All Chapters of THE OMEGA'S VOW: Chapter 71 - Chapter 75

DARIUS POV"You should be asleep."I turned. Lyra stood in the doorway of the room they'd given me — the smallest one in the lodge, furthest from everyone else, which nobody had bothered pretending wasn't deliberate."So should you," I said."I don't sleep well anymore." She stayed in the doorway, arms crossed, not committing to entering. "Being dead for a day does something to your schedule."I didn't have a response to that. There wasn't one that wouldn't sound like an apology, and I'd learned a long time ago that apologies I didn't fully mean were worse than saying nothing at all.She came in anyway and sat on the edge of the second bed, the one nobody was using, putting the width of the room between us."I keep waiting for you to explain yourself," she said. "You haven't. Not once since the tree line.""What would explaining accomplish?""I don't know. Maybe nothing. Maybe I just want to hear you try." She looked at me directly, the way she hadn't been able to in the hospital corr

CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREEKAEL"Stop."Aelindra's arm shot out, catching Gideon across the chest before he cleared the ridgeline.He stopped. Everyone did, the whole line freezing mid-step the way trained people freeze when someone with more information than them says one word with that much certainty behind it."What," I said.She didn't answer right away. She'd gone still in the specific way she went still before she touched something — a door, a wall, a piece of ground that told her more than it told the rest of us."Down," she said. "Everyone down. Now."We dropped. I pulled Lyra with me behind a shelf of grey rock, close enough that I felt her pulse jump against my forearm where it pressed to her back."What did you see," Lyra whispered."Nothing," Aelindra said, crouched beside us. "That's the problem."I looked over the rock ledge.Below us, the ground opened into a wide basin ringed by the same broken stone that had carried us the last ten miles — and at the center of it, half-swa

KAELThe gap narrowed to nothing three inches from my hand.I hit the stone with my shoulder anyway, full weight, and it didn't move. No seam. No give. Just smooth rock where an opening had been a half second earlier, sealed so completely that if I hadn't watched it happen I'd have thought there had never been a door there at all."Kael!"Gideon's shout came from behind me, sharp with something that wasn't panic yet but was close to it.I turned.The line had held for maybe ten seconds after Lyra went through. Then it hadn't. Three of the dark-clothed attackers had broken past Rafael's flank, moving fast and low, and one of them was already inside our perimeter, close enough that I saw his face for the first time.Wrong.His expression hadn't changed since I first saw him on the slope.Gideon's shot had dropped his companion clean through the chest thirty seconds ago and this one hadn't so much as glanced at the body.I put him down with a strike to the throat that should have stagger