I cover my mouth with my hands as a sob breaks free, then another.
He filmed me. Filmed the worst moment of my life and kept it as some sort of sick trophy.
I curl up on the floor and Luc lifts me onto his lap.
“I need a minute,” I say numbly.
“You have all the time you need,” he says. I take a deep breath as he strokes my hair softly, a purr rumbling against my cheek and softening my muscles.
“That’s some freaky magic,” I mumble, and his chest ripples underneath me.
“Only for you, brat.” Luc tips my chin up with the tip of his finger. “Tell me what’s in your head right now.”
I sigh. “I don’t know, Luc. I’m just… so tired. Of all of it.”
Examining my face, he nods. “And how do you feel about their plan?”
My pulse jumps as I consider Harper’s words.
“It’s insane,” I whisper sadly. “It won’t work, Luc.”
He presses his lips together, and my eyebrows fly up to my hairline.
“You think it will?”
He fixes his eyes on the far wall. “I think that I don’t want you anywhere near a camera. I don’t want you on display like that. But…”
My breath hitches. “We don’t have another plan.”
Shaking his head, he drops his nose to my hair and breathes in deeply. “I think we’re at the edge of something, brat. We would – wewill- fight for you. I’ll fight for you until the last breath leaves my body. But this isn’t a battle we can fight with fists and weapons. And I’m fucking petrified of how this might turn out, but I’m more petrified of doing nothing.”
The door knocks, and we both look up as Max slips inside. He takes us in on the floor and sits, his arms open as I untangle myself from Luc and crawl over to him awkwardly. His arms wrap around me, and he sighs.
“I called Bastien and Nikolai here. They’re coming now.”
My body twitches in anxiety, and Max picks up on it. “Ava?”
“I can’t ask this of you,” I confess. “I can’t. This is Nash’s home. If anything goes wrong, I can’t be responsible for him losing his family.”
I can’t face Nikolai and ask this of him.
Max lifts me up. “You keep saying that you can’t ask this of us, but you’re not asking, sweetheart. We will do whatever it takes to get you and the babies away from them. Whatever it takes. And we have our own back-up plans to keep Nash safe, you know. We always have in case anyone tracked us down here. He’s not registered. The government would put him up for adoption if they realized.”
“We’re all trapped, in different ways,” I whisper.
Maybe… maybe it’s time to break free.
I think about Nash, how his whole life is squeezed into a few acres of forest because he’s not registered with the Government. I think of my pack, trapped in a never-ending web of hiding to keep him safe. Leah, choosing her family over the chance for love and a real life of her own.
Emery, losing her life because she had to choose between going to hospital and losing her freedom. Harper, crawling on the floor in public because she can’t let anyone know that her pack cares about her.
I swallow, looking down. And me.
All the omegas, thousands of them, bagged and tagged like animals, tortured and starved, beaten and abused, raped and forced into slavery because the world turns a blind eye.
No more.Resolve straightens my spine. Not my daughter.
No fucking more.
