Chapter 178 Luna Rising pt 2
Seren
The pain didn’t come in waves, but all at once. It had weight, crushing me. It filled every space inside my skull until I could no longer tell where I ended and they began. Memories that weren’t mine flickered behind my eyes—pack markings, burning homes, the copper taste of blood swallowed against protest. The metallic tang of Meredith’s magic threaded through it all, sharp and rotting, binding them together like barbed wire pulled too tight.
The web wasn’t just a form of control. It was yet another violation.
I felt the architecture of it then—black veins laced through marrow and muscle, anchored deep in blood. Each hybrid wasn’t a soldier. They were a node, a conduit. Their thoughts fed inward, converging on a single point. On Mikhail. And now, on me.
The connection bucked and snapped as it recognized something in my blood. Royal. Compatible. A thread between the two of us.
Duncan staggered somewhere to my left, his anguish flashing through the bond, but it was swallowed by the roar of thousands. Gideon’s power surged, trying to cut through it, but even his strength felt distant, muted beneath the avalanche.
My lungs forgot how to draw breath. My heart lost its rhythm.
For one splintering second, I understood what Mikhail had built—not an army, not even a hive, but a chorus forced into harmony. Each person had their choices stripped away, their ability to dissent silenced. The screaming inside me shifted pitch, climbing higher, thinner. The bonds that anchored me to Duncan and Gideon stretched, strained, ropes pulled too tight across a chasm of foreign minds. Horror flared through me at the thought of our bonds breaking.
I knew if I let go right now, I would vanish, destroyed by the web Mikhail had woven. Lost inside the thousands of voices, drowned in their fear.
My knees buckled as the weight increased, black veins tightening around my wrists, my throat, my ribs. The ground felt impossibly far away, and the sky farther still.
‘This is what he wants.’ Kara’s voice was faint, but she was still there. ‘He wants to absorb you into his horde. He wants our power for himself.’
And for one breathless, terrifying heartbeat—I wasn’t sure I was strong enough to refuse it.
I was frozen, locked in place not just physically but mentally. I could feel Duncan reaching for me, his mind trying to connect to mine, but he couldn’t. The bond between us burned, corrupted by whatever this was that was overtaking me. I knew the moment he could no longer find me amid the thousands of voices, the moment Gideon lost control.
The storm faltered. Lightning struck too close to our own ranks. Earth splintered unpredictably. The wind howled without direction.
Mikhail stepped forward through the chaos. “You were a servant once,” he said to me, voice almost gentle. “Hidden. Small. Built to carry power greater than yourself.”
My knees hit the ground as the screaming drowned me. The bonds stretched thin, too thin, and so tight they were on the verge of snapping.
Then I felt it. That warm flutter low in my belly, the reminder of the future that I could have. If I was strong enough. And there, under the desperation in our bonds, the overwhelming love and faith from Duncan and Gideon flooded into me.
For a heartbeat, the simplest thing in the world was to do what I’d been trained to do my entire life—endure. Hold still. Let it happen. That was how servants survived. That was how omegas survived. And the web loved that instinct. It tightened around it, rewarded it, whispered that if I just…yielded…everything would stop hurting.
Sensations rolled over me. Kara’s panic surged. Duncan’s bond flared like a lightning strike searching for ground. Gideon’s steady anchor strained. If I gave in, I wouldn’t just lose myself. I would take them with me. And I knew what I had to do.
I could feel it in the web. The way it tightened when I struggled, how the black veins pulsed brighter when I pushed back. My resistance fed it. The overwhelming pain amplified it. The more I tried to hold myself separate, the harder it dragged me inward. I stilled. I’d lived my entire life with pain, knew how to fight past it, to function through it. So I embraced it. I stopped fighting against the voices.
The instinct to resist was primal. I wanted to shove them out, to silence them. To claw my way back to the edges of myself before I disappeared completely. But that was what he expected. Domination. Force meeting force. Instead, I let the voices in.
The screaming did not lessen, and the agony didn’t fade. But now I let it exist without trying to overpower it. I opened the bond between myself and the minds pouring through me—not to control them, not to command them—but to see them. Truly see them.
The boy wasn’t a weapon. He was twelve. He liked carving little wooden animals from driftwood. The warrior had a sister who braided his hair before battle. The woman who’d strangled her own mother had once sung lullabies in a kitchen that smelled of cinnamon and smoke.
They were not nodes. They were people. The web trembled as understanding replaced resistance. Compassion moved differently than rage. It spread gently, arms open, pulling the abused and broken into its warmth. It was slow, steady, and certain.
Kara’s pacing ceased. She stopped snarling. She pressed against me instead, vast and luminous, her presence no longer feral but sovereign. Behind her, I felt Duncan—terrified, straining—and Gideon, anchoring himself in his power, both reaching for me through the chaos. The warmth low in my belly flared, not hot like fire but steady like a hearth. Our future. Life. A continuance of sorts. The symbol of a kingdom not built on fear but on choice.
The black veins constricting my wrists tightened once more, testing. I relaxed against them, opening myself to them. Then I reached through them. Through the corruption and the blood magic. Through the architecture of violation. Then, thread by thread, I unraveled it.