Rivers and Roads, page 1
Rivers and Roads
BEAST OF BURDEN
BOOK TWO
E.M. LINDSEY
Rivers and Roads
E.M. Lindsey
Copyright © 2022
2nd Edition
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Any events, places, or people portrayed in the book have been used in a manner of fiction and are not intended to represent reality. Any resemblance is purely coincidental.
Cover by: Natasha Snow
Content Warning: This book contains A/B/O hierarchy, pheromone-driven heat sex, mentions of torture, blood, and violence, an instance of miscommunication that can be read as dubious consent.
This book was previously released under the penname Ariel Millar. This is a second edition with minor changes made to the text.
Contents
EM Lindsey Links
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Epilogue
About the Author
EM Lindsey Links
EM’s Discord
EM's Patreon
EM Lindsey on Instagram
EM Lindsey on Bookbub
Prologue
ZANE
There may have been a time—in the years before I was in this place of darkness and pain—that I believed I was unbreakable. That the horrors of the First War were the worst things I could have experienced. I had been taken prisoner more than once. I had been beaten, tortured, and left for dead.
But oh how the humans were clever. Oh, how they were ruthless.
There was some sort of vicious irony when I heard one of them whisper, “The last of his humanity is being stripped away.” Because was I losing it? Or was I gaining it? This monstrous beast in front of me that far rivaled my wolf in its cruelty, and its desire to inflict unending pain…
That was human.
That was the only human I had ever known. Would ever know.
I had no concept of time, only a cycle of agony and unconsciousness. I couldn’t shift forward or back—my teeth elongated, my claws engaged—tearing at my own flesh as I tried to free myself, tearing apart other Wolves they put in front of me. Once upon a time, I thought a rescue would come, but I could no longer remember who existed to rescue me.
This was it. I had no name, no face, no purpose but to destroy.
I was a beast.
This was my burden.
Chapter
One
ZANE
Peace was a stranger, a foreign sensation that was a little too close to pain for my own comfort. It felt like a devil on my shoulder, trying to convince all of us that we should drop our guard and then the chaos would set in. I knew what my brother would have to say about it, of course. Danyal hadn’t studied psychology, but he knew enough to see trauma in the Wolves who had returned from the First War.
None of us trusted the world around us, and that had only grown the more we learned what our people were capable of. Once upon a time, we had only feared what the humans could do. Now, even a year after Kor’s return—after we settled into Corland and began to rebuild—we barely trusted the Wolves around us.
Too many nights I woke up with a silent scream lodged in my chest. Too often, I was lost to the nightmares of the battles—in the faces of those I had killed and those I had failed to protect. But on occasion, I was lost in the terrors of what would be if we didn’t stop it. The face of an Alpha Wolf standing over me, foot on my neck, a reminder that power was more appealing than true freedom.
I preferred insomnia to those dreams. More often than not, Danyal found me in our small living room, my gaze locked on the moon which sat heavy in the sky, just outside the window. It felt strange to be in a home too, especially one that had been abandoned to the wilds after the humans had attempted to destroy the city. It had taken clean-up crews nearly six months to make one single quarter of the city habitable.
Danyal and I had chosen this place together for the proximity to where