"Juney, down!" Felix's voice cuts through my focus, and I drop without thinking. His knife whistles over my head, embedding itself in the eye of a guard who was lining up a shot. The man drops, and I roll, coming up with my gun already aimed at the next target.
We're a fucking force of nature, all six of us. The hallway becomes a slaughterhouse, bodies piling up as we work our way toward Evan, who's backing away with each fallen guard, his confidence evaporating faster than water in the desert.
Carlisle grabs a guard's head and twists with that casual brutality he's perfected, the snap echoing off the walls. "You know," he says conversationally, wiping blood from his hands on the dead man's shirt, "I'm actually grateful for the pheromones. They're quite invigorating."
"Only you would find forced rut refreshing," Archer mutters, but he's grinning as he chambers another round. Their banter is one of many things I've come to love about these alphas. One of many things that's starting to feel like home.
The last guard falls, Bane's massive hands leaving bruises that will never have time to fully form on the corpse's throat. And then it's just us, standing in a hallway painted with blood and littered with bodies, all our weapons trained on one pathetic figure.
Evan.
He's got nowhere to run. Behind him is a dead end, and in front of him are six people who have every reason to want him dead. His hand shakes as he holds his gun, swinging it wildly between us like he can't decide who to threaten first.
"Stay back!" His voice cracks, muffled by the mask that now seems more like a muzzle. "I'll shoot! I'll?—"
"You'll what?" I ask, taking a step forward. "Kill us? Torture us? Sell us?" I laugh, and it's sharp enough to cut glass. "Been there, done that, got the fucking trauma to prove it."
His gun wavers, and I can see him trying to calculate his odds. Six against one. Even if he gets a shot off, even if he manages to hit one of us, the others will tear him apart. He knows it. We know it. The corpses cooling around us know it.
The gun clatters to the floor as Evan drops it, his legs giving out as he collapses to his knees. The great Evan, reduced to a sniveling mess in his own hallway, surrounded by the bodies of his protection. He rips off the gas mask, and his face is pale, sweaty, eyes darting between us like a cornered rat.
"Go ahead," he spits, trying for defiance but achieving only desperation. "Do it. Kill me. Show them what you really are—murderers, monsters, no better than?—"
"Shut the fuck up," Bane growls, but then he does something that surprises me. He lowers his weapon. "This isn't our call."
Carlisle tilts his head, studying Evan like he's trying to decide which organ to remove first. "Oh? And whose call would that be?" he asks like he already knows the answer.
Bane's eyes find mine, then Felix's. "Theirs. We helped with the final leg, but this has been their fight all along. They deserve to finish it."
The weight of his words settles over me like a warm blanket. Not an order, not even a suggestion. Just simple acknowledgment that this moment belongs to us. To the twoomegas who survived this place, who burned it down halfway once and came back to finish the job.
"So," Carlisle asks dryly, twirling his knife with unnecessary flair, "who gets the honors?"
I can see Evan's adam's apple bob as he swallows hard, his eyes ping-ponging between Felix and me. He's terrified. Good. He should be. He should know exactly what it feels like to be powerless, to have your fate in someone else's hands, to understand that your next breath depends entirely on someone else's mercy.
Mercy he never showed us. Mercy he doesn't deserve.
Felix and I exchange a look, and seven years of communication flows between us without a word. All the nights we planned this moment, all the ways we imagined it ending, all the revenge fantasies that kept us going when everything else felt hopeless.
"He's your brother," I say softly, offering him the kill he's been living for. "You've been carrying this weight for so long. You deserve this."
Felix's silver eyes search mine, and something enters them I've never seen before. Peace, possibly. Or resolution. "It's not what he did to me that keeps me up at night," he says, his voice steady despite everything. "It's what he did to you."
Then his lips quirk in that almost-smile that makes my heart race. "But it's time for me to start living for something else."
Hope blooms in my chest, bright and warm and impossible to suppress. My grin probably looks manic, but I don't care. "Then let's finish this how we started," I say, pulling out the knife I took from the guard. "Together."
Felix takes the blade, his fingers brushing mine as we both grip the handle. It's poetic, really. Fitting. We escaped together, we survived together, we found our pack together—okay, so wetried to murder them in cold blood—and now we'll end this together.
Evan's eyes go wide as we approach, scrambling backward until his back hits the wall. "Wait! Felix, please, I'm your brother, I?—"
"You were never my brother," Felix says quietly. "Real brothers protect each other. Brothers don't sell each other to the highest bidder. Brothers don't beat each other bloody for showing kindness."
"And real alphas," I add, crouching so I'm eye level with Evan, "don't fucking prey on the weak."
Together, we drive the knife home.
It slides between Evan's ribs with surprisingly little resistance, finding his heart with the precision of all those anatomy lessons Felix taught me. The books he stole so I could learn exactly where to strike to make it quick. Or in special cases like this, to make it last just long enough.
