Throat agape, his voice was hollow and disturbed. “Help me, Momma,” he whispered.
Leaning back, Cassian closed his eyes and remembered the lakes of Varikar. The sandbank glittered with their takings’ blood. The omegas they found there were prized above the rest. All slaughtered. There was no reason except to bleed them dry. Cassian took each act to be a message to God.
Forsake us. This world is on its last chapter.
During that horrible raid, the air stung Cassian’s eyes, salty and rich with the new death. Bundled before him like jerking planks of drained sacks, the women had the complexion of stillborn baby birds. As he watched their hearts die out, he’d felt a sense of pride overwhelm him.
He had inhaled the last scents of those slaves. Some of them might have been betas—unable to procreate. Disgusting beasts with no purpose. They deserved to die, too. Their bodies dictated the sentence.
On that day, the sand beneath the slave traders’ feet had flooded with red. A river of hope, Cassian had thought.
Cassian felt his mother’s hand close around his shoulder, waking him from his peaceful vision. He swallowed and opened his eyes to a small chalice. Taking hold of the golden stem, he quickly drank, choking on the bitter, dark liquid.
Warmth flowed through his cheeks and chest. He let out a sharp cough and inhaled. “You spiked my drink.”
The elderly hand wrestled the chalice away from his fingers. “Only with the necessary combination of chemicals to keep your knot hard and strong,” she said.
He refused to look at her, though he would never question her right to intervene. He could feel the chemicals running through his cock, straining the shaft outward.
“I can feel it now,” he moaned.
The dying woman calmly smiled. She would taunt him, knowing his anger brought more seed out of him. “Your empire’s growth is impressive. Soon, no one will be able to challenge you,” she whispered.
Cassian shuddered and shot an angry glance at the silent clones. “Are you trying to enrage me? The girl is gone,” he said. “I listened to your guidance!”
He felt her turn his body to face the sleeping clone. A dark crown hung around his skull. “Don’t worry about Vash’s wrongdoings. He will be found and punished for taking the omega.” Her voice wavered with age. “Open the copy up, instead. You haven’t tried her yet. She looks absolutely scrumptious.”
“Vash.” Cassian gagged. “If he gets his hands on a cure, he will become too powerful.”
Her tone was poised to excite him. “I told you he would turn on you,” she said. “Don’t allow your weakness to leverage control.”
His mother’s frail hands typed in the code on the freezer. With a hollow cry, the pod opened, clean and circling with vapor. He hated opening the freezers—it disturbed the process and drained the hogs’ overall life expectancy. Worst of all, the pods reminded him of his own mortality, and what he had already begun to lose.
Cassian winced and jerked his hand around his shaft. Raking his fingers into the meaty flesh, he groaned in sexual agony. “He took her. My own brother. I should have known.”
Leaning over the botched copy of Wren, he forced her awake with a few quick blows to the cheek. As her eyes expanded in horror, she started to scream. Holding her bruised face, he roared beside her like a twisted, laughing beast.
Pinching his fingers around her ear, he shoved her to the ground. He didn’t always entertain the urge to kill the clones, unless he felt especially enraged.
They would all have to die.
“Guide me, Mother.”
He tilted his neck forward with inhuman delight as he inserted his weighty tusk inside the whore’s dilated hole. He hammered a fist against her nose until she let out a whimper that satisfied his ears.
They were all brain-dead. Their existence held no glory. Their broken coding only magnified his failure.
His mother giggled and took a huff of oxygen fr
om her tank. “Take your power back.”
He felt strength swell within his core. A short rush of anger forced his palm around the clone’s air pipe. Listening to her choked gasps, he felt his aching cock bob against her parted, cold lips. Cassian painted the walls of her cavernous womb with his off-color seed. The alpha’s musk began to flood the room with his stench.
Jaw open, he swung his body forward and felt it vibrate with painful orgasm. His eyes went hazy, knot expanding his spilling cock. The polished and pockmarked cock vibrated, and he prepared to knot her with confidence. But before he could drive into her icy uterus, stiffness set in his muscles like a dull pebble between his legs. He collapsed onto the floor, choking on air.
He was losing his ability. Unable to knot, he could never have her. Not really.
Because of time’s cruel fate, he would have to destroy them all. He’d kill every last omega… except her.