Chapter 14

I spewed. It is a typical reaction to all this brutality, right?

I could hear other people around the room heave or vomit as well. In between my heaves and splatters of the recently eaten feast, I noticed sparks going up and down my back, soothing my nerves and helping to eventually end the seemingly endless supply.

Once it felt like I had nothing left in my stomach to be evicted, I sniffed then spat, trying to clear the little bits of sick that had gotten trapped in my nose and the back of my throat, from when the vomit had tried to exit all holes possible at the same time. Fuck, I hate being sick.

My eyes were streaming from all the bitterness of the night. I was still bent over when a tissue and a veiny male hand appeared in front of my face. I accepted with a mumbled thanks, not wanting to risk starting the stream of vomit again and rubbed at my eyes, before around my mouth then nose.

I stood up to see Reid with a concerned look on his face for me. That explains the sparks. In my state, I had not put two and two together and realised that it was the contact from my mate. I shrugged his hand off me, not wanting to feel the pleasure of our mate bond.

“I’m fine.” I sniffed and kept my eyes looking down, not wanting to see the hollow, lifeless eyes of two of my dead pack mates or of my soul mate.

Reid stepped away from me because of my coldness towards him. His face instantly steeled, all sense of concern and humanity wiped away, as if it was never there or will be again.

“What the fuck did you do that for? You said that you would let her go!” Now it was Tony’s turn to not have any common sense and just shut the fuck up.

Tony barged his way through the male wolves that had been on guard and headed right for Corbin, a large knife twinkling in his fisted, right hand. A ferocious growl from Reid put a stop to him instantly. Tony halted mid-step and fearfully looked at Reid, too scared to continue going forward, or to even move at all from where he hovered.

“Well, thank you for this...Tony, is it?” Corbin reached forward down and forcefully pulled the knife from Tony’s hand. He was obviously not willing to give it up, most likely because it was his best defense as he is not much of a fighter. The sense to be scared was finally kicking in, his face showing his fear for the situation that he just put himself in.

Alpha dickhead surveyed the knife, pressing the sharp point into the tip of his forefinger as he started walking back and forth in front of the trapped and quiet crowd of wolves like it was his stage.

“So, I think that it’s time that I gave you all an explanation.” He went quiet for a minute or two, leaving everyone in further suspense, just the sound of his dress shoes tapping on the hard wooden floor, resonating around the Ballroom, drumming a little bit more fear into everyone with each step.

“Well kids, to start with, Tony and Beth are not the only traitors in the midst.” He paused yet again, giving us all time to adjust to the blow that he just delt us. “And why, you ask? Well, it’s because of your ‘Alpha’ Brock here.” He put a lot of emphasis into saying ‘Alpha’ as he pointed to the huge unconscious mound on the floor at the front of his stage with the knife and showing his hatred for the defenseless pile of flesh and clothing. “He is a fucking pussy!” He abruptly bellowed to the room, making us all jump from the sudden eruption of volume and aggressiveness.

“He keeps you all too docile for the superior species that we all are. He would rather keep you all a bunch of wall flowers, hiding away from the humans, the Royals, any threat at all really. He would rather you all have a little tea party than fight!” He carried on pacing, eyes on the knife. It was like shadows were slowly clouding his face, turning him darker the more that he spoke, urging him to get angry and worked up.

Everyone was hanging onto every word that Corbin spoke, dreading every second that he continued speaking. The smell of fear rolled off all of them in powerful waves.

“There’s also the fact that I wanna take down the Royals, the Alpha King mainly. But if I did that, then he would call on his colossal army to come and save him and I would be wiped off the face of the earth. So, first, I aim to take out his army. All the packs that he calls on to help him? Yeh, those are the wolves that I’m taking down first, before taking his throne.” By this point, he had stopped wondering around his stage whilst looking at the knife and was now looking from one scared face to the next as he spoke.

He strolled casually up to Tony, looked at his scared and weary face, heaved out a long breath before grabbing one of his shoulders to hold him steady and plunging the knife repeatedly in quick succession into Tony’s stomach, blood spraying and pouring down the front of the pair.

Tony doubled over and fell to the floor with a heavy thud, the noise echoing around the room.

“And that, is for being a fucking coward!” Corbin bent over to scream in Tony’s face that was twisted in agony.

It was too late for Tony to realise what he had done so epically wrong in his life. I could never say what he was thinking, but he was shaking in shock from what he most likely thought of as betrayal from Corbin. How he could ever think that he was a trustworthy wolf, I will never know.

I watched as the colour drained from Tony’s face, and as the blood poured from his many wounds that had left the inside of his stomach open to the bitter air.

I wanted to look away but found I was completely frozen, unable to step in and help as Corbin left Tony struggling in pain on the floor, death waiting to claim him.

