Page 107 of Omega Hunted
I took a step backward, then another, putting as much distance between us as the room allowed, every instinct screaming the same thing. Keep him away from her. Somewhere outside, I could still hear shouting, the crack of something breaking, chaos that made no sense with him standing here so calm and so untouched by any of it, as if the storm outside existed purely for his convenience.
“How did you get in? Where’s—”
“Give her to me.”
He said it lightly, already bored with my questions, and the calm in his voice told me everything I needed to know. Whatever was happening outside, he’d planned for it. Maybe caused it. People could be dying out there and he was standing in my room asking for my daughter as casually as if she were something he’d left behind.
I stumbled back another step, closer to where I’d laid the gun. “You can’t have her.”
His gaze settled on Asha.
Not her face. Not the tiny hand curled against my shirt. He studied her with the cold assessment I remembered from home, weighing bloodlines and value and what could be produced from them.
“You can hand her to me, or I can take her from you.”
He came closer and the room tilted around me.
“You can’t—”
“I can. I will.” There was no anger in it. No impatience. No mercy in him I could appeal to. “You’re still useful, if I need you for more of them, but you don’t have to be.”
More of them.
My stomach turned.
“Your survival is a preference, Soren.” His eyes finally lifted to mine. “Not a requirement. The legacy is.”
Asha stirred, her fingers curling into my shirt, and something inside me went cold.
I placed her in the bassinet, keeping my body between him and Asha as I tucked the blanket around her. I wanted her hidden. I wanted him to forget she existed. I wanted walls, locked doors, and Cassian between her and this man forever.
“For God’s sake.”
The disgust in his voice made me turn.
He drew his pistol from inside his coat with the same unhurried precision he did everything else.
“Give me the brat.”
Some distant, sensible part of me knew I ought to be on the floor, begging, doing whatever it took to buy her one more second of freedom. Instead, I was frozen in place, my fear grew exponentially, and I couldn’t breathe. The bond flared to life in my chest, sudden and fierce, and for one disorienting second, it felt like Cassian was standing right behind me with his hand pressed flat to my back.
My brother is here.
Help me.
My arms stopped shaking. I grabbed the pistol and pointed it at him.
“You’re not taking my daughter,” I said, and the steadiness in my own voice startled me more than it seemed to startle him.
Something flickered behind Emric’s eyes, the first real crack in his composure since he’d walked through that door. “Put the weapon down, little brother.”
“No.” I kept the pistol level, both hands wrapped around the grip the way Cassian had shown me, and took a step left so that any bullet would go through me and not hit her. If I died, I had to trust that Cassian would go after her, protect her, love her if I couldn’t. But she was going to live.
“So dramatic.”
His gun swung upward toward my chest before I’d finished the sentence. The bond surged again, hot and violent. I threw myself sideways into the wall hard enough to knock the air from my lungs as the shot went wide, splintering the doorframe behind me.
Asha cried out, and the sound cut through me sharper than the gunshot had; it burned away whatever fear had been left in me. I came off the wall shoulder-first and drove it into Emric’s ribs, and we went down together in a tangle of limbs, his pistol skittering somewhere into the dark and somewhere beyond the panic; my cat fought with me, snarling and clawing against the instinct to submit.
