“Her name was Elle. She is the last one left in her family, and she went a little bit funny in here. It just seemed to break her. Maybe it was for the best. Was it clean at least?”
They look at me as if I’ve sprouted another head.
“It was. One shot,” Mordecai says.
“That’s a relief,” I murmur, ignoring my desire to rile this pack up and instead focusing on survival. “We do need to leave, though. I’ve heard them getting ready, and I know they are mobilizing to start coming through in the next twenty-four hours, which means we need to be gone.”
“We?” Cadel asks in an icy voice.
I turn a sexy smile on him. His eyes narrow, so I walk closer, reaching out. He captures my hand before I can touch him, but the electricity that passes between us both is powerful, and he feels it too. I can see it in the widening of his eyes and the way he looks away, licking his lip.
“Yes, we,” I murmur. “Because she is my omega, and there’s nothing on this planet that is going to drag me away from her.” I flash him a grin designed to irritate him and break the strange feeling between us.
He bristles, and I love it.
“Enough,” Keres grumbles. “Let’s just go; we can fight about it later.”
“I look forward to it,” I purr.
I step past them, holding out my hand to the omega. She looks at it and frowns, but, in the end, she steps around me, refusing to take it. It’s okay; there’s still time to win her over while we find a way out of this hellhole.
“Who is in here?”
I blow out my breath. “Lots of us, more than I’ve ever seen, were taken. Possibly thousands.”
Mordecai heaves a frustrated sigh. “We need to get to the Resistance.”
“Oh, no, you’re not one of them, are you? The Resistance?” I bark a laugh as I lead them across a cracked road. Grass grows out in tufts of yellow and green. Massive trees have split the earth and the buildings, retaking the city. “The Resistance are helpless babes, screaming and stomping their feet.”
“They are doing something!” Mordecai growls, and I laugh again.
“Good little soldier, are you?”
He wants to hit me; he won’t. His instincts are challenging him to make me submit to him, but his training won’t let him. Cadel, on the other hand, is sizing me up already.
I can see that these two are going to be so much fun to seduce and, clearly, from my reaction, they are as much a part of this pack as I am. How interesting, and why don’t they recognise it? To be fair, I can’t evenremember seeing a pack in recent history or ever. They are rare and almost unheard of these days.
I can smell the rain in the air and look up, seeing a picture of dark purple-black clouds framed by dilapidated buildings. Running along windowsills are cats. Their patchy, ill-looking coats are dull, and the creatures themselves look demonic with longer legs, glowing blue eyes, and three tails each. They track our movements, but we don’t need to be worried about them; there are enough corpses that they will be satisfied.
“Ring a ding, dong, the dinner bells dinging, peeling, ringing,” I sing under my breath.
The omega watches me with a frown, and though I’ve never desired it with a single person before, I find myself suddenly almost desperate to know what she’s thinking.
“Do you like cats?” I ask and curse the stupidity of asking a question like that.
She looks at me, startled, looking both old and young. She’s timeless. When she looks at me, I feel like I’m falling, and when she looks away, I hit the ground hard, a part of me broken. Oh, yes, very, very mine.
I’ve never felt like this, but my father spoke to me about what a scent-matched omega feels like. He said it’s like finding your soulmate in a package designed to be all your favourite things. He severely understated it.
“Yes, I like cats.”
Suddenly, my question doesn’t feel so stupid.
I break into a jog, and to my intense pleasure, they keep up. After a while, I stop looking back to check on them, listening instead to their footsteps.
The crumbling ruins of vehicles remain in pockets throughout the city, but the ones on the street are the most deteriorated. The buildings thatshould have fallen are now held together by concrete and vines. Plastic and glass remain behind, not all of it, but enough of the old world to make this place feel alien. Most of the cities have been mined for all these resources.
Not Foreen, though.
