Crack.
She’d twitched at so loud a noise.
A tickle, he’d told her. Some blood for show.
Yet her boy was screaming, every cell in Wren shouting for her to kill all who stood between her and her child.
Crack.
So much blood. The ear-piercing screams of an innocent.
And she could not go to him… because those who had gathered had not come to this place to see a kid tortured. They had come to stare at her. The defeated Omega Caspian had bitten. The wild thing who had survived her Omega rampage and been cowed by their great leaders.
To see if she’d snap under pressure and entertain them once more with her death.
Crack.
The unbroken pinky finger of her left hand curled around the nearest living support. Wren took the hand of the man responsible for her boy’s torment, held it with all she could, because she could not bear this alone.
The intimate touch before his men… Caspian allowed it.
Just as he allowed her silent tears to run free, the convenient mist concealing every trace.
Crack.
Four strikes and Alec had lost the ability to stand, hanging from chained wrists like a broken doll.
Crack.
Voice grown hoarse, the boy’s screams no longer reached her ears. Though his shoulders shook with visible sobs.
Crack.
Lavender eyes turned away from the rivulets of blood running down the flesh of her beloved child. They settled on a muddy brown gaze.
Caspian, the arrogant and deceitful king, saw everything.
Unmitigated despair.
Crack.
Squeezing the tiny finger she had hooked to his palm, he offered. “It won’t kill him.”
And that justified this?
“The kid came to me. He took an oath when he joined, swore to forsake all family. That was his choice.”
Crack.
“Which means”—significance burned in that treacherous gaze—“that he is no longer your boy. He belongs to me.”
Always. Alec would always be her boy.
Even when he was old and gray. Even after her body had long since decomposed in the mud, Alec would be her boy.
Crack.
Love, she felt pure emotion even in that horrible moment. And Wren knew Caspian could feel it churning in her. And knew that the Alpha was well aware it was not for him.
Crack.
His eyes narrowed, a less than subtle reminder that this was her punishment too. A test that, should she fail, would be the end of more than just her life.
Alec who suffered. Mikael who healed. Both were nothing to him.
Crack.
That was why she’d been paraded before his slaves, his servants, his whores, and his Syndicate. An Omega. A woman he’d defeated at her most dangerous. Who he’d mounted in abject victory. Who he had marked in a frenzy of violence that would never leave her skin.
Crack.
Each lash might as well have been lain to her flesh.
“That’s enough!” Caspian’s voice boomed across the massive space. Loud enough that even a thousand gallons of rushing water could not drown out his bark. “Punishment has been served.”
Panting from the exertion of wielding the whip, Toby cut a glance over his shoulder. Then he turned, bare chest covered in a myriad of tattoos. He looked right to her.
The way her bones vibrated, Wren knew he called through their link, demanded that she give him her attention. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t lift her eyes away from the weight of Caspian’s stare.
She would never be able to look at Toby again.
“It could have been the kid’s hand. Remember that, pretty mouse, before you hold a grudge.” It wasn’t Caspian words that made her flinch, it was what was buried far beneath them—a hint of regret.
It was as if even a megalomaniac of his proportions had finally recognized that what he’d done had… eternal repercussions.
As if the thought had never occurred to him.
As if his unsettled feelings were foreign, uncomfortable.
What vibrated from him was too subtle to be called guilt, and too selfish to be culpability.
His concern was utterly selfish, the male bothered by the loss of something he’d never had to begin with.
As if to offer this recognized deficit that lingered between them, he spoke over her head. “Kieran, have the boy taken down and put somewhere dry.”
Her face was so warm, the splints binding her fingers creaking from the force she’d exerted gripping Caspian’s hand for support. Which had to be why her bones protested when she let go, her fingers slipping from Caspian’s grasp.
Chapter 8
“No.”
No?
Back in Caspian’s den and away from the eyes and ears of his men, Wren had wept. The ugly kind of sobs that left one rocking themselves and breathless.
Curled up in the corner, sopping wet from the waterworks downpour, her dress was no longer white.
Dingy, like the Alphas’ whole fucking hive, it suited her.
Stuck to her skin, marking the floor where she’d plopped down in a puddle, it gave her a barrier to shut out the males when she buried her face in her knees.
After she’d purged, hiccupped, and hated, silence stole over her thoughts.