A few minutes earlier
Devastation vibrated through me. For the first time in a hundred and twenty years, I didn’t know how to react.
I hung from the ceiling as Cobra, Sadie, Xerxes, and Ascher moaned beside me. Everyone looked awful.
Like a desperate man, I looked back and forth at Sadie’s and Cobra’s battered bodies.
My eyes burned with unshed tears, while my throat was scratchy with the screams that bubbled up but wouldn’t release.
Every muscle in my body strummed with tension and pain. A type of mind-melting agony I hadn’t experienced for over a hundred years.
The remnants of suffering dragged me back into the past, back when I’d been Sadie’s age and unaccustomed to physical suffering. Back to the last time I’d known true, bone-wrenching pain.
When the oligarchy had paid me to hunt down a massive elk that was carrying a plague.
I was a new alpha, and it was a job nobody else had wanted.
Over mountains and vast forests, I stalked the plagued beast.
At first, I hunted as a bear. But my shifted form required more nutrients, and I quickly ran out of food a few weeks into the hunt.
I didn’t have time to waste, so I shifted back and followed my prey on two legs.
It was the dead of winter, which meant the red sun didn’t bother to rise above the horizon.
At first, snow turned to sleet, and it froze to my face in a mask of ice.
Next came the hail.
Massive balls of ice pummeled from the sky. They smashed into trees with loud cracks. Ice exploded around me.
Then the blizzard hit.
When I finally found the elk, I was frozen to the bone and had fasted for two weeks straight.
In a blur of agony, I snapped its neck with my bare hands. Covered in blood, icicles dripping off each of my braids, I turned around and trekked back.
I didn’t reach civilization for another two weeks.
Over a month with no food.
Before my journey, I’d foolishly thought that if I was hungry enough, I would just hunt for food until I was nourished.
But in the dead of winter, the few animals that didn’t hibernate were the ones crafty enough to escape a predator.
That month, I learned an important lesson.
When food was nonexistent and every cell in your body was screaming for sustenance, you were already too weak to fix the problem.
Hiking for miles in the hail and driving sleet, something changed inside me. My body burned with hunger for so many hours that a part of me stopped recognizing the agony.
Every step forward through the chest-deep snow was a step away from giving in to my base urges.
The urge to curl up into the cold and sleep. The urge to gnaw on bark like a madman.
Ever since that hunt, physical pain hadn’t affected me the same way.
I’d left a piece of myself in those woods.
In the murder of a diseased elk.
The man who had returned from the hunt had known a depth of suffering that was unmatched.
Either the cold broke you, or it remade you into something sharper than ice and tougher than pounding hail.
I’d almost forgotten how bad pain could hurt.
Almost.
Now, hanging by a rope from the ceiling with Cobra and Sadie badly beaten beside me, I remembered.
Once again, I was the young man hiking through the desolate forest, fighting for survival as trees howled around like monsters.
I vibrated with angst.
Not for myself.
For them. The alphas I cared about.
On top of that, Xerxes cut a pathetic figure, and my alpha instincts screamed at me to protect the omega.
It was wrong to see an omega bloody. Unnatural.
My chest even hurt for Ascher. His tattoos were indiscernible among blood and bruises, and both his eyes were swollen shut.
Suddenly, Sadie was cut down by the fucker who dared hurt her.
She fell to the ground with a crack, her legs and arms splayed.
It took every ounce of strength left in my body to not roar like a maniac. I trembled with the urge to help her up.
With a weak gasp, the little alpha rolled to the side and coughed up blood. But she didn’t cry and break down. She stumbled onto her legs.
When she turned so I could see her face fully, I raggedly sucked in air. My chest rumbled.
Sadie’s gold skin was covered in a patchwork of bruises, but the worst was her face.
Two massive black eyes were dark and ghastly against her delicate bone structure. She mirrored Ascher.
Trembling violently, the little alpha hunched over with her hands on her knees as she breathed raggedly.
White hair hung around her face, a snarled mess covered in blood.
It reminded me of the elk’s entrails splashed across the snow after I’d savaged it with my bare hands.
The leaders had assured me the disease didn’t affect alphas, but you could never know for sure. Back then, a part of me had hoped the disease would take.
It hadn’t.
Now I uselessly tugged at the restraints still tying my wrists.
I was a second from bellowing at Spike to hurry the fuck up when Xerxes stumbled over and helped support the little alpha.
My roar died in my throat as the much larger omega leaned against her. Even battered, they were both stunning in a softer, more beautiful sort of way.
There was something delicate about them.
Cobra, Ascher, and I were built for torture, built to withstand the atrocities of war, pain, and suffering.
They weren’t.
Yet here they were, destroyed among us.
I swallowed a low growl and reminded myself that looks could be deceiving. Instinctually, I wanted to wrap the little alpha up and yell at the omega to stay safe.
Subconsciously, my mind was bellowing at me to protect them even while consciously, I recognized their competence.
It was torment.
The only thing that stopped me from growling at Sadie like a maniac was Jinx.
My youngest sister had always been strange, and from the outside, she looked like a delicate waif that couldn’t harm a fly. An innocent little girl that needed protecting.
Even hanging from the ceiling with blood dripping from my mouth, I couldn’t stop the slight chuckle that shook my chest.
I’d seen the little girl make grown soldiers cry with a few choice words.
At school, they had elevated Jinx to the highest classes because, even as a six-year-old, her intelligence had been unfathomable.
