Corday’s head was in his hands, every last testament of violence he’d found stirring up a more horrible thirst than his worn out, simple desire for revenge. What he longed for in that moment, what he craved, were the whims of a violent psychopath.

He wanted to see Shepherd suffer. He wanted to watch him bleed.

Corday wanted to torment his rival himself until the sounds of the monster’s screams might drown out the noise of the madness knocking about in his skull.

It was hard to swallow, even harder to admit there was no way to balance what he was with what a darker corner of his mind tempted him to become.

It was the room. It was the broken furniture. It was the blood.

The safe house where the Omegas recovered from the drug pushers’ brothel, the place they had been promised, protection was ransacked. The two Beta enforcers set to watch the women lay dead on the ground, wracked with bullet wounds.

Nailed to the wall, his hand raised in a wave, drooped a headless body hung like a sick banner. The clothes Corday recognized, the stature, the smell not quite ruined by the stink of carnage.

Senator Kantor.

The leader of the resistance had been taken, tortured, and murdered, and it had been done right under their noses.

Shepherd was toying with all of them–laughing at them.

There was no sign of the few Omegas who’d called this place home. Though before they had been stolen, based on the stink of terror in the air, Corday imagined they had been forced to watch whatever had been done to a man he looked up to like a father.

“Are you going to say nothing?” Leslie stood at his side, staring forward, her lips bloodless, her expression dazed.

The safe house had failed the women it was set up to protect. The few remaining Enforcers, the stunted resistance, were failing the city they’d sworn to save. The one man unifying the flagging population had been butchered.

What was there to say?

Corday was crumbling no matter the stern look he kept locked on his face. There was nothing left.

Staring at the stump of mutilated neck, at the blood, and the open cavity of the man’s torso, stepping over the entrails piled and stinking on the floor, Corday could find no worthy words for the corpse’s niece. “We should take him down.”

Leslie shook her head as if she couldn’t bring herself to touch the abomination. “What do you suppose they’ve done with his head?”

He had no intention of answering a question they both, deep down, must know the answer to. Instead, he turned his attention to prying the body as gently as he could from the wall.