Page 34 of Shadowlands Omega

I wince, hating him a little bit for his words, which are at odds with the way my Omega preens inside. She loves his violence. She has no embarrassment. She wants him and doesn’t care that she’s covered in shit and blood and has no clothes and no hair and is at his complete mercy.

“Walk twenty paces up the road. Keep your gaze towards the castle and cover your ears.” He withdraws from me entirely, taking back his shadows and his warmth. He looks back over his shoulder at me. “I want you to hear nothing. Hum to yourself, if you must. I’ll return to you quickly.” He turns again, but seems to hesitate. His hands are forming fists, clenching and unclenching. Fur is popping up on the sides of his face, his ears shifting to that of his beast, his hands forming claws before resettling.

His uncertainty makes me hesitate. I glance down at the road. “Yaron, you…you forgot your axe.” I feel silly pointing to it, but when I turn, I see that the Rider is still standing there, looking prepared, looking determined that he might actually be able to take down Yaron. It makes me uncertain.

Yaron is staring at me with a bewildered expression.

“I…” I start, but as I speak, the Rider uses the advantage to edge towards Yaron on light feet. He wouldn’t be so dishonorable as to attack while Yaron’s back was to him though, would he?Yes, a coward would do that.I shout, “Yaron, your axe! Be careful!”

But Yaron doesn’t move. He just stands there staring at me like I’m an alien thing while the Rider advances with the tip of his sword aimed to kill. Yaron’s eyebrows are knitted together so neatly they nearly make a complete line, his gaze moving across my face like I’ve got the secrets of the universe tattooed across it and he’d know them, if only he could read the language. I wipe the blood dripping in my eye away with the back of my hand. A muscle below his left eye twitches and I don’t miss the clenching of his hands.

I point at the approaching Rider, now only five long paces away and looking prepared to lunge… “Yaron!”

The Rider attacks, but Yaron bats the blade away with a paw, sending the Rider spinning to the side and shocking the hell out of me. His eyes never leave my face. He says softly, “I don’t need my axe for this.”

My lips fall open. Warmth cascades through me. Little bubbles that burn every place they pop.

“Wait for me, Kiandah.” His expression softens, his brow smoothing as the Rider behind him struggles back upright. He’s clenching his teeth, spittle flying out between them. Yaron doesn’t look bothered at all. “Please.”

Please.I start to move without intending to, but before I’m out of earshot and he turns away from me completely, I manage to squeak out a quick, “Be careful.” It sounds trite, saying something so glib tohim, the Berserker Lord of the Shadowlands, and I fully expect him to ignore me. He doesn’t.

Instead, he stiffens. His expression twists in and out of that furrowed, soft look he seems to be wrestling with before finally settling on something so severe it looks painful. That same muscle high on his cheek ticks. “Move, Kiandah,” he barks, his voice harsher.

I jolt, wondering what I did wrong, and — determined not to do anything else to displease him today — I place my hands over my ears and limp up the hill. I sing the Beta song quietly under my breath to drown out anything I might hear. It doesn’t really help. “Alphas say grrr…Betas say bliss…Omegas say….Omegas say boom.” The lyrics are punctuated by the muffled sounds of a struggle behind me. Thud, thud, thwack, slice.

The battle doesn’t feel like it lasts that long, but it doesn’t help me any. I feel overexposed, my dewy skin blistering in the wind that I don’t think is really that cold, but it feels it to me. My face is hot. My throat burns. And I can still feel every place that Rider touched me. My bare, mud-encased toes curl into the dry road as I think of what could have been if Yaron hadn’t found me.

Screams fight through the barrier of my palms and my song and my scratchy voice fades when I see a small contingent of Crimson Riders cresting the hill. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. I don’t know if he’s noticed them and my scratchy voice rises, “Yaron?”

I shrink, my shoulders curling inward as they advance and so many sets of eyes sweep my body. The male in the front, a white man with reddish hair, looks stunned at the sight of me. And then an axe flies over my shoulder towards him.

I nearly jump out of my goddamn skin as the axe sinks deep into the highway line, right where the red-haired Rider’s horse had been about to take its next step. His horse rears up and the Rider hisses as he struggles to get his horse back under control. Behind him, the other Riders’ horses roughly scatter.

I turn, worried that something’s happened — worried that I should be worried about the approaching Riders. Like the one he called Ugaros, do these others mean me harm? I open my mouth, but I don’t manage any words.

Lord Yaron is standing there, the breadth of his shoulders covered in dark, torn fabric. Black strands of his hair slash across his face and hang past his cheeks. His arms are held slightly out to the sides and his sleeves are torn, missing too, which means I have no problem at all seeing that his hands are covered in blood up to the biceps.

He’s staring straight into my eyes, even as he points at the approaching Riders and roars, “Do not cross that line.” To me, he lowers his tone and speaks so gently. “I’m nearly finished. I’m sorry to make you wait, but please turn back around and wait for me another moment more. You’ve been such a good girl.”

I could faint. I’m nodding absently and as I turn back around, I pretend that my gaze doesn’t stray to the sight of the bloody mess of a person on the ground behind him. My stomach churns. My throat is too ruined to sing anymore so I hum loud. As loud as I possibly can.Yaron…he…. Did he dismember the man?

The Riders that had been approaching are all stopped on the road, fourteen of them in two lines of seven spaced well away from Yaron’s axe in the road. The first two Riders of each line are male, both Alphas, and both watchingmefixatedly despite the carnage that’s taking place past me down the road.

It’s the man with skin a slightly darker shade of brown than my own who says, “Are you alright?”

I meet his gaze briefly and shake my head. “No.”

The second the word leaves my lips, I feel the temperature of the air change. It heats with Yaron’s rage and I notice the horses and the Alphas that ride them stirring. But I don’t. I feel my shoulder blades sag down my back, strangely soothed by it.

I feel him before I see him. I feel him through the sole of my bare foot. His feet thud so loudly on the ground, I can feel the vibrations. And then he swivels around my body, appearing like a gathering storm against a backdrop that seems suddenly too bright. I hold fast as my gaze tracks the blood droplets pouring down his face. It looks like he bathed in the other man’s blood. The carnage is spectacular and like nothing I’ve seen before. And it’s forme,in my name and in my honor even though I’m his prisoner and he’s supposed to hate me. At least…that’s what I thought. I waver, but somehow catch myself on the bruised heel of my foot. I don’t breathe, but I don’t fall.

His gaze is locked on the ground and when he follows it, dropping suddenly to one knee at my feet, I jolt. In the absence of my humming, the world is starkly quiet when he reaches forward, his thick, rough fingers caressing the back of my left calf. He gives my foot a tug and I look down to see that he’s holding Owenna’s shoe. It’s not clean by any stretch of the imagination, but he handles the slipper as if it’s made of the finest crystal.

“May I?” he says without meeting my gaze.

I don’t speak, breathe, move. But I do let him pull my left foot out from under me, and I place my full weight on my right. He slides my shoe on my foot and I thank him. Well, I try. My voice comes out as puffs of air with no coloring. Yaron’s gaze snaps up and locks on my lips momentarily before traveling lower.

He rises to stand and his fingers reach forward and trap my face tenderly. His blood-soaked fingers are so warm. So warm and violently careful as he tilts my head side to side. He’s already inspected my wounds thoroughly though, so I don’t know what he’s looking for. Especially not when his expression changes — not to rage or worry, but to something harder to interpret. He makes a choking sound in the back of his throat, his nostrils flare and then he swallows stiffly.

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