Reborn (Alpha's Claim 3)

Jules stared down at the panting man, took a long look at his handiwork, and curled his lip. “I gave you your chance to shoot her. You hesitated.”

The smile Svana wore, the self-assured cocky smirk, diminished to the point where her face was blank, chilling. “You would dare insult me now? Not one of you—”

Jules didn’t acknowledge a word out of her mouth. Before she could make any grand speeches, he unloaded ten bullets into her chest.

Eyes bugging out of his head, Corday struggled to scoot out from under Svana’s collapsing body. “What the fuck?”

Jules ignored the inconsequential Beta, choosing instead to tower over Svana’s pretty bleeding corpse. “After some recent thought on the subject, I disagree with Shepherd. I don’t believe we need you alive to take Greth Dome. We only need parts of you to bypass scans—a hand, some blood, maybe an eye. The rest of you is garbage that we will harvest at need. Enjoy your legacy.”

Reaching down, he hoisted the woman across his shoulders, hesitated when her body brushed his face. He crinkled his nose in a deep sniff, and growled once the trace of fading scent registered. His face contorted and he looked as if an ocean of profanities were rising up to his tongue.

As quickly as the rage began, he shut it off.

Jules swallowed, and once again became an empty, hollow thing. Svana bleeding all over him, he glanced once to where Corday grew pale, slumped against the roof’s retaining wall. The Enforcer was dismissed with one derisive glare before Jules climbed down from the roof with his prize.

He left Corday alive.Chapter 12The grand doors of the Citadel wide open at his back, the city in shambles at his feet, Shepherd looked over his dying kingdom. Sun sinking over a broken wasteland, aging light stretched shadows atop the sea of Thólosen men and women desperately trying to reach their tormentor. His men had done well disrupting pathways by destroying bridges and hastily constructing barricades. The unwise that approached, had only one plausible path to his doorstep.

To his loyal Followers armed on the overlooking fragmented causeways, he ordered, “Fire at will.”

A wave of gunfire erupted, an upsurge of enraged citizens falling under the stampede of their rabid neighbors. More protestors climbed over the growing hill of the dead—like locusts they kept swarming, hour after hour.

All Shepherd could do was clog the path, and keep the masses, and Svana’s bombs as far from the Citadel as he could.

He had broken down the odds, added up all known variables. Soon those desperately trying to climb over the dead would be hungry and thirsty. If he were lucky, they would make it until nightfall, where violent winds barreling through the Dome might drive Thólosens to seek shelter in the Undercroft, as every COMscreen under the broken Dome suggested. But the colder it grew, the more arrived in mass to shout and throw things across the divide separating the Citadel from the city.

There was a greater unresolved issue beyond the insects gathering at his doorstep: Svana

She was yet unaccounted for. The ships that had already launched would be stuck hovering out of range of their intended target until they had their key to Greth Dome in hand. His men, his mate, would be trapped out there just as he was trapped in here, if Jules failed to find her.

Until she was delivered, those same ships would not be able to return and gather the army waiting for freedom. Unless the transport ships returned soon, a second round of evacuations would be impossible.

There was no hope left for those deserted in Thólos. His men knew it.

Should Shepherd have the opportunity to lay eyes on Svana again, he would be hard pressed not to reach out and tear her limb from limb.

Claire had been right; he had created a monster in Svana just as she had harnessed the violence in him. As a team, they had been unstoppable. As adversaries... they knew one another so well, it was like fighting against one’s shadow.

Moves and countermoves, and they were still at an impasse. She knew he would not unleash the virus so long as there was even a chance his men might survive. That’s why she’d given it to him, a final taunt he’d been too foolish to recognize.

Even armed with the greatest weapon in history, he was powerless.

She held control, her absence aside.

He’d put her on that untouchable pedestal himself. In tormenting Thólos, he’d created for her the perfect fodder to fling at his wall. Svana knew what to look for in the hearts of men, and had used her experience to her ultimate advantage. Worse, she had done it right under his nose.

Jules, Claire, had both tried to warn him.

No matter the roaring ice of the wind, Shepherd stood like a beacon atop the steps of the Citadel and fought for the brothers who’d offered their devotion and the woman whom he loved with every fiber of his being.