For some reason, that little show of emotion soothed her as nothing else had. Was it possible there was a small part of him that remembered the connection she’d never been able to forget?
His expression gave nothing away, but she clung to the hope nonetheless.
Eyes sinking shut, she allowed the betas to remove her robe.
Cool air brushed her skin. Her nipples tightened, her legs shaking as she stood before them all, exposed.
The sound of cracking glass had her eyelids springing open.
Skolov’s palms smashed against his pod, the tendons on his neck bulging. His lips curled upward while the once black bands around his wrists glowed bright red and then gold. His horn jutted straight out.
Small fissures snaked down the once smooth pod.
The beta had said the glass was shatterproof, but she wasn’t so sure.
The powerful Alpha’s stare fused with hers.
She shouldn’t be able to hear him, but she did. Low growls that reverberated down her spine and through her skin interspersed with softer purrs. The sounds vibrated over the follicles of her hair like the softest of strokes. Soothing her. Calming her. Connecting her to him.
She was no longer alone. Her Alpha watched over her.
Even all these years later, the connection between them was as potent as ever.
“Bend, now. Legs spread.” The meaner beta’s impatient command, followed by an equally impatient press against her shoulder blades, ripped her from the soothing spell of her Alpha’s hold. The wrongness of the beta’s touch burned her skin.
“N-no.” Panic tore through her once more. She fought the beta’s grip. She couldn’t do this.
Another slam against the glass. Another crack. Her Alpha, demanding her attention, exerted his will over her.
Gaze locked with his, she bent.
4
He wasn’t going to make it through.
Looking at Olan Lundin’s smirking face might have helped, but Nikolai couldn’t look away from her. Couldn’t stop the animalistic, possessive growls or urge to purr and comfort.
His control was shot when he needed it most.
Unlike most of the Alpha crime heads, he had no stable of omegas, indentured or otherwise, and no long line of official offspring or bastards, either. At age twenty-eight, that was almost unheard of. He fucked when he needed release, but until now he’d never had an omega of his own. He’d known, after meeting her, no one else would do.
But he wasn’t prepared for the effect seeing her like this would have on him.
Shoving his hand into his pocket, he pressed his thumb into the deepest groove in the necklace and let it dig into his skin as he repeated his personal creed.
He did not show weakness. He was harder, tougher, more ruthless than anyone here, and he did not let anyone see him ruffled. Ever.
Except now he couldn’t reel himself in, and the chain wrapped tight around his thumb wasn’t tempering the worst of his fury as it usually did.
Instead, the skin designs at his wrists flashed from red to gold as the lines on the top and underside bled together to form a perfect circle, completing a cellular change that had begun the first time he’d seen the omega and waited until now to complete. At the same time, his cock grew harder than it had ever been in his life.
He hated her fear, but he was mesmerized too.
The thick pod barrier blocked her scent, but it did nothing to hide the beauty of her curves, the lushness of her hips, the high globes of an ass shaped for his hands, or the sweet shadowed hint of the tight pink slit he knew would welcome him home.
She was perfection. Perfection he wanted no one seeing but him.
His claws scoured the glass. He’d lost the ability to retract them.
He wanted to kill every one of these fuckers for looking at her.
He told himself to be reasonable. To play it cool. To picture his siblings and remember he was so close to his goal. That this tiny attempt by Olan to piss him off didn’t need to affect him at all.
The omega was his and would soon be riding his cock, doing his bidding, presenting and spreading for him, showering him with her gift, telling him all he needed to know.
Then the beta male laid his hand on her back and pinned her to the bench, kicking her legs wide, and Nikolai’s vision tunneled.
His female’s eyes sunk closed once more.
His body went mad as the tie between them severed.
With a roar, he threw himself against the glass.
His frenzied stare locked on the glimpse of paradise between her thighs. Pink. Tight. His.
The other beta stepped forward, his hand slipping between her thighs before his fluttering robe blocked Nikolai’s sight.
Everything went red. He would not allow this. He could not let this happen.
He had to stop them from touching what was his. Maim. Kill. Destroy. Whatever it took.
Lucidity slipped away as the rut took over and instinct took top billing. At the worst possible time.
He threw himself against the glass. Over and over.
Even as Olan’s gloating voice, utterly indifferent to his first daughter’s plight, crackled through the shared comms. “Proceed. I demand the ritual proceed. It is the way.”
Even as the beta performing the assessment shoved his arm further between the omega’s spread thighs.
Even as her shoulders tightened and her body stiffened.
Nikolai felt the invasion as if it were happening to him, the cold, hard digit stabbing into his flesh.
He roared in fury.
Blackness curled the edges of his vision.
Fractures snaked down the barrier like cracking ice or rolling tears.
“Sh-she is untouched.” The beta’s declaration barely reached him over the slam of his body against the glass. “The assessment is complete.”
The barricade shattered, shards tumbling to the floor as the Brotherhood’s automatic alarms sounded, triggered by the destruction of one of their own pods.
Terrified, the two betas sprinted toward the door, their robes swirling behind them.
Rightly so.
They were going to die for touching what belonged to Nikolai Skolov.
Glass crackled beneath his boots as he stepped out from the broken pod, his mind clouded by lust and violence, the blaring alarms mingling with the roars of the other crime heads as they too threw themselves against the confines of their pods. His aggression had triggered their own. But unlike his, their barricades held.
Which was good. It left him more time to kill them all one by one. And he would. He would kill every single male who’d looked at her. He would—
“Help.” The soft, lyrical voice of his omega penetrated his blood-rage. “The glass. I can’t move.”
His body turned toward the sound as if pulled by a magnet, the sight and smell of her hitting as one. Her beauty was more startling up close. The scent of her in his lungs better than the sweetest of tavel berries.
Fear. Sorrow. Shame. Pain. Fury. He tasted it all on his tongue, and beneath that, courage and goodness, light and life, and lush vitality.
Her.
So much more intoxicating than he remembered.
His lungs heaved under the onslaught, greedy for more. Determined to devour. To soak her into his bones, absorb her into his cells.
Until some still slightly lucid part of him registered her delicate features tight with fear, and the shards of glass scattered around her bare feet. Thankfully, none had reached her, but one wrong step and she’d be cut.