My heart was in pain as I stared at the armed alpha sire, and it hurt even more when I peered over my shoulder to see if Kent had really left. He had. I was now completely alone.

My alpha left me to die…

The alpha with the gun clicked his tongue in disapproval, and when I turned to face him, his expression had changed. He was still angry, but even he felt sorry for me.

“Hope that wasn’t your mate or anything,” he said.

I’d broken into his home, and our group had tried to steal his baby, and it was he who felt sorry for me…

“Get the fuck out of here,” he told me, and lowered his gun.

I let out a relieved breath and quickly hurried out the broken window before he’d change his mind. He had no reason to let me go. There were no laws protecting us looters if we broke into someone’s home. That alpha had all the right to kill me right then and there, but he still let me go…

But once I was outside, and tried to get out of the yard, my fear kicked in and my knees gave out. I gasped for air and crawled my way behind a few old trees in the yard, and hid in the shadows behind them. My heart was beating so fast I thought it was going to stop, and the pain spreading on my face… I feared something was broken… It hurt so bad…

Kent… My own alpha… How could he hit me…? And even worse, how could he want to steal someone’s baby? He knew what those people who bought stolen kids did to them…! Especially if they were omegas… They’d be sold as prostitutes or broodmares to illegal baby factories… They’d be forcefully impregnated as soon as they were old enough to carry a child… They’d be forced to keep making babies until their bodies gave out…

And Kent was fine with that…

I wanted to throw up…

I heard firing coming from inside the tiny yellow house. I looked up to see the same guys who were after the baby returning to the house with guns in hands. They were still trying to get the child! And the baby’s sire was alone against all of them…

The guys shot in through the windows, and a moment later, they climbed in. The house was silent, so I feared they’d finally killed the sire… I’d thought I couldn’t feel any worse, but if that man was dead… All he did was try to protect his family…

If we’d killed him…

I was too scared to move, but I heard more gunshots, an agonizing yelp, then more yelling and shouting. I felt so incredibly sick as I listened to it. I felt sick because we were not killers… We were simple thieves trying to steal enough to survive! We were not murderers or kidnappers…! That was what True Order terrorists did, so how could Kent do this to us, to his own clan? How could he get us into a gig like this? He’d just made our lives so much worse in this city!

My omega was still crying inside me. It was heartbroken because of what Kent did… How he’d betrayed us… It couldn’t believe our alpha had hurt us. It couldn’t believe our alpha didn’t do anything to protect the crying child… And they’d left us to die… They’d escaped instead of protecting us…

Silence fell in the tiny yellow house again. And then…

“Your buddies are dead!” the baby’s sire yelled loudly inside the building. He was enraged… “And you’re next if you don’t fuck off!”

Kent’s new friends hurried out of the building, completely defeated and bleeding. I breathed out in relief as I watched them make a run for it, crying and in panic. The sire won. His baby was safe. Now that was a good alpha… He’d protected his loved ones like alphas should.

I leaned hard against the tree and started crying. The raid was still going strong all around me, but all I could do was cry out my fear and pain. I didn’t even know what to do. My world was falling apart around me.

Maybe I should wait for the cops to find me…

But it was not them who found me first.

“There you are!” I heard Kent’s angry growl, and a second later, he grabbed me harshly by my arm, dragged me up on my feet, and forced me to face him. “Why didn’t you fucking run?!” he shouted in my face.

“I… I…” I mumbled in fear, trying to pull away from him, but his hold on me grew painfully tight.

“Get a fucking grip, we need to get the fuck out of here!” he said angrily, and started dragging me to the street, where a car was waiting for us.

“No! Let me go! You monster!” I shouted and tried to escape from his grip again, but he was much stronger than I was.

“Fucking stop! What’s wrong with you? The cops are coming!” Kent yelled at me.

“Joni!”

I looked up when I heard Payton calling out to me. He was in the car that was waiting, and he hurriedly waved at me to come. I also heard the sirens in the distance…

What else could I do…? I didn’t want to go to jail and lose my friends… I stopped trying to get away from Kent and let him push me into the car. Payton hugged me, looking just as scared as I felt. In seconds, everyone was in, and Derek, who was driving, hit the pedal to the floor. I held tighter onto Payton as the car bounced and swerved on the narrow street as Derek did his best to get us out of there.

