Tormented cries left Vash’s throat as Cassian lowered the thin worm into the white of Vash’s eye. Forced to blink, Vash allowed the worm to roam freely into the back of the socket where the odd pressure started to seem like a painful malfunction of reality.
“I will keep your misery visible,” Cassian muttered, spit rolling down his lips.
“Why…?”
“The pressure is the first symptom of many. You will experience dry mouth. Depression. After about a week, your gut lining will erode. Your shit will spill from your insides before you can clutch your ass around a toilet seat. You will undergo minor facial paralysis before it makes its way into your central nervous system, littering your nerves with extreme tics before it shuts down completely. When you are fully compromised, no one will be able to tell. You will starve to death, and the last thing you see will be the fading lights of my world, my universe.”
Vash convulsed against the floor, and Cassian watched with curiosity. Pools of spit drifted around his lips. It was strange for him to see Vash like this, like a helpless animal. Like Rae.
Vash was behaving like the spoiled bitch Cassian kept under lock and key. Cassian had given his brother everything. He’d offered him a seat at the table. Yes, it was underneath his great authority, but at least he’d taken the trouble to do it. Had Vash turned on him before the Coalition fell, things would have turned out differently. Vash would have stayed silent, and Cassian could have diligently developed the omega more.
“What…what is she?” Vash whimpered.
Cassian sat next to him, sighing with exhaustion. It had been a tiring week of fighting, and Rae was almost ready to wake for him. “The perfect being. But you knew that already,” Cassian said.
“What makes her so special?”
“Besides her three-chambered uterus?” he asked.
Three? Vash frowned. “You’re lying again.”
A cheap grin placated him. “No, brother. This time, I am not.”
Although not probable, it was possible. There were women born with strang
er deformities. Cassian had the bitch under his control, but it was clear what Vash had to do. He needed her. With this revelation, the whole fucking pack could breed her.
“And the rest of the filthy cunts? Do they share the same abnormality?” Vash asked.
“They all serve a different purpose. The worst copies go to the nightclubs. Let the men pay for their flesh. The others stay frozen in the cryo chambers,” he said.
The thought of all those women locked away in godless machines… It made Vash’s stomach turn. “You— You’re a monster,” Vash growled.
Cassian stood, but he took Vash’s jaw in his hands and squeezed. Pulling out a small flashlight, he shone the beam into Vash’s eyes. His vision shrank into a sharp pin of red.
“You see? That’s what I cannot understand,” Cassian said. “Decades ago, man cloned the fruit then multiplied your tasty vegetables, so people would not starve. Did they not? It is our destiny to continue the growing process. The long tradition of paving the road to the gods is almost complete.”
“They did, and all of that effort failed the generations before us,” Vash said.
Vash didn’t know how to react. Everything he was hearing was too much for him to take in. It was certainly clear he was in over his head. His pack was right. They’d warned him, but he’d relied on his authority to get him through. In the end, they went to the wrong fucking place.
He could see a key ring buried near the opening in Cassian’s small satchel near his waist. As his brother taunted him with nightmarish visions of his death, he strained his arm forward. Vash kept careful eye contact with his brother so as not to be obvious. “You will be stopped. Eventually, someone will match your evil,” Vash muttered.
He lowered a finger into the bag and carefully threaded his finger through the ring.
For a brief second, Cassian’s eyes flashed with murderous rage. Luckily, Vash’s new infection seemed to please his brother enough not to kill him on the spot. “I have hundreds of enemies. They have all been crushed.”
Vash ran his tongue against the front of his teeth and lips. A slow and methodical laugh emerged from his throat as he shrouded the key into his palm. “I have heard of an army,” he said.
“You know nothing.”
“They’re rebuilding the Coalition’s militia,” Vash whispered through his laughter. “They have explosives. The biggest the world has ever seen.”
Cassian pondered this for a second and, eventually, nodded his head. “The warriors of the old republic. They were a grand army, but their insolence destroyed them.”
“So. You have heard the rumors.”
“Rumors are exactly what they are. They might utilize some of the best technology in the world, but they will be no match against men whose only wishes are to die for their pack.”