Page 95 of Queen of Diamonds

I didn’t linger, knowing it wouldn’t matter. Clenching my jaw, I picked a card.

I turned it in numb fingers.

“Seems two are safe,” Ace murmured, as I stared in frightened shock at the picture in my hands. “For now.”

The picture swam as I warred with tears until all I could see was the blurred reds of the queen of diamonds.

“Well.” Ace stepped back and offered me his hand. “Shall we go?”

“Now?”

Like this?

Only… this dress could be designed for nothing else.

“Now, Omega. I’m dying to see what happens.”

33

GLADE

The trap was set.

I’d cycled through it a million times, trying to envision this end differently, but it never changed.

A heavy set of cuffs designed for Alphas chained my wrists, and a gag was tight around my mouth. Ace had picked the location for a spectacle. He lounged upon a wooden chair that almost looked like a throne, and I knelt before him, chained to a hook fixed to the wooden panels of a grand stage.

We were in a huge theatre, with curtains drawn to reveal a sea of empty red seats behind me. We weren’t alone, though; I’d heard quiet footfalls from the balconies above. Silent watchers ready, I knew, to kill on Ace’s command.

I was shivering from the cool metal on my wrists and the chill in the air. From shock.

My heart clenched as my mind ran into dead end after dead end, pure panic fraying the edges of my sanity as I fought with tears.

I’d rarely seen Ace so tense with thrill. He had chained me here with deliberation. Anyone who stepped through the doors ahead and into the theatre would see the marks on my back. My hair was draped over my shoulder so they remained visible, a part of the art, he’d told me, which I knew was that threat that I would pay if I tried to shift it to cover the scars.

The scars that were a claim he could finally show to the pack I’d left for him.

“You’ll see them first. They won’t die straight away,” Ace told me. “I could just have him shot, but where would be the fun in that?”

I stared at him, my mind working through that, then I turned desperately, the cuffs making it difficult. My eyes scanned the theatre, the rows of seats, searching for?—

Then I spotted it, only just visible because I knew what I was looking for. The tiniest glimmer that didn’t fit, the warm light that spilled from the stage, catching ever so slightly on something hair-thin.

A tripwire.

I couldn’t see the setup, the device that would trigger the moment that wire snapped—but it could be anywhere.

“The poison your mates have a fascination with is broadly versatile. It’s a neurotoxin. You can adjust the speed of paralysis before it finishes someone off. At its base, it should kill an Alpha in thirty minutes, but if I give them a little… help…” He tugged a little silver square from his pocket; it looked like it held a pill. “This will slow their death. They’ll still be conscious, unable to move or speak as you cry over them. We could play a game if the other two decide to play the hero and get themselves caught—I’ll free them if you make the first one suffer enough before he dies…”

I shook my head, a choked sound in my chest.

This couldn’t be real.

They wouldn’t come.

They would take the freedom and go…

“I can be merciful, Omega. When we leave, at least one will walk, just so you know the price if you leave me again.” He smiled, his eyes too intent as he met my gaze.

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