Page 53 of Knot All Is Ruined: Part 2

Chapter twenty-four

Since I showed Branko my marks, he refused to speak to me and left me in the back of the cave while he spoke with his men. Frustration at how he’d responded outweighed the fear I might have had trapped in a cave with men I didn’t know or trust. If they’d wanted to kill me, then they wouldn’t have carried me all the way here. Unless that changed now that Branko knew I wasn’t a victim.

Even though it was dark in the cave, I could tell from the entrance that it was light outside. We couldn’t have gone that far from where we’d camped for the night—right? Either way, I knew the moment my pack found out I wasn’t there, they’d be hot on our trail. Closing my eyes, I reached through my bonds, trying to see if I could reach them, and let them know I was okay. While I could feel them there, I didn’t get much of a response. Not really knowing the limitations of this kind of thing, maybe we were too far apart for them to know anything more than I was still alive.

“Here,” Branko said, causing me to open my eyes as he threw a canteen my way.

“Why bother?” I asked, not moving. “Obviously, your opinion of me has changed now that you know I’m bonded with them, so why keep me alive?”

He studied me for a moment, then crossed his arms. “What I can’t come to terms with is the Danella I knew back at the outpost wanted nothing more than to return home with her friends. Now here you are, bonded to Lucian, who you hated, and a bunch of Southern soldiers. How can you not be in this against your will? Fuck, how can Lucian share you? That man is a possessive bastard.”

That brought a smile to my lips. “Yes, yes, he is. Funny enough, so are the others, and that didn’t go so great in the beginning. There were a few fist fights they tried to hide from me, but it’s not that hard to notice when fat lips and black eyes appear out of nowhere. What essentially changed things though, is Lucian marked me first. He could feel how I felt about the others. When my heat came upon me, and I craved them as much as him, he realized I needed more than just him.”

“Nah, that’s some sort of brainwashing going on. It has to be,” Branko argued. “My bet is Lucian knows he’s being hunted by his father and decided to team up with others who would help him take out his old man.”

“In a manner of speaking, yes, that’s true,” I shared.

Now that threw Branko for a loop. “Excuse me?”

“Lucian is working with the others of my pack to take down the General,” I explained.

“So you think the seven of you can overthrow a man like General Rasvan?” he said with a laugh.

I shrugged. “We will probably have a better chance after we convince the rebels to join us.”

The laughter cut off as he heard what I’d just said. “Wait one goddamn minute. Is that why you’re here?”

“Whoops, looks like the cat’s out of the bag,” I drawled.

If I could get Branko on board with this idea, then it would only help us get the powers that be to listen. They trusted him enough to send him on a critical mission as well as lead this team of men. Plus, it would help me gauge the reaction of people.

“Start at the beginning,” Branko ordered as he sat cross-legged in front of me.

“You know the beginning, we were attacked, so I grabbed my girls and ran. Unfortunately, we didn’t get very far before the South spotted us and were hot on our trail. Of course, they had no idea we were Omegas and not soldiers, so when we ended up getting cornered we jumped off a cliff and down into the badlands. I thought we could have lost them there, but I didn’t account for the fact that I’d gotten a concussion or slammed into a boulder on the way down.

We hid in a small cave since I was in no shape to run off into the darkness, beaten to hell. That’s where the Southern soldiers found us and where I first met the men of my now pack. They brought us back to the main Southern Military base at the capitol, and I received medical attention,” I shared. “Is this what you wanted to know, or should I skip to a different part?”

“No, I want to know everything. If you expect me to believe a fucking word out of your mouth about this, I need to know how it’s even possible,” Branko muttered, motioning for me to continue.

“You know, for a Beta, you’re acting an awful lot like an asshole Alpha right now,” I shot back. “All you had to do was say please, continue. No need to be a prick about it.”

He gritted his teeth then nodded his head. “Dani, please continue. I’d like to hear the whole story.”

“No problem. I have a feeling I’m gonna need to explain this to more than just you by the time this is all said and done,” I sighed. “Where was I? Oh, right, medical attention. That’s where I woke up, in the Med Center, and let me just say that is where you want to be when you are in the condition I was in. I’m not sure I would have survived even if I’d made it back to Oscad. The South is incredibly advanced in their medical treatment.”

Branko gave me a look that told me I better move on to more important things.

“Once I was healed enough to move around and work on building up my strength as well as gaining some weight, that’s when my pack came to me with a deal. See, the girls had told them what the brand on my neck meant, and they decided it would be smart to take advantage of the knowledge I had. The terms were if I helped them learn about the North and shared all the information I knew, they would get Tori and Violet back to Oscad. It would appear that Oscad has been sending covert teams to collect all the Omegas that had been sent away against their will. Somehow they were made aware that we were in the South and, interestingly enough, there was a connection between the Alpha who leads our unit and someone in the Oscad government. Well, he’s not in the government. However, his pack mates are, and they all share an Omega. Whatever, you get the point. All I was trying to prove is that the deal I made was legit. So here I was, given a chance to stick it to the North and get my friends back home safely. How could I turn it down?” I asked.

“What about you? Did that mean you were theirs? Is that how you ended up bonding with them because of this deal?” Branko pressed.

“I was promised that once I’d given them all the information I knew and completed their military training, if I didn’t want to stay, I would be allowed to return to Oscad as well. In hindsight, I don’t think that’s what they wanted to do, and the whole thing was a ploy to make me give them a chance. They’d set their sights on me the moment we met as the perfect Omega for them. However, the challenge was them convincing me of that, so I became a member of their unit. We lived, trained, and ate together for a little over a week before something happened and we got sent on our first mission. That’s where all the carefully laid plans blew up in our faces and how we ended up here,” I said.

Branko studied me for a moment, scratching his chin. “That doesn’t explain how Lucian ended up in all this with them.”

“He was the one who blew up their plans,” I pointed out. “There was a perceived attack on a main power plant in an area of the South that the North shouldn’t have been able to get to or know about. When we arrived on the scene, Lucian was lying in wait, assuming, like yourself, that I was with this group of men against my will. He snatched me, marked me, and we journeyed down the river and through the woods to get back to the North. Only thing was, my pack was made of one of the top elite units in the Southern Military. They tracked his ass down in three-ish days and ta-da, here we are.”

“Yeah… I’m going to need more specifics than ta-da,” Branko countered. “Lucian marked you against your will, stole you from this team who you claim have feelings for you, and now you’re one happy family?”