Meeting those yellowed eyes, Corday stepped far too close for comfort. "You must think us sky-breathers are pretty stupid. The racket ain't nothing new. But, unlike you, we weren't dumb enough to get caught and crammed in the Undercroft. I said fuck Shepherd, and I meant it."

The man flat-out guffawed. "You're one cocky little motherfucker. If your stock is any good, I'll get you what you need, kid. As much as you need. And you'll get us exactly what we want. That's how an alliance works. Or do they call it a trade agreement under the Dome?"

"They really must think every last law-abiding Enforcer is gone," Brigadier Dane muttered under her breath.

The idiot on the causeways was either mentally challenged, or outright shameless of his crimes, acting as if consequence no longer existed. Not once had he suspected that Corday slipped a tracking device onto his person, not once had he even seemed wary. And even now that the creep was back in his cozy, dingy hole, she could hear the man laughing, the sounds of grunts, and hoarse, animalistic noises in the background.

It was hard to listen to. The Alpha female was fully aware of what was going on behind the concrete walls bad men thought would keep their flagrant secret safe.

What Corday had claimed to possess—Omegas kept like livestock—these men had in quantity. And they were being used even as the thug from the causeway plotted with his chums just how he planned to slice up the cocky kid who had such a mouth, laughing at how easy it would be to double-cross the boy, and how much they would rake in offering something other than used, slack pussy to the men lining up outside.

Corday's continuous issue with insubordination aside, for once the Beta Enforcer had done something right. The atrocities committed against those females had to be stopped. All the men inside had to be wiped from existence. And order—even if it was only a small step back to the way things were before—had to be enforced.

Things had gone to hell under the Dome, the beauty of a functional system going up in smoke at the first sign of real trouble. It shamed Dane to see her brethren so weak, to know that the precious survivors of wars and plagues could still be reduced to nothing but the animals humanity had become before the Domes. Thólos Dome had been the bastion of civility. The greatest Dome on all the continents. What had been accomplished under the glass—the flourishing culture, the beauty of life beyond mere survival—was now abandoned by Erasmus Dome, by Bernard Dome, even by the poorest Vegra Dome. One hint of plague and any chance of support from the outside vanished.