Chapter 115: No Room For Empathy

Selene’s pov

I had been right all along. It was so damn obvious.

Valerie and Nora came out after spending about another hour inside. The person I had told them to look for ... they found him. He was a worker there. They saw him with their own eyes.

That was the confirmation I needed. Firsthand.

When we finished there, we started heading home. The rest of the breeders went their separate ways, and I stopped by the library to see Ms. Ashlyn.

"Hi, Ms. Ashlyn." She hugged me the moment she saw me, just like she always did.

"How are you doing, Selene?" she asked.

"I’m doing well. Just trying to move on from everything that happened," I told her.

You’ll get over everything, I said to myself ... but deep down, I knew I couldn’t see myself forgiving anyone. Not until I had my revenge. That feeling wasn’t going anywhere.

"I hope you aren’t planning anything, Selene. Please, leave it to the authorities to handle them," Ms. Ashlyn said softly.

The instincts of a mother were never wrong.

She told me she’d had a dream ... and in it, I was shot.

I kept my face calm, but my mind was already made up. A dream wasn’t going to stop me. We dreamed too much and achieved too little. Action was what the moment called for, not visions in the night.

"I’m not doing anything," I lied straight to her face.

Lying had become second nature to me. It had to be, if I was going to execute this plan the way it needed to be done.

Before I left, she pressed a book into my hands ... something about healing, written from a true-life story. A person sharing how they’d found peace after pain.

I went home, walked straight into my room, and dumped it on the bed without a second glance.

Then I sat down and started drafting the plan to apprehend Dax.

From that moment until the next morning, I didn’t sleep. Not once. This was my only real chance, and if I messed it up, there would be no coming back from it.

Everything fell into place. No matter how smart Dax thought he was, he wasn’t escaping this one.

The breeders were out again, just like the day before ... and we were ready to move.

We pulled out in the afternoon and reached the company. We took some time to go over the plan one last time, then we waited. Evening crept up on us fast, and soon the place began to close.

Their wolves came pouring out in abundance ... troops of them, spilling out in different directions, taking different paths.

Dax followed his friends along a separate route.

Nora and Brynn moved to intercept his friends and hit them hard on the road.

Dax and his second friend started running.

That street was a lonely one ... completely isolated. That was exactly why they had planted their company there. Far from eyes, far from noise. The perfect place to take people and make them disappear.

They didn’t realize they were running straight toward us.

Valerie pinned his friend down. I pinned Dax.

He tried to reach for his gun. I kicked it clean out of his hand.

Without wasting another second, I pulled off my veil. He saw my face.

"Selene," he breathed.

Valerie was beating his friend so viciously the man went speechless ... out cold before long.

"You know why I’m here, don’t you, Dax?" He froze. The shock on his face was real ... I knew his actual name. My shoe pressed down on his neck. He couldn’t move.

"Please ... I didn’t know it would turn out like this. Forgive me for everything," he said.

"Forgive you for everything?" I repeated. "How many people have you killed in that company?"

He said nothing. Just sweated.

I pulled out my gun and leveled it at his face. "How many people have you killed?"

The gun changed things.

"I’ve killed a lot," he said.

"I need a number."

"Over a hundred," he admitted.

The grief that hit me then ... I didn’t even know how to name it. Over a hundred people. Over a hundred lives snuffed out by this man.

"The blood of over a hundred people is on your hands, and you’re asking me for forgiveness."

While I was speaking, Nora and Brynn slipped through the company doors to sweep the inside ... making sure we weren’t missing anything.

"There’s no forgiveness for a monster," I said.

I cocked the gun and pointed it at him again.

He was faster than I gave him credit for. He swept my feet from under me and broke into a run ... but Valerie shot him in the left foot before he made it ten steps. He hit the ground hard.

Look at a criminal. Thought he could outsmart me.

I walked up to him slowly, his leg pouring blood, and pointed the gun at him again.

"Your judgement was always coming. Today is just that day."

I gave Valerie a look, and he put a bullet in Dax’s friend right there on the ground. The man died instantly.

"Kill me if you want, Selene," Dax said, looking up at me with that ugly smile still on his face. "But just know that you’re a failure. You failed at getting the king. You failed at becoming Luna. You even failed at convincing your own family."

I pressed the barrel closer.

Empathy tried to creep in ... I felt it. I shut my eyes and pulled the trigger twice.

One shot to the belly. One to the head.

He died instantly.

It was my first kill.

My breathing came out hard and fast ... ragged, unsteady. I had never pulled the trigger on anyone before that moment.

But there’s a first time for everything.

Inside, Nora, Brynn, and Aria tore through the company and wiped out every criminal they found.

What they discovered inside made my stomach turn.

In a room that looked like a cold storage unit, people were bound and kept like animals ... thrown in there like they were cargo. Their families had probably given them up for dead. It was trafficking. Plain and ugly.

We didn’t free them ourselves. We left them there so the authorities could find them in the morning and do this properly.

The breeders and I dragged the bodies to the front of the company and arranged the scene so it would look like a clash between rival parties. Clean enough to mislead. Messy enough to be believed.

Those people inside were going to be free. That thought settled something in my chest.

Dax was dead. And with him gone, I felt something shift inside me ... like a piece of myself I’d been holding onto quietly had finally let go. I wasn’t the nice girl anymore. Something harder had taken her place.

Then we heard the sirens.

We moved fast and hid ourselves before the authorities rolled in. They swarmed the place, marked it as a crime scene, and left the bodies where they fell. Then they pushed through the doors into the company.

The shouts that came out of that building ... pure joy, raw and unfiltered.

The trafficking ring had been obliterated. The talent-suppression operation was finished.

The authorities began combing the area for evidence, searching for whoever had caused all of it.

We were already gone.

We slipped through the same path we’d come in on and disappeared into the night like vapour.

I was certain the news would be on fire by morning.