasion was intimate and horrible, creating space where my body insisted there shouldn’t be.
Blood welled up immediately. Hot and sticky, spreading across my stomach in a pool that quickly grew too large. I felt it under me, soaking into the waistband of my underwear, mixing with the cold sweat already covering my skin. The warmth was obscene against the cold of everything else, and the amount was terrifying. Too much blood. Leaving too fast.
The pain intensified with each heartbeat, each pulse pushing more blood out around the knife that was still buried in my abdomen. I wanted to scream, needed to scream, but the hand on my throat had tightened again the moment the blade entered, preventing anything except a strangled whimper that sounded inhuman even to my own ears.
My working eye rolled back, showing me the sky above the alley. Dark with city lights painting it orange rather than black. Stars twinkled radiantly across my limited field of vision. Peaceful. Utterly divorced from what was happening to my body.
This was death. I knew it with the certainty that comes from feeling life drain away in hot pulses. The knife had found something vital, had torn something that couldn't be fixed, and I was bleeding out on an alley floor while men I'd tried to escape laughed at my suffering.
My Alphas' faces flashed through my mind. I'd never tell them how much they'd meant to me. Never accept their marks. Never have the life I'd started believing I deserved to live.
The service door exploded open with a sound like thunder. Metal crashed against brick hard enough to make the impact echo through the alley, and suddenly, the hands holding me down were gone. The pressure on my throat released, and I dragged in a desperate breath that burned through my damaged windpipe.
My vision was tunneling, darkness eating away at the edges, but I turned my head toward the sound. Toward the doorway. Toward the three figures charging through like avenging angels made flesh.
Kade. Theo. Lucian. My Alphas.
