Page 77 of Cowgirl Omega

Far more advanced.

“Just stick close,” he said over his shoulder, “and watch your step.”

Logan kept advancing, carefully testing each section of the floor before he put his full weight on it. As he moved deeper into the sphere, the surroundings got darker, but luckily there were still enough small holes in the metal exterior to allow a few bars of sunshine to come through, and they provided just enough light to see by.

He could feel Shannon right behind him. His protective instinct told him to send her back, make her wait outside with Rufus until he and Tanner had a chance to explore everything and make sure it was all safe. But he knew she would never listen. Not now.

At last, Logan reached what seemed to be the central chamber, a small circular space with a domed ceiling. There were things that looked like metal chairs attached to the floor, and around the walls were shiny rectangles that looked like windows, but they were all dark. Below the windows were machines with lots of buttons that reminded him of those fancy new cash registers he’d seen in some of the general stores he’d visited. The whole thing was very, very strange.

Shannon came up beside him to get a look. She passed her eyes around the room for a second, then gasped.

“Logan, look…”

He looked. Gathered at one side of the room, at the lowest part of the slanted floor, were three skeletons, the white bones barely visible in the darkness. From what Logan could see, they were shaped a lot like human skeletons, only the skulls were too elongated.

“What the hell?” he whispered.

A clicking sound shook him out of his daze. A second later, his nose picked up a scent of sweat and cigar smoke coming from the far side of the chamber. He could see another passageway over there, much like the one he and Shannon had just walked through, and there in the shadows, stood Ned Flarity.

The bastard must have hidden inside the ship when the shooting started—must have come in through a hole on the other side, which was why Logan hadn’t smelled him until now. The man had a fat cigar clamped tightly in his teeth. In his hand was a nickel-plated pistol.

The click Logan had heard was the hammer cocking.

The muzzle was aimed directly at his heart.

CHAPTER 37

Shannon didn’t think, she just reacted.

There wasn’t time to draw her gun and shoot Ned Flarity before he pulled his own trigger, she wasn’t that quick on the draw, so instead she flung herself in front of Logan, shielding the alpha’s heart with her own. She knew Logan wouldn’t have wanted her to do that, but she didn’t care. He and Tanner and Rufus had all saved her butt several times over. Now it was her turn to be the hero, the only way she knew how.

She just hoped Logan would kill the hell out of Flarity after she was dead.

Time slowed to a halt. Shannon had heard that at the moment of death, a person’s entire life would flash before their eyes, but that wasn’t what happened to her. Instead, she had a vision of the life that might have been. She saw herself back on her ranch, living and working with her three alpha mates by her side. She felt her belly swell with pregnancy, felt the pangs of childbirth, and the deeper pangs of joy and love that came from cradling her tiny babies in her arms. She watched her children grow up and have children of their own. She and her mates grew old together—old and happy, surrounded by family and friends.

Her eyes ached with tears, but she didn’t have time to shed them. She could see Flarity’s finger squeezing the trigger, almost in slow motion. In another sliver of a second, the hammer would fall, the gunpowder would ignite, and the bullet would fly across the round chamber at the center of the sphere—a ship!Shannon thought.It was some kind of ship—before entering her heart and ending her life.

Only, none of those things actually happened.

Instead, Ned Flarity just… disappeared.

There was no flash of lightning from the heavens, no explosion. The floor didn’t split open and swallow him whole. There was only a softwhumpfand a swirl of dust as the air closed in on the empty space where the man’s body had been.

Shannon tried to swallow, but her throat was dry. She was relieved to be alive, but a new fear was quickly filling her mind—the fear that whatever had just happened to Ned Flarity was about to happen to her and her mates.

“I think we’d better get out here,” Logan said.

Shannon didn’t argue with that.

She turned around and saw Tanner and Rufus right behind her. Rufus was in his wolf form again, and Tanner had his pistol drawn and pointed at the ceiling. Beyond lay the dark corridor they had just walked down, barred with sunlight leaking in through the holes in the ship’s walls.

In a blink, the pistol vanished from the Tanner’s hand. Shannon turned and looked at Logan. His rifle had vanished too. She dropped her hand to the holster on her hip. Her gun was missing as well.

It had been a mistake to come inside the sphere.

A big mistake.

“Go!” Logan roared. He gripped Shannon’s arm and started leading her back up the metal corridor toward the hole through which they had entered. Before they made it two steps, however, the whole structured started to vibrate like a gong struck by a hammer. Shannon covered her ears to block the sound, but it didn’t help. She could feel it rumbling through her guts and wriggling into the hollows of her bones. Colored lights streaked along the metal walls, tracing the edges of the strange machinery in every color of the rainbow.

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