And we somehow made it back home… We had to leave our car in a hidden spot and walk the rest of the way, and it was a horrible thirty minutes. Kent was steaming. He was so angry he couldn’t speak a word. I tried to stay away from him, but if he saw me getting too far away, he marched to me and pulled me back to the group.

I didn’t want to go back home. Not with him… I was scared. I knew he was angry at me. I had never been afraid of him, but now I was. He’d already hit me today, so I had no idea what else he could do in his rage. Even my omega was so scared it was slowly retreating deeper and deeper into the darkness, where our second spirits went to sleep when they weren’t needed – or if things got too rough for them to handle.

The parking garage where our little camp was hidden came to our view, but so did a group of three cars and eight people standing in front of them.

I recognized the biggest alpha. Grant. The leader of the largest looter clan in this city.

And he, too, was fuming.

“Kent!” he growled loudly and marched toward us. “You piece of shit!”

I stopped in fear, and Payton hurried to me and put his arms around me, seeking comfort, but I couldn’t even comfort myself at that moment. I carefully moved us further away while Kent’s focus was elsewhere, but there was nowhere for us to run.

“Two people are dead because of you!” Grant continued shouting. “And you lost my guns, you fucker! That’s nine hundred dollars!”

“I didn’t do anything! They screwed up and got themselves killed!” Kent shouted back, but he was keeping his distance from the larger alpha.

“That house was your responsibility! I heard you fucking escaped! You even left your own men to fucking die! And you didn’t even try to get the fucking baby!” Grant’s voice grew louder and meaner as he spoke.

Seeing Kent scared of this bigger male warmed my heart, actually…

“I was trying to find someone with a gun!” Kent kept throwing his excuses while taking steps away from Grant, but the other leader quickly caught up with him, grabbed him by the front of his jacket, and shoved him hard against a crumbling wall.

“You fucked up the whole gig!” Grant shouted in his face.

“I fucked up?! What about your fucking awesome plan to get in and out before anyone would notice, huh?! What the fuck happened with that gate, huh? We lost a lot of time just trying to get in, you idiot!”

“You could’ve had the baby!” Grant growled in his face and shoved him harder against the wall. “You almost had it!”

“You said the omega was alone with the kid, but there was a fucking alpha too! And he had a gun! This is your own fucking fault!”

“You had three guns! Three! And plenty of men! But you fucking ran!”

“If you’d fucking done your job and make sure they were actually alone!”

“YOU FUCKING RAN! You piece of shit! You left our people to die!”

Grant finally had it, and hit Kent hard into his guts, then tossed him on the dirty ground.

“You fucking ran!” Grant shouted again and started kicking him in his rage. “You fucking coward! I’ll make sure no other clan will ever work with you! And you better fucking get my guns back, or I will finish you! You hear me?! You get those fucking guns back, or you’re fucking dead!”

Once he was done beating the shit out of our leader, he spat on him, turned around, and marched to his car. Our group waited for a short moment, but then Derek went to help our moaning leader up from the ground.

This was our opportunity, so I started walking home without looking back, pulling Payton with me. I feared that once Kent recovered from his beating, he’d take his anger out on me. We were better off getting out of his sight as fast as we could.

Payton and I hurried up the collapsed pile of large rubble to the second floor where our camp was, and a moment later, our camp came to our view. I was so relieved to see people making a bonfire between our tents. At least a lot of us had managed to escape.

But not unscratched… I saw Yvon sitting next to one of our alphas, Caleb, who was bleeding hard from his head. She was trying to help to stop the bleeding, and it looked like she, too, was injured. She had bandages around her arm, but she was bleeding through them.

They all looked up when Payton and I stepped out of the shadows and smiled in relief at the sight of us.

“You all right?” Yvon asked.

“Uninjured…” I mumbled, and glanced at Payton.

Payton shook his head. “Not injured.”

We lost their attention almost right away when they heard Derek and Kent approaching us. I glanced over my shoulder and felt a little better when I saw that Derek had to hold Kent up while he limped next to him, grunting in pain with every step.

Everyone stayed silent as they walked past us. I assumed everyone had heard the fight just now. No one dared to even look up until the two of them had entered the guard station and closed the door behind them.

“Did we… Get anything valuable?” Yvon finally asked.

Her question was met with silence.