“You are a disappointment to your kind! No respectable wolf uses a knife, only fucking useless cowards like you do!” Corbin stood up straight, pulling on the bottom of his suit jacket and straightening himself out as he tried to quash his anger and prevent another outburst from happening.

I wanted the ground to open and take me, not wanting to see whatever else Corbin had in store for us. What he had done so far was enough to leave any sane wolf needing some serious therapy. I am pretty sure that nearly every wolf here felt the same way as I did; nauseous, terrified to the point that it felt like I my heart was going to stop any second, every noise steadily scaring me more and more, my limbs were uncontrollably shaking and I felt cold to the bone.

This felt like it was a nightmare that I desperately needed to wake up from, right now. Blood was pounding in my ears, blocking out any other sounds as my body and mind went into shock at the gruesome sights surrounding me thanks to Corbin.

Tony's groans and cries of pain started to filter through the pounding in my ears, bringing me back from my state of shock and realising that Corbin was watching my reactions with a satisfied grin on his podgy face.

He turned to continue speaking to his prisoners; there is nothing else that I can call us now because I realised that is what we are. Fucked.

“You know, you guys should be honoured really. I consider all of you individually, at home with your beloved packs to be near impossible to take-out one at a time. With each attack, I would lose more members of my army. So, by the third or fourth, the numbers of my pack members and rogues would be seriously depleted and I wouldn’t have anyone left to rule over. What you should know though, is that by having you all in one place does not make you stronger but makes it a lot easier for me. What you all failed to realise is that none of you can work as a team. You've not had to rely on near-complete strangers for your security before. Communication, structure and procedure in one pack is different from the other, creating a lot of holes or discrepancies and allowing others to basically walk right on in, just as we all did.” Corbin paused his speech to stretch his arms out and spin on the spot, indicating to the while room of his scraggy mutts that he had brought with him, inciting jeers, hooting and howling from them all. Each fleck of noise making the trapped wolves jump, easily startled because of their now raw nerves.

Corbin stopped his dramatic rotation to observe the sea of petrified faces staring back at him, waiting for his encore. He stayed eerily silent, the suspension grating on everyone's nerve endings and making them more sensitive to all that was happening around them.

Many different emotions were spilling onto the faces as they waited anxiously and swirling around in the sealed room, and I felt the same as what they portrayed. I was unable to hide any of my fear from my pack mates, those that I called family, my enemies or my mate as I stood alone on display facing them.

“Factoring in everything that have just said, the best idea that I could come up with was to attack tonight. I just had to be clever about it, plan every little detail properly, thoroughly. I had one shot to get this right, to get as many high-ranking wolves as possible and then I get to sit back and watch all the packs in question implode. Watch them tear themselves apart with chaos, disorder, anarchy. Then, without all of you fuckers on standby ready to assist, I can finally declare war on the wolf that calls himself ‘King’.” Corbin had spoken all relaxed, as if he was simply talking about the weather and not mass genocide, until he had reached his part about Treason. Where he then grew more aggressive, darkness slithered onto his face as his features grew tense and hardened.

“Oh, and your Alpha thought that he was protecting you earlier by not saying anything, but there was a bit of an incident in the woods. It involved our beautiful Olivia here, her friend, my son and a few of our warriors.” He looked back at me, a glint in his eyes at the humour that he was feeling.

“So, there my son and his warriors were, hiding deep in the woods where they thought that no-one would find them, when who do you think should come across them?” He paused as if he was giving people the opportunity to guess, but we all knew better than to interrupt. He pivoted on the spot to indicate me as he continued, keeping us trapped listening to his story.

“Olivia here, chased a rabbit right into my son's lap. But he couldn’t kill her then,” my throat tightened, and palms were sweaty as I realised where his story was going. “He smelt his mate, and anyone that has found their mate would know that there is absolutely no fucking way, that you can do that. Plus, Olivia’s disappearance would have raised alarms that we didn’t want to happen yet. But somehow, through our witch’s spell, she sensed us and ran, so we had to kill her then. But my own fucking useless son couldn’t catch her. He even stopped one of my warriors that tried to tackle her.”

His chuckle at the disbelief of what had transpired earlier was out of place, he did not actually find it humourous, he was fucking pissed as hell.

I turned to see Reid with his head lowered, either accepting the disappointment from his dad or feeling his own, I do not know.

“I knew it, I wasn’t imagining it. I felt you there, I smelt you.” I practically whispered to Reid in the joy at realising that I had not been losing my mind, someone had been there. That was until it dawned on me how close I had been to death. My scalp started twitching as my hair started standing on end through fear, I could feel the beads of sweat forming on my forehead as my temperature rose all throughout my body along with my trembling panic.

My eyes widened as I looked on at my mate, hoping to all gods and goddesses everywhere that there was no way that he would have been able to kill me or Poppy if he had managed to catch either of us. Tears gathered at the corners of my eyes and began to slip slowly down my face, just as Reid finally looked up at me; I saw no sympathy or concern of any sort written on his face.

