Page 58 of Bound to Four Alphas

He crouched by Mikhail’s head, taking it in between his hands, and closed his eyes.

He was very talented at blocking out the screaming.

Once inside Mikhail’s mind, he found the soldier’s consciousness easily enough. A puny, shriveled, simple thing. As he had done to so many enemies before, he shoved that spark of being into a box of its worst fears, slowing down time so that an eon could pass in the blink of an eye.

And whilst Mikhail experienced a millennium of horror, Elian went searching.

It was easy enough to find the thread of memory; Mikhail’s stupidity made him an excellent stooge for Damien but didn’t lend itself to a strong, defensible mind.

An omega, drugged and kidnapped, ordered to be kept under constant guard in one of the far tents after she woke and injured several men with a lash of power. Elian frowned. It madeno sense, he was so certain that Selena would be kept at the temple, and unless something drastic had changed, there was no way she would have been able to attack so many human men at once. She simply hadn’t accessed her power yet.

He tugged on the string, following it deeper.

Then, he saw a flash of blonde hair, and understood.

By the time he retreated from Mikhail’s mind, Ronan had retreated, leaving the man sobbing and writhing on the floor, his enormous muscles bunching into themselves. Elian clenched his hand, and Mikhail’s eyes bulged open, bleeding red into the whites. His body twisted and writhed, tearing itself apart, the sick sound of flesh rending from bone until he was nothing more than a pile of seeping bone and viscera.

Ronan looked at Elian with something close to fear. Elian understood. That was two surprises he had given the wolf in not as many hours. Malek thrashed, circling, his eyes darting between the bloodied heap and the other alphas, his thirst for blood tangible.

“Did you find her?” Kaelen’s voice was oddly measured. For all the dragon’s pretense at nobility, they undeniably shared a vicious streak.

“Not quite,” said Elian. “He didn’t know about Selena. It seems Phaendar was clever and masked the kidnapping of one omega with another, no doubt to keep the secret of Selena’s power under wraps. They have Caeda locked up in one of the tents. If we can rescue her, she may be able to help us.”

Ronan growled in frustration but nevertheless relented, and followed Elian as he led them away from the stinking corpse and towards the southern edge of the camp where he had seen in Mikhail’s mind her location.

It wasn’t difficult to locate the exact tent where they were keeping his sister.

“You fucking limp-dicked piece of reprehensible garbage,” Caeda’s lilting voice floated to them even from their considerable distance. “If you even think about knocking me out again, I swear to all the Gods, living and dead, I will rip those puny, shriveled little slugs that you call balls from your body and shove them so far up your ass that you—”

There was a pause, then a loud, masculine yelp of pain.

“Fucking bitch, she just burned me with her hands!”

“I warned you, don’t get close, those manacles limit her magic, but they don’t get rid of it altogether!”

The litany of shouting and cursing continued, Caeda’s vocabulary getting increasingly colorful as the soldiers struggled to contain her.

Elian laughed out loud at a particularly rude turn of phrase. “She learned that one from me!”

“Come on,” Kaelen growled. “Can your magic conceal us this far out from the center of the camp?”

“Let’s find out,” said Elian, extending his magic to shield the other alphas as they crept through the trees.

Before they entered the tent, any noise from their soft movements hidden rather well by Caeda’s furious screeching, Elian sent several tendrils of shadow through the entrance.

Four bodies hit the floor with damp thuds.

“Greetings, sister,” Elian grinned as he waltzed in, ignoring the dead guards as he stepped over them to unbind Caeda from the iron chains around her wrists.

“Took you long enough,” she grumbled, climbing to her feet and rubbing her wrists, “the bastards kept trying to make me drink that bloody sleeping potion. I’ve got a horrible headache from fighting through it, my magic is nearly drained!”

Despite her indignant fury, he could scent the fear and desperation lying underneath, and knew it was only a matter of time before the shock wore off and her omega inevitably won the internal battle.

“You’re safe now.” He pulled her into a hug, and she clutched his tunic with white knuckles, taking several, shuddering breaths against his chest. “What happened?”

“Syllia,” she replied, pulling away and raking furious fingers through her hair. “One of my handmaidens. She betrayed me. Slipped sleeping potions to me and Selena. Oh Gods, Selena!” Caeda turned to them in horror, her hands flying to cover her mouth. “Are you okay? I mean, you must be going crazy!”

“It’s alright,” he soothed, injecting his voice with just enough alpha command to keep her rising panic at bay. “We’ll get to her. Do you know if she’s in the temple?”

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