Page 155 of Knot Their Soldier: Part Three

The enemy can still enter it.

My head jerks toward Knox. "Why aren’t we holding the Pass?"

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Halley

Knox is too busy to answer me.

His radio crackles, and he snatches it up at once, already issuing orders to someone on the eastern wall. Another officer barrels toward us through the chaos, speaking fast, and Knox turns to meet him with the full force of his attention.

He is being the Prime Alpha this fortress needs, and I cannot hate him for that. He has enough on his plate without needing to soothe his Omega too, and I am determined to be an asset, not a liability.

So I turn back to the battlefield and try to make sense of it without him.

Below us, the surviving enemy pours out of the forest in broken, staggered waves. Blaze’s traps have done a stunning amount of damage, and the missile strikes have ripped gaps through their formation. Bodies litter the lower slope and dark smoke drifts through the trees, but none of it is enough to stop the advance entirely.

They keep coming.

More and more of them.

The mountainside is crawling with movement as the scattered enemy presses toward the narrowing approach. From up here, it looks like a river finding its course. Every distant dot is drawn to the same point.

The Pass.

My pulse starts to pound harder as I track the placement of our soldiers again.

Our soldiers still aren't defending the entrance to the Pass. They're to the side, clustered at the mouth of the mountain road that leads up to Blackgate Fortress.

A cold, sick feeling opens in my stomach.

Another missile fires, and the blast tears through the rear of the advancing line, forcing men forward in uneven chunks. They stumble, regroup, and shove onward anyway, funneled tighter and tighter by the terrain and the constant pressure behind them.

The first wave reaches the Pass.

I brace for the clash. I expect the rebel line to surge forward and meet them there, to choke the entrance with bodies before the enemy can force their way through.

But they don't move.

The enemy floods into the narrow cut almost unchecked, cramming into the stone corridor while our soldiers hold farther back. Only when some of them break toward the mountain road do the rebels open fire. Gunfire tears across the slope, echoing off the mountains.

My grip locks on the frozen battlement until it hurts.

Knox stands right beside me, blazing with command, barking orders into the radio.

I don't understand. It looks like we're letting the enemy invade the last safe place left for Alphas, Betas, and Omegas. That can't be right.

Then Knox goes still beside me, his radio lifted near his mouth, his whole body fixed on the mountain below as if he's waiting for a sign.

I follow his stare back down the slope, and this time I see what I missed before. The open entrance to the Pass, the rebel line holding back, the enemy pressing deeper into the narrow stone corridor. It's not a failure.

My pulse stutters.

Knox was never trying to keep them out.

He was letting them in.

The Pass is a trap.