Her mind.
Her very soul.
The change was happening at breathtaking speed, and Darcy could barely keep up with the wonder of it.
It was nothing like she'd imagined. Until this moment, Darcy would have guessed that an omega's transition would hurt, like the growing pains of an adolescent as their bones and muscles stretched.
This felt more like a quickening, her entire body drawing in the energy needed to fuel feats she had never known she was capable of.
Though Darcy didn't know what came next, somehow she knew that her life would never be the same. She would experience it in ways she never imagined. Pleasure, pain, chaos, and joy—all of them would be different.
She could feel her old life fading away, sloughing from her like the papery husk of skin shed by a snake. She felt her hurts disintegrating, making room for something new and vibrant and lush inside her.
The fear was gone.
Darcy didn't care that she couldn't breathe, couldn't move, that she was still just the squeeze of a trigger away from death. She'd never be able to explain it, but even though she was sprawled on top of an armed man who wanted her dead, Darcy knew she was right where she was supposed to be.
Of course, that lovely sensation of rightness didn't last long.
In the next instant, Darcy felt another hard jolt as Robert was yanked out from under her. One moment he was beneath her—the next her ass was resting on a patch of sorrel.
This second impact freed her lungs from paralysis, and Darcy was able to suck in a couple of deep, sweet breaths.
She looked up just in time for Zeke to let out a terrifying bellow and hurl Robert against a redwood. Robert's legs took the full impact with the broad, unforgiving trunk, and a sickening crunch echoed through the trees. Screams erupted as Robert fell in a heap at Zeke's feet, and Darcy's eyes widened as she tried to make sense of what she was seeing.
Jagged white bone protruded from the bloody fabric of his pants at angles that made no sense. One foot was turned completely backward. Darcy's stomach roiled at the sight, and she turned away.
Robert Baron might have been a sadistic son of a bitch who wanted to do horrible things to her, but that didn't mean Darcy wanted to watch him die in agony.
But she couldn't avoid the sounds he made, his garbled screams as Zeke roared in primal rage. Then came the cracking of bones, the tearing of flesh, until all was silent except for Robert's last shuddering breath.
Then it was over.
Except she knew that wasn't true.
The last sliver of her beta identity, the part that even now she could feel slipping away, knew it was just beginning.
Blood dripped from Zeke's hands and landing in the carpet of pine needles below his feet. For a moment, Zeke stood still, sucking in giant breaths that reeked of blood, piss, and fear.
But underneath all that was her.
Darcy.
Zeke could feel her sinking into his body, into his heart, where she would be lodged until the day he died.
He had touched her, activated her nature, taken away her freedom and his own in one fraction of a second, dooming himself to be shackled to her forever. It was done, and he couldn't take it back.
He would never be free of her.
No matter where he went, no matter what he did, even if he pulled up stakes all over again and went where Darcy could never hope to follow, she would still be with him.
Haunting him, tempting him, teasing him.
He'd known how this would end from the moment Cade revealed that betas had driven onto his land.
Zeke had been terrified—truly goddamned terrified. He was painfully aware that he was one of only a handful of alphas who would ever experience that emotion, which always came from the same source: omegas.
To know terror, you had to have something to lose.
Well, Zeke was never going to lose Darcy.
He had denied this truth for too long, and, like a salmon throwing itself upstream, would have kept doing it until he died if these craven beta brothers hadn't come here begging for justice to be served.
Until he'd slammed into Darcy's body, Zeke had convinced himself that his reaction to her was the mindless result of biology.
But Darcy wasn't just any unawakened omega. She was a fighter with more guts than some of the alphas Zeke knew. She was a damned fool who worried about him when she didn't have