Page 256 of Knot Their Soldier: Part Three

I'm bringing my Omegas home, even if I have to fight dirty to do it.

Epilogue

Halley

I’m back on the road to Blackgate.

Smoke chokes the mountain and saps all color, turning the world gray. My rifle is clutched in my hands, and gunfire rattles through my arms and into my bones as enemy soldiers pour toward me in an endless, faceless tide, their mouths open in screams I can’t hear over the roar of the battle.

I fire because I have to.

One drops at my feet, and his face snaps into focus.

He’s young, with soft cheeks, freckles across his nose, and blue eyes wide with terror until they dull as death takes him.

I falter, but then another is already on me, and I fire again.

He falls hard, one hand skidding across the blood-slick gravel, tearing his skin. There is a wedding ring bright on his dirt-stained finger, and laugh lines crease the corners of his eyes, and for one horrible second, I imagine him smiling at the one who loves him and is waiting for him to come home.

Another soldier lunges through the smoke.

I kill him too.

His blood splashes across my boots as his body folds. He has a crooked front tooth and an old scar across his nose, eerily similar to Knox's. He looks terrified.

I kill a woman with a heart-shaped pendant bouncing against her uniform.

A man crying for his mother as he dies.

Another tries to speak around the blood filling his mouth, but the words drown before I can make them out.

The bodies pile up in front of me, and the battlefield changes with every death. The horde isn't faceless anymore; they're men and women with freckles, scars, shaking hands, old bruises, bitten fingernails, and eyes that stay open after the life drains from them.

I keep fighting because stopping means my Pack dies.

I keep killing because Blackgate falls if I don’t.

Still, every enemy I drop becomes a real, actual person at my feet.

When I finally use my Omega Command, the road goes silent.

The waves stop, the gunfire fades, and I stand alone among my dead with blood dripping from my hands.

I don't feel relief, only deep sadness that I know I'll never shake in my lifetime.

Suddenly, there are stiff fingers hooking into my clothes, my arms, my throat, dragging me down as their mouths open all around me.

"Murderer."

The word is shouted from every corpse at once.

I wake with a choking gasp.

"Halley."

A hand closes gently around my shoulder, grounding instead of restraining, and I jerk upright with a broken inhale that burns all the way down my throat.

The nest comes into focus in pieces. It’s dark and warm, and blankets are twisted around my legs. Blaze is asleep facedown behind me beneath a pile of pillows, dead to the world after five nights away from Blackgate. Viper is curled along his other side with one arm buried beneath his pillow, while Knox lies across the foot of the nest with one hand closed loosely around my ankle. None of them stir.