For what felt like minutes, she played with her children. She kissed the tops of their eyelids, their plump and doughy cheeks, and every soft spot on their stomachs. But they weren’t babies anymore. She had missed out on so much. All because of Cassian. All because of her sister. All because the universe wanted to ruin real heroes.
And that’s exactly what she was. She knew it as much as everyone else did. She wasn’t a victim. She was a fucking hero, and she’d get her revenge.
Standing, she peered down into a center entrance, the same entrance Severin had forced her in for her coronation. She felt her chest pump. Every inch of muscle clenched. She didn’t want to have to do this, but it was a necessity. Rae gave one last kiss to her darling children. “Noah, climb. I need to give you my children,” she said.
Noah choked before responding. “W-what? No, no, no. This is not part of the equation!”
Rae had already started to descend into the glass chasm. There was no time for any of their weakness. Virgil’s plan was smart, but he hadn’t given them the full picture. If he had, none of them would have agreed to continue on with the clandestine rebellion. “Fuck your equation, Noah. We need to get you and my children out of here. How big is this bunker? Are we talking a hundred square feet, or what?”
Noah rushed to climb as Rae was already inside the complex machine. “Big enough to fit our people and then some,” he said.
Rae nodded. “Good,” she said, wrapping the complex wiring around her body. Now that she understood what all this was for, everything was in clear sight. She placed her finger against the glass, tracing the cracked edges where Killian hit earlier. He had no idea that he almost detonated the entire world by trying to destroy this masterpiece of death.
“Don’t do this,” Noah said from above her.
“Well, you climbed up here fast,” Rae replied with a smile, but it fell from her face as the weight of the situation failed to put her at ease. “Please, keep them safe until my alphas come.”
“You don’t know they will come here,” he said. “And even if they do, wouldn’t you want to hold them in your arms in safety? Don’t you lie awake at night wishing you could be a family again?”
Don’t you, Rae?
She asked herself that question every single fucking night. Of course, she yearned for their touch, their hold, their masculine scents. But Noah didn’t realize a damn thing. If the bomb could be stopped, she would be the only one able to do it.
Voice turning angry as a jaguar, she screamed, “I said, take them!”
Nothing more needed to be said. Noah held the babies in their crib. He was quite shaken, but he’d manage. Meanwhile, Rae had a job to do. She turned her focus inward and closed her eyes, stretching both arms outward. Slowly, the synthetic embryonic cables coiled around her arms and fastened around the wrists. They held her in place, and suddenly, she remembered the hunger of the alphas’ eyes during the coronation ceremony. Did they know of Severin’s plans? Probably not, but as terrible as all of those men were, she didn’t wish them harm. She merely wished to turn this thing around.
As the cables wrapped her, her feet left the ground. Soon, she was floating in the small space of the glass womb. With her circulation shut, she lost sensation of her limbs. And as the mechanics raised her into the center of the womb, where all of society once saw her as a modern deity, she felt dizzy. She was losing herself. And soon, the liquid would fill to the brim, suffocating her. Below her hanging body, she could now see Noah and her likeness, the babies lying near their feet.
She’d felt all of this before. When Severin first brought her out of her darkened room, he’d made sure to ease her into the new role. A few weeks together, re-teaching her what she once knew. Except, the interpretation was much different. He reconstructed her like building blocks, but it was much different than Cassian’s way. He was snide but gentle, cunning, but he always left a trail of breadcrumbs. That’s what Rae had noticed from the get-go.
She knew what to do because she remembered what he told her. What he told everyone at the coronation. As she started to grow weary, she placed her palm against the glass. “Turn the valve,” she said.
“I won’t,” Noah stated, standing strong.
“Turn the valve or we all die,” she said.
“I don’t understand. Virgil never gave us further instructions.”
Noah placed his hand on the rusted valve. The auditorium was empty, but she heard Ruby’s voice repeat those fatal words from the past. “The queen is dead. Long live the queen.”
“The bomb will detonate in ten minutes, unless—”
“There is no way to disarm the bomb. We’ve studied it for years. The mechanism that holds it together is... absolutely exquisite.”
Pushing forward, the clone leaned against the central computer below. Her shoulders pumped into the air, and her sadness made her appear much older. “The bomb will go off unless she is put inside. Unless—”
Rae laughed angrily, but she had accepted her next move. It was inevitable. “Unless I give myself to it.”
“To... who?” Noah asked, trembling.
“Not who. What.”
A group of footsteps echoed nearby, followed by the loud jeering of three men. Three alphas. Three undeniably sexy, highly obsessive, and consuming alphas. Rae recognized their call, and the sinking of her heart only continued. She didn’t think she would have to sacrifice everything with her entire family present.
Killian stopped around the corner, chest pumping and shaking between breaths. “The machine,” he said. “Unless you give yourself to the machine.”
Now, real tears were present in Rae’s eyes. They were the type of tears that rolled down like perfect streams, tiny trickles of liquid that might as well have spelled out the history of her sadness. She had to give up everything again. But this time, she really had to disappear. She had to become something else entirely. And who even knew what would happen after her body became a slave to its operating system?