Customers were already shuffling in with offerings to trade, twitching with the need to knot a heated Omega. It seemed something as simple as a fresh piece of fruit or a bag of rice could get an Alpha or Beta laid. There were stockpiles of food, crates stacked in a guarded corner that could be put to better use once impounded.

Taking down these men might potentially fund the beginnings of a true rebellion.

Led by Brigadier Dane, with Corday at her back, the team of twelve armored Enforcers breached the concrete compound in tactical formation. All targets were eliminated without question, the infiltration choreographed to a precision even Shepherd would have admired.

While Dane took down the men bent over tables cooking drugs, Corday's team turned a corner and passed into the back of the building. Nearing where the Omegas were corralled, the Enforcers, like all humans, found themselves susceptible to the lust-inducing pheromones mixed with the stink of human filth. The animal inside Corday sniffed, instantaneously enticed, while the human who controlled such urges found all he saw repulsive. The view was sickening. Six women were chained to the wall, collars around their necks like dogs. Two were so emaciated from the continuous estrous, Corday was not sure how they were still breathing.

Each captive was equidistant—just a bit too far from the others to touch. A few were still being rutted by Alphas; oblivious to the soldiers bearing down upon them. There was no mercy with the city a war zone. A single shot to the head and the offenders died, too caught up in the knot to disengage. In the end, only three of the savages—including the necessary Otto—had been taken alive and bound in the middle of the room. The Enforcers began unchaining Omegas, preparing to move them as soon as possible before one of the officers instinctively fell into a rut from the pheromones.

There were things Corday had seen in his short years as an Enforcer, crimes so vulgar he just could not believe anyone was capable of committing them. It turned out that the horrors in that Omega kennel were only the beginning. Behind a chained meat locker lay the spent bodies of numerous skeletal creatures. The emaciated corpses of eleven murdered Omegas, bruised, beaten, gazing out of lifeless eyes at the nothing they had become were haphazardly piled up, frozen from the cold that kept them from rotting.

Brigadier Dane stared, the Alpha female slack-jawed, seeing one little girl who looked so much like her missing sister, it took her a moment to register the shouting of her men. Tearing her eyes away, she rushed toward the outcry. One of the Omegas, a female freshly caught and still free of the drug's full effect, held a shard of glass that dripped with blood. Naked, she stood over Otto and his thugs, sawing through the bound gangster's neck until her hand bled.

She'd killed their source of information.