Weaning against the dark floor, Wren pulled her heavy body toward Cassian. She fought through the intense bodily ache. Despite her cracked features, she pushed herself onto her knees and leaned her face close to his.
Curiously, Cassian did not beat her. H
e lifted his eyes and watched in solitary horror. Surely, he had never seen an omega behave in such a way, and he certainly didn’t react with confidence.
Closing her eyes, Wren widened her nostrils. Hovering over his clammy hide, she scented him. The smell of his unkempt body nauseated her, but the feeling of control elated her.
“You dumb brute,” she said. “You’ve had me this whole time.”
Cassian clenched his teeth. They started to chatter. There was something different about him. He looked vulnerable. Stroking his hair back, gently, Wren whispered, “There, there. It’s okay now. I will take care of you.”
Cassian’s forehead dropped against hers with a dull thud. More tears fell from his irritated eyes. “I can’t stop this madness,” he wept and shook terribly as if suffering from a heavy flu or bout of insanity.
Wren’s throbbing mess of a face made no difference. Though she was covered in the splatter of her own blood, she allowed herself to remain quite composed.
“It was my fault that you hit me,” she said. “I spoke out of line.”
Cassian’s tears dried up instantly. Issuing a fake sniff of snot, the man revealed a hidden smirk. “You… like this… it’s beyond horrible.”
Wren could see the flash of lunacy in the movement and rash twitching of his facial features. She wasn’t sure how much longer he would stay docile, so she quickly took his hand and squeezed.
“I want you,” she whispered.
His foul breath hung between their lips. Cassian tugged his hand away from hers, but she gripped him tighter. “I will take you now.”
“No,” she whispered, looking back at the copies. “Not with them watching.”
“They don’t mean anything to me,” he said, reaching for his weapon to prove it.
Wren stopped him. “You wish to spread them throughout the world. Do you not?” Wren asked.
“When the coding is correctly synthesized, we can have the family we’ve deserved,” he said.
Wren sneered, albeit only slightly enough for Cassian to see. Glancing down at his hardly erect shaft, it all seemed to hit her. So obvious was the truth that she never came to think of it during the times she wondered about her creator.
He couldn’t breed. That’s why he made them. He must have lost his abilities decades ago. Grinning, she stroked his thigh, but it was obvious she didn’t mean it. “The triplets are yours,” she said.
“Don’t placate me,” he said.
“Take me back to your quarters. Have your way with me. Breed until you’re forced to knot,” she said.
Forcing the web of his palm against her throat, he squeezed. “I have yet to decide what to do with you,” he admitted. “But I can assure you, it will be worse than what they did to you in that house.”
He turned his head and let out a horrid shriek. Wren struggled away, but before Wren could run, Cassian knocked her head with the butt of his pistol. The heat of pain spread throughout the back of her head. Conceding to the repeated blows, she fell into the depths of his darkness.
The last thing she saw was the lifeless set of eyes on the dancing omegas on the stage.
Chapter Twenty-One
As days seemed to slip out from underneath him, Vash prepared for his oncoming death. His mouth was so dry he couldn’t even swallow. The whites of his eyes were a tapestry of yellow.
“Then there will come seven years of hunger and famine, and all the great abundance of the previous years will be forgotten in the land; and starvation will exhaust the land,” he whispered.
The sound of silence ran in his head like a grinding nail against a chalkboard, rhythm, angry and relentless.
The fear of the end. It washes over everything. Face the fire.
Vash opened his eyes to a sliver of light. Blinking through the pain of his narrowing pupils, he reached for the bars on the door. On some days, they would feed and water his throat, but the light never graced the windows of his prison cell.