She was also the class bully.
I’d received detailed letters from Jala and Jess about how Jinx kept making her older classmates cry.
Of course, they thought it was funny.
The lesson of it all: Looks meant nothing.
I repeated this mantra in my head as Sadie and Xerxes held on to each other.
The omega stared down at the little alpha with an intensity that made me want to growl at him that she was mine. Not his. Claim her in every way possible, so he knew who she belonged to.
Fuck it, that was how Cobra acted.
No, I needed to be better.
We’d all just been tortured for hours. Two dead alphas were splattered across the floor in hundreds of tiny pieces.
If all five of us were going to survive this new realm, I needed to be a leader.
With a crash, Spike cut Cobra down, and his pale body slumped against the concrete floor.
My heart crashed with him as I stared down at the man I’d been trying to not focus on.
We were a partnership.
I’d told him I would always be by his side, and I meant it.
Yet once again he was suffering unmercifully, and I couldn’t stop it.
I willed Cobra to move, to drag himself to his feet and give me his signature cocky sneer.
He remained collapsed and unmoving.
Sadie and Xerxes swayed laboriously as they struggled to hold each other up.
Ascher was cut down next, and his tattooed fingers shook with stress.
Blood dripped from both his eyes, and it tracked across his harsh cheekbones like tears.
It didn’t make him look soft.
Ascher’s expression was hard as granite. He wasn’t a man to be fucked with, and a small part of me was grateful for his presence.
Cobra and Sadie consumed my thoughts obsessively. Xerxes’s omega status made my instincts go haywire.
But Ascher was just another alpha, a soldier.
Someone that could stand beside me and help protect them.
He stared at Sadie as she held on to Xerxes, like a sick man praying to the sun god.
Ascher’s obsession with her was acceptable, as long as he kept himself in check and proved his loyalty.
If he put Sadie or Cobra in harm’s way ever again, I would murder him with my bare hands.
He wasn’t getting another chance.
Finally, Spike cut me down from my restraints.
I landed on my feet and barely took stock of my injuries. Already I’d cataloged my aches and dismissed them.
My heavy muscles struggled to extend and contract properly after hanging from the ceiling for so long. It took a moment of centering myself before I could lean down and drag Cobra’s body off the floor.
I cradled him against my chest.
The stunning diamonds and crystals embedded in his skin didn’t have their usual shine.
Even his snakes were hurting.
Now that I knew Cobra didn’t have a beast form—he was the beast—a lot of things that had confused me over the years made sense.
In the shifter realm, after we’d battled fae monsters, I’d always had to fuck the intensity out of him.
He’d always struggled to rein in his aggression and settle down.
The urge to fight wouldn’t leave him until I pinned his gorgeous face against the wall and drove my knotted cock into his ass. It wasn’t until I’d filled him with my cum that his eyes would go back to normal.
Only then would the shadows stop writhing across his pale flesh.
He lost himself fully in the heat of battle and stopped pretending to be civilized.
Now Cobra’s neck hung limply across my forearm, his gorgeous face scrunched up in pain.
Unlike with the rest of us, Cobra’s flesh wasn’t just covered in hideous bruises. He was also covered in hundreds of tiny cuts.
Someone had tried to cut his jewels out of his skin and failed.
My gut told me it was Cobra’s father’s doing.
If he was going to be the prince of the Mafia, the prince of the city, he was going to have to prove himself.
I shivered at that awful realization.
The don was a darker, more polished version of his son; where Cobra was barely controlled aggression and fire, the don was a blade.
“You can go,” Spike said gleefully, and I barely heard him, too worried about the abused man hanging limp in my arms.
A low rumble rattled through my chest.
I breathed in the violence that made me want to bellow and charge out of the room like a madman.
How dare they hurt Cobra and Sadie like this.
Instead, I walked slowly.
Ascher’s tattooed fingers wrapped around my arm for support, and we both pretended not to notice how badly he was shaking.
Sadie latched onto Ascher’s arm as Xerxes held her upright on her other side.
I held Cobra carefully against my chest and tried not to jostle him while I lent the other’s support.
When we finally got out into the rainy night, Cobra’s long black lashes fluttered open.
Neon lights reflected off his pale skin.
Piercing emerald eyes stared up at me as the rain rinsed the blood from the open cuts on his stunning face.
“Thank you,” his sinful lips mouthed.
An alpha purr rumbled through my chest in response.
Cobra chuckled softly. Then the bastard snuggled his head against my bicep like he wasn’t a grown six-foot-five warrior.
My heart beat harder in my chest.
I loved that about him. Ruled by his baser urges and living by a code of ethics that no one else understood, Cobra was refreshingly different.
He didn’t need to act strong; he just was. There was something intoxicating about a man who didn’t pretend to be someone he wasn’t.
Cobra was completely relaxed in my arms, trusting me to take care of him when he was at his most vulnerable.
At any other time, I would have marveled at the noise shaking through my chest. Everyone knew alphas only purred for omegas. Not other alphas.
I was too exhausted and worried about Cobra to care.
His long sooty lashes rested delicately against his high cheekbones, and he smiled contentedly.
The two alphas and omega clinging to me for support said nothing as my chest continued to purr.
We slowly limped down the street as a unit.
Anyone who tried to harm them messed with me, and you didn’t want to cross a centuries-old alpha bear who had people to protect.
I’d raze the realm.