“I smelt you too.” That was the first time that he had spoken to me. Four little words had me silenced, waiting and praying to hear his surly and grumpy voice again. He continued staring into my tear-filled eyes that were threatening to spill an amount the same as what Niagra Falls contained. “I wouldn’t have killed you. For fuck sakes, I killed one of my men to protect you.” His gruff and quiet voice floated across to me, as if he was trying to soothe me with the touch of his voice to avoid feeling the sparks from a physical touch again.

“I did say that it’s impossible to kill your own mate, but I didn’t say that you can’t let someone else kill them for you.” Corbin had been listening to our small exchange, waiting for his cue to cut in with his intrepid input. “He will be getting punished for it when we get back to Bloodmoon. He should have just let the other wolf kill you, it would have been a lot easier that way.” He was looking at Reid in annoyance, Reid refused to give him his attention, probably after getting shit from his dad all day, with no end to it.

There was a well-timed grunt from the floor, drawing everyone's attention. Tony was still alive, but only just. He was twitching on the floor, his movements becoming less and less frequent, each of them becoming smaller, less violent. The pool of blood that surrounded him now was an immense amount. It looked as if there was more of the sticky red substance on Tony and the floor than the human body could ever contain.

With all the blood that had been spilt in this room tonight, there was a heavy metallic smell in the air that was so strong, that it was most likely going to be permanently embedded in the walls and furniture.

It was sickening.

The scent of death was overpowering my senses; it was drowning out my ability to think straight.

“Still kicking there I see, Tony. Stubborn little twat. Just give up and die, no-one is going to save you, they can’t. They're all busy being good little doggies for me.” Corbin squatted down to the floor to be closer to Tony’s face as he gloated, spurring him to pass on to give Corbin another notch on his murder belt.

Tony’s breathing was shallow and pathetic; he was barely even taking breaths now. His chest was hardly rising and falling by the time that it stopped altogether.

I kept hoping that he was just holding his breath, that he was in on some sick joke about pretending to be dead. But the longer that I waited, the more that reality started to sink in, that yet another friend of mine was gone. I felt hollow, like the light would never touch me again to fight away the shadows.

I was stunned, unable to look away from my former lively friend. He may have betrayed us all, but I still cared for him and would never have wished for that fate for him.

“You’re a monster.” A croaky female voice reached my ears, finally forcing me to look away from the blood-soaked shell left on the stained, brown, grainy floor.

It was mum; her Luna instincts forcing her to speak up in any way possible. I just hoped that Corbin did not see it as an excuse to kill her next.

Mum was still on the hard, cold, wooden floor. Elijah was now squatting down next to her and had his arms wrapped around her shoulders, comforting and protecting her. Elliot was standing over the two figures on the floor as if he were their bodyguard. She must have felt each of the three bonds snap when Marthe, Beth and Tony had been killed. Each time would have felt like a part of her soul had broken away.

For the first time tonight, I noticed Ajay and Louis, the next in line Beta and Gamma for our pack. They were standing not too far from mum and the boys, their faces steeled and hard, only anger present. I still had not seen Poppy since before Corbin kicked this little fiasco off, when she was on the dancefloor practically dry humping a wolf.

“I suppose that I am. Life’s a bit boring if it’s normal, murder makes it interesting.” Corbin gloated in response to mum, rubbing salt into her already gaping wounds.

I wanted to go to them, to be with my family. We all needed each other, this had been the toughest night we could ever go through, and the familial support would be the best thing right now. I was hesitating about moving my left foot forward, to go to them. I could feel it twitching in my indecision.

‘Don’t.’ Hearing Beaux suddenly speak out scared the living shit out of me, making me jump and squeal. Corbin and Reid’s heads whipped around to study me.

“It was a hiccup.” Feeble excuse, I know, but I could not think well enough to come up with a better excuse. They both studied me for a few more seconds before turning back to mums broken frame on the floor. The Luna feels it very deeply when something happens to one of their pack members, so having three murdered in front of her shattered her very being.

‘Where have you been? What the fuck is going on? Why have you been so...’ I threw question after question at Beaux in a frantic desperation, one of them had to stick and she had to answer it.

‘Whoa, whoa, slow down. I’ve been here the whole time, but they’ve done something so people can’t mindlink or reach their wolves. It must be the witch again. But I don’t know why I can reach you; it could be the whole Alpha family bollocks. I've gotta be careful though, I don’t know if they have a way of saying that I can still reach you.’ Beaux whispered to me, probably in fear that they would notice.

I tried acting as if nothing was different, like I did not still have contact with my wolf or anyone else. I thought that taking off the horse blinkers and looking around at the scared faces would be a good place to start. I started with looking at Reid. Yeah, I am fucked, he was looking at me with a puzzled expression, as if he knew that something was different.