Prologue: Coronation Day
Earth.
After the Second Fall.
Location: Unknown
My name is Rae, and they took everything from me…
“Slide it in.” He grinned, salivating heavily at the mouth. “Deeper, yes… so fucking deep.”
Darkness enveloped her sanity like a warm blanket. Cavernous caresses from hypodermic needles tore through her arms, keeping her asleep. Again, she was forced into slumber, forced to lie in cold and dormant sleep until the time was right to wake her again. The darkest horrors allowed her no form of comfort. As Rae dreamt, her demons awakened. And somehow, she was used to their tormented ways.
She had been fighting all her life—fighting to hold on, fighting for some ounce of freedom and liberty, fighting to survive. Fighting for the men who took her and left her alone again to fend for herself. There were no truths found. There was only darkness, isolation, and the inevitability of her capture and death.
“Vash… Killian… Lucas…” Heavy pain ran through her veins. A fog that refused to lift enveloped her mind. “Where are my men?”
“Your men will not be coming back.”
A man shrouded in darkness hastily rolled a cigarette, licking the edges gently. He lit up and breathed in deeply. Tobacco spilled onto the floor, and his eyes burned a dark shade of red. The man’s name was Severin, the newly appointed minister of propaganda of the new republic. A tall and sinister snake of a man, he watched over her with elongated eyes. Now, she was trapped deep within his coiling tail, even kept away from her twin sister, Ruby. He’d kept her near him, only providing her nourishment when necessary. He forced her to understand everything she was taught in the old world meant nothing now. Her destiny was to not only lose herself, but her family as well.
She was a captive. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Manly hands carried her body, speeding her through a darkened hallway. “Hurry. We do not have much time,” he urged.
Addressing new faces, horrible faces, faces with eyes that glowed in the dark and teeth that clicked in rapid succession, Severin muttered, “Everyone is waiting. Place her inside the center of the machine, like so.”
Months upon months stacked against each other, rolling into nothingness, into one moment she couldn’t twist away from. It always did seem like every time she twisted away, she fell back into another web of insanity. Severin claimed they had constructed a new world, but it was exactly like the old one. The only difference was how they conducted their torture.
Now that the reconstruction had come, Severin prepared her daily for the next steps. He told her of his plan to broadcast her image across the globe. She’d be his little star. With her voluptuous body and hourglass hips, she was already the most beautiful icon Severin had ever come across, but he promised her he wouldn’t use her for sexual pleasure. According to him, she had another purpose.
That’s what he told her, night after night, breathing deep into her ear like a hungry worm searching for the core of the bright-red-and-glowing apple. Still, he left out plenty of details to surprise her.
His eyes burned severely. Every time she saw him, she felt the pain of her children sear through her empty womb. All she wanted was for this to end, to find some semblance of peace. She thought of her alphas patiently waiting for her. Despite her circumstances, she tried not to laugh. They sure as hell weren’t waiting patiently. If she knew them like she thought she did, they were frothing at the mouth, desperate as her to come together as four again.
And despite the pain Severin forced her to feel, she couldn’t stop the heat emanating from between her legs. Nor could she stop the soft flow of dewy wetness from dribbling between her pussy lips. She needed her strong and possessive alphas, not this ungrateful, imbecilic puny man.
Severin lowered his voice, presumably so that she would take his next words seriously. “Look around you, dear.”
Reality came rushing back. She took in the terrifying sights in the same way she took the drugs from the needles. Numb, numb, numb. There were hundreds of alphas gathered to watch. Their eyes lit up, as sti
rring as candles in a cold, dark desert. “Who are these people?”
“They are your audience,” he muttered. “You may not realize it yet, but you’ve been asleep for quite some time. So much of the world has been waiting for your reawakening, and now the time has come to show them that you’re ready.”
She took a deep breath, but the air seemed to sting her lungs. “Ready? F-F-For what? What could they possibly want to witness?”
Severin’s lips twitched eagerly. “Well, of course, they want to see the show, my dear,” he said through a tight chuckle. “You are ready to lead, are you not?”
Rae’s eyes dropped and scanned what housed her. She had been set in a subterranean auditorium, body held inside her own glass casing. A pod. Another capsule to rest in. “The show...? But you despise me. I can’t lead anyone.”
“Dear Rae. Remember what I told you so many times before? It’s not about what you can do. A martyr needs an audience,” he said.
A man next to the minister giggled maniacally. “Open her up. I want to see how hollow the bitch really is.”
But Severin would not kill her. Not yet. The public wanted a story they could rally around. Although Rae was the perfect martyr for the new regime, she was aware that if he killed her too fast, the public might descend into chaos again. For all regimes were built on glass castles. Severin had a lot of planning to do, and he was counting his cards wisely, stacking them as need be. But the walls could shatter at any moment.
As she stretched and tested her limits, her tits stretched back and appeared as two perfectly sculpted orbs. The men inched toward her to see a better sight. Soft and subtle, her body had adapted to the effects of childbirth quite well. The wideness of her hips was an alpha’s only weakness. The mother… There was something about the idea that brought on a certain type obsession or hunger in an alpha.
She was now more than a piece of flesh or candy to suck on, and perhaps that gave her some level of agency. On the other hand, she was the one still trapped.
The herd of slobbering alphas shared the same hungry expression. Their eyes rolled into tired slits, and they extended their tongues as if she were near enough to taste. Every glance they sent her way traced her body until she absolutely knew that whatever this gathering ceremony was about, it was going to change her life forever.
“Back, you mutts,” Severin said, standing above them on a round metal podium. “I will not let you bleed her.”