Chapter 52: Let There Be Carnage

SELENE POV

That thing I couldn’t control had come again.

I could see the doctors and nurses through a strange film ... like watching the world through dirty glass. Ms. Ashlyn was there. Lucian was there. They were all looking at me with the kind of eyes people reserve for someone they’re desperately hoping won’t disappoint them.

Hope. I hated seeing it on their faces right now because I wasn’t sure I deserved it.

I was bound to the hospital bed, but I barely felt the restraints. They might as well have tied a bracelet around my wrists. Whatever Nara had done to my body, it had made me something else entirely.

"Selene, I love you and I believe in you." Lucian’s voice cut through the noise. "You can fight her from the inside. You are strong ... I know it."

"He thinks that’s going to make any difference." Nara’s voice curled through my mind like smoke. "What a fool."

She made me smile ... not my smile. A slow, sarcastic twist of my lips that felt wrong on my face. I was watching myself from somewhere deep inside, unable to pull the wheel.

"Selene, I know you’re still in there," Lucian pressed on. "You can hear me. Fight it. You’ve always been fighting. You wouldn’t even be here if you hadn’t."

The more he spoke, the hotter the anger burned inside me. Not my anger ... hers. My hands tightened. My grip became something inhuman. I felt the restraints straining, then snapping clean off like they were made of paper.

Everyone in the room went still.

Ms. Ashlyn and the doctors exchanged a single look, then moved the nurses out. They were replaced almost immediately by soldiers ... armed, shoulders squared, eyes locked on me.

"Let’s go for a ride," Nara laughed inside me, and before I could resist, she fed me the instinct and my body reacted.

I grabbed the nearest chair and sent it flying at Lucian. He dodged it cleanly ... he always did ... but the crash it made against the wall rattled through the room. One of the guards launched himself at me with full force. I flung him across the room and through the window. Glass exploded outward. His body hit the ground below and went still, blood spreading underneath him.

I was supposed to feel something watching him lie there ... helpless, broken. But I didn’t. I felt joy. A sick, electric rush of it.

I even laughed.

The other guards started pulling back. Lucian held up a hand and ordered them to fall away.

Then he looked at me ... really looked at me ... and his voice dropped into something harder. Something Alpha.

"Selene. Enough of this rubbish." He took a step forward. "You couldn’t even look me in the eye on your first day here. Have you forgotten who I am? I’m your Alpha. The one who rescued you. And I’m ordering you ... fight that parasite."

Something shifted inside me when he said that. A tremor. A crack of light through whatever Nara had pulled over my mind. I tried to reach for it. Tried to pull myself back to the surface.

But Nara was faster.

She took control of my hand before I could finish the thought. My fingers closed around a surgery knife from the tray beside the bed. My arm snapped forward ... and I threw it at Lucian.

He dodged. The blade caught the soldier standing just behind him in the neck. The man dropped instantly and didn’t move again.

I got to Lucian next. I grabbed him and threw him hard into the far side of the room. He went down.

The moment he hit the floor, the rest of them fled ... scattering out of the room like bees pouring from a broken hive.

Unfaithful fucking soldiers.

I stormed out into the corridor. Doctors and nurses bolted the second they saw me coming, scattering in every direction. Even a cheetah would’ve had trouble keeping up. I was laughing at them. Not because they were funny ... because Nara found their fear delicious, and I was still trapped inside her.

They weren’t my targets. They would only become that if I couldn’t find who I was actually looking for.

Nara had instinct the way an animal has instinct ... raw, directional, certain. She knew exactly which room Tessa had been admitted to. I ran to it, threw the door open ...

Empty.

I checked every corner. Tessa was gone. They must have moved her the moment the chaos started. There’s no way she recovered that fast from what I did to her, Nara sneered inside me. They discharged her to protect her.

I scoured the entire hospital in ten minutes flat. Nothing.

Nara’s plan had always been to kill Tessa first before making Lucian’s life hell. She wasn’t going to kill him outright. "Fate will handle that for me," she’d said. She wanted Tessa dead because Tessa was his betrothed ... the same way the Luna of centuries ago had been the Alpha’s chosen woman. That Luna had gotten Nara killed unjustly. Tessa was her stand-in for that old score.

It didn’t matter that Tessa had also killed my child. Nara wasn’t doing this for me. She had only used my grief as a door.

I knew all of this because something had shifted between Nara and me over time ... a synchronisation, a slow bleeding together of thoughts. The longer she stayed inside me, the more I could read her. And the more I understood her, the more I wanted her gone.

Tessa had escaped death again. Third time, maybe fourth at this point.

"This isn’t fair," Nara seethed inside me. "Nothing will be until she dies ... even if everyone else dies with her."

"What do you mean?" I pushed back.

"Let there be carnage," she said.

A surge of power ripped through me. In that moment I felt like the most powerful thing that had ever existed. It was terrifying. It was intoxicating. I hated that part most.

I walked out of the hospital and there was a line of soldiers waiting ... guns, swords, clubs, every weapon they could carry. I walked straight toward the nearest one. Calm. Unhurried. They couldn’t shoot me and something in them already knew it.

I drove my claw into his carotid artery. He choked, clutched at his throat, and bled out on the ground until he was gone. I took his gun and his sword.

The rest opened fire ... darts, meant to make me pass out. I felt them hit. I kept walking. I was laughing again.

Who did these people think I was? They were about to find out.

She made me raise the gun and shoot back. Every soldier in that line went down. They tried to return fire but I was already moving, already striking before they could aim. She used my speed, my strength, my position in this territory like tools she’d been sharpening for years.

Then she took me out into the streets.

She went on a killing spree through my hands. Soldiers. Bystanders. People in the market who had done nothing to anyone. People who were running. People who were begging.

"Let them feel what I felt that night," she kept saying, and she didn’t stop.

I had had it up to my throat.

"Stop!" I screamed at her from inside. I pushed back with everything I had. She was still stronger, but I felt her grip slip ... just slightly.

"I told you," she said, steadying herself. "You have a bigger purpose."

"Not to kill innocent people," I snapped back. "That’s not purpose ... that’s just evil."

"There must always be justification for evil deeds done," she said. "And this is it."

She went back to hunting for Tessa. But my will was building. Slowly, like a muscle I hadn’t used in days finally starting to respond. I needed one more push.

Then Lucian stepped out in front of me.

Injured. Battered from what I had done to him earlier. He looked like hell ... and he still walked toward me anyway.

"Remember our first night together," he started, his voice low. "I told you that you belong to me."

"Keep a deaf ear to him," Nara commanded.

She tried to make me deaf to his voice. But she couldn’t ... and something about failing at that small thing seemed to rattle her.

So I kept listening.

"You belong to me," Lucian said. "Not to Nara. To me."

He dropped to one knee ... not in ceremony, but because his body was giving out beneath him. He was running on nothing but sheer will.

"I love you," he said. Then again, softer, as he went down. "I love you."

Something cracked open in my chest.

"I love you too, Lucian," I forced out. It cost me everything I had.

"Are you mad?" Nara exploded inside me. "That is not part of your assignment..."

She raged. And in her rage, she loosened her grip on me by just enough.

I had always believed Nara was something ancient and noble ... a spirit who had been wronged and come back to restore balance to Morvaine. But she wasn’t that. Her revenge scheme mattered more to her than any kind of justice. More than peace. More than anything.

I had every reason to fight her to my last breath.

But she was stronger than me in a straight fight. She wouldn’t leave willingly. So I had to find another way to evacuate her.

I ran.

"Where are you going?" Lucian pushed himself up and came after me.

I didn’t stop. I ran until the ground changed beneath my feet ... until the soil gave way to rock and the rock fell away into open air. A cliff. A large body of water waited far below, dark and still and cold.

"Selene ... wait. What are you doing?" Lucian’s voice cracked. He sounded terrified in a way I had never heard from him before.

I turned and looked at him. Just for a moment.

"Your love gave me the strength to fight," I said. "Now I have to finish the rest on my own. Bring me back. Please."

"You cannot run from destiny," Nara hissed, scrambling for control. But she was at seventy percent now, maybe less. Lucian had done more damage to her than she’d ever admit.

"Destiny isn’t decided by mortals," I said back to her. "It’s decided by the goddess."

Those were my last words before I stepped off the edge.

I heard Lucian scream my name from above ... a sound that tore through the air and followed me all the way down.

Then the water swallowed me whole.

It rushed into my lungs through my nose, cold and absolute, filling every space Nara had occupied. My body fought it. Then it stopped fighting.

That was the end of Nara inside me.

And now everything ... my life, my next breath, whatever came after ... depended on Lucian finding me in time.