“Lincoln, you might be mooning at the artwork, but come look at Lennon’s guns. Trust me, you’ll be blown away and lining up behind me to bend over and dick our sweet omega too.”
“Sold!” I squeal as I reach up for a kiss from Lincoln then beeline over to Valak and my stash of weapons, because he’s kind of only seen the first part of it. Really, he had me at dicking.
Ares ruins my fun though, letting out his usual impatience bark to be let out back. I open the door and follow him out. While he forages, I stand on the back deck, breathing in the fresh mountain air. If the sun was up, I’d be cuddled up under Valak or Lincoln’s arm, pointing out the mountains over my fence. Instead, I fill my lungs with the scent of home and wait for Ares.
But he doesn’t come back. And as the minute stretches to two, a heavy unease settles in my bones. The instinctive realisation has me climbing slowly to my feet, calling out for Valak. We’re being watched.
But both Valak and Lincoln are already behind me.
“Get inside, Lennon. Call Gabe, check your cameras and do not come outside. Do you hear me? Do not come outside.” Valak speaks in a harsh whisper in my ear and gives my hip a squeeze before he slips away into the night.
Lincoln rushes me inside, repeating Valak’s words as he shuts the door, closing me in and locking them out. Sprinting through the house to my office, the screens are on, the cameras not picking up any movement and none of the alarms have triggered.
“Gabe.” I’m talking even before he can say a thing. And then I realise it’s his voice mail. I freeze the rush of panic that makes my heart beat heavy in my chest. But I don’t have time for panic. I lock everything down to focus on what I can control.
“Gabe, Ares, Valak, and Lincoln are outside. Nothing showed on my security system as a breach and we had no alarms triggered, but I’ve clearly got visitors coming in.” The message times out, and I call back.
“I’ll try Noah, but he’s going to be in surgery.” I get cut off again trying to figure out what to say. And as I dial back through, I finally get a visual on what is going on. “They look army, they’re definitely in a grey and blue uniform, about ten all up. They’re dragging Val, he looks unconscious, Lincoln is walking, and I can’t see Ares at all. I know what you said, I hear you in my head. Track me, hero.”
There’s no sense in hiding from the men streaming into my property, they know I’m inside. Pressing the intercom, I open the line and press record as well as live stream. The angle of the camera means my deck and outdoor patio is visible but everything beyond them is pitch black.
“I am a packed omega. I am part of Pack Teo and those are my alphas that you have outside. I have sent an urgent request to assist from the Alpha Alliance.”
The clear leader in this pack of soldiers is built like a brick shit house with an ugly sneer that makes him look like he’s been eating shit for years. There’s a pause after I finish talking, and I see him look over to the men at his back, where he mocks me before laughing like a hyena. “Yeah, nice try. Tell you what, I’ll count you down from ten. You open the door and come out, no one dies. We get to three and you’re still in there, we shoot.”
Maybe a better person would walk out that door. Every part of me wants to, but I won’t.
Double checking I’m streaming and recording my security feed, I stop for a last look at the two alphas that have rocked my world. Then, without another backwards glance, I turn and run. Stopping at the control panel near my office I press the intercom again. “I need longer than ten seconds. Three minutes, I’ll be out with a bag packed. Like I said, I’m a packed omega and need to take precautions for when I leave with you.”
I don’t watch or hear the leader’s response so focused on what I need to do. Opening my safe I grab the pre-packed backpack, stuffed full with as much cash, burner phones, fake IDs, and weapons as it can hold. I want to load a suitcase with all my belongings but clearly there’s no time for sentimentality. Sprinting out of my office, I hear the echo of his cruelty as he barks again, marking down the time to two minutes thirty.
Not even ten seconds later, I’m crab crawling through my escape tunnel like my ass is on fire. And I’ve got no doubt I set a personal best before I stop to check the last security screen at the end of the tunnel. One of the cameras finally catches how they got access. Like rats, they burrowed under the perimeter of the fortified fence, confirming what I already knew: I’m wanted by a group of professional assholes. I see a couple of men standing guard over their cars, all lined up nicely with the back of one sitting open, no doubt waiting for me.
At the far right of the screen lies my boy in a dark shadow. I can’t stop the whimper from escaping my lips, and I definitely can’t still the explosive rage that takes hold. I climb out of the hidden trap door and move like a ghost. A fucking vengeful ghost.
I should run. I will run. I never claimed to be a better person before, and I know when Valak and Lincoln catch up with me, they’re going to be wicked pissed, but a woman scorned and all that shit means I have to do this before I flee.
On silent feet, I manage to creep right up between them, and feel nothing when I shoot them in the back of the head, execution style, just like I was taught. Their bodies drop, and I have their guns in my hand probably before their hearts stop.
Snatching up one of the radios and the earpiece, I can hear the soon to be dead asshole leader make another sardonic count down to the last thirty seconds and use valuable time to toss the keys into the dark behind me. My whole being is eerily calm when I climb on top of the roof of one of their vehicles and line up my final shot. My aim is spot on, and the chaos that screams over the radio lets me know I got my mark and that this group of men need a new leader. My ass is on the seat and my foot on the accelerator before any of them can figure out their next move. To add to the chaos, I depress the charger and blow the front of my garden up, blocking their exit there too.
There’s this desolation that takes hold knowing I’m leaving behind Valak and Lincoln in danger, but it’s made a thousand times worse as this deep, deep sorrow rips my heart apart at having to leave the body of my boy behind.
I know Ares is dead. I literally feel my soul splitting in two. And the only thing that has me driving away from him is the deal I made him over and over, that we would never allow myself to be taken again. There’s no way I’m abusing the sacrifice my dog has given me; he gave his life so I could live.
27
LENNON
There was a chapter in my life after Broken Cube, and before Ares, that was particularly black. There’s no other way to put it other than to say life was hard, and I don’t know how it happened. A Ra Wn was gaining traction, I was working long hours and had just bought my house, but there was nothing inside me.
Some days I could barely put one foot in front of the other. There were a lot of times I couldn’t even look at myself in the mirror because I did not know the person staring back. And for someone so focussed on owning their future, it was a really confusing time, because the only person holding me back was me. Thankfully, I was at least aware enough to realise I was at a point in life where I knew I had to either decide to live differently or accept I was done.
And I was not a quitter. Just a lonely, scared, workaholic, which was blunt but real, so I did the most random thing I could find, and signed up for a survivalist experts retreat. I’m not sure if I read the sign-up form wrong or if my subconscious was being insistently optimistic, but instead of getting a twenty-one-hour deep dive into survival, I got a twenty-one-day exposure to it.
And every goddamn hard and awful lesson that Jack Black taught me during that time when I was crawling across the desert trying to find a way to give up, drives me now.
Jack was a man who had suffered a lot of loss in his long life. He had a no bullshit approach to living and took that experience, plus the skills he had honed as a decorated veteran, bought a ranch in the middle of nowhere and promised you’d survive. We fought a lot until he broke me completely, but then he rebuilt me with his bleak love that was just as deep and rich as the fluffy love you see in movies.
