The place I’d come from—it was dark and agonizing.
I needed a long shower.
Trying not to let the bunk creak too loudly, I swung my legs over the edge and climbed down.
Pain or not, I needed to dislodge some of these memories because alarm bells were going off—and I couldn’t get that one word out of my head.
Danger.
PHANTOM
After a day of hunkering down in our cell, we were all a little less tense than we had been the first time we’d seen the threat on the wall. None of us were relaxed, but this morning the cell wasn’t completely vibrating with tension.
Five days more to survive.
I was drying myself off post shower, when I heard footsteps. I turned to see Vandle leaning against the wall beside me. Crescent’s giggles were loud from the cell, contrasting Karma’s deep, gruff tone, and Vandle spoke quietly enough they wouldn’t hear.
“There might be a problem with our appeal.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.
Problems weren’t an option. Not with Crescent. Keeping her safe until our appeal call was hard enough, but trying to keep her to ourselves if we had to wait for the next pack member’s call?
We’d all end up dead, while Crescent and Sin would be taken and abused.
“What kind of problem?” I asked.
“Not sure.”
I opened my eyes and waited for him to continue, grabbing my sweats from the countertop and sliding them on. Surely he knew that wasn’t anything I could work with.
When I was fully dressed and he still hadn’tfucking elaborated, I glared at him. I liked him a lot better when he was fully feral.
“That’s useless to me. You know that, right? Are you trying to stress me out for no reason?”
“I had a dream,” he said, ignoring the way my eyebrows shot up.
A… what?
“I’ve been getting flashes of memories, and I don’t know. It’s about Sin. His eyes, there’s something…” Vandle winced, like thinking about it pained him. “Something wrong.”
Sin’s eyeswerean anomaly, but we’d always put it down to the experiments he’d lived through, or a genetic mutation. I didn’t know how that would threaten our assessment when we got to our appeal.
But now, there was the fact that the dark bond hadflipped, too. He shouldn’t be able to use the commands on us—but we also shouldn’t be able to evenhavetwo omegas with a dark bond.
It was all strange, and if Vandle had a bad feeling, we’d be better off looking into that.
“Wrong how?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but I can’t shake this bad feeling about the appeal. There’s a library in here, right? Have we got anything we could trade for books?”
He was fucking lucky. I’d been building a relationship with the Archiva pack just like Sin built his relationship with the Redgraves.
Karma and I had cut off a lot of fingers for them, given a lot of alphas black eyes or broken arms for disrespecting the books.
I sighed. “Don’t say anything to the others until you know… Well, more than the pathetic information you have right now. Let’s take Crescent with us. The Archiva pack owes me alotof library books.”
The grin on Crescent’s face when I told her Vandle and I were taking her out was incandescent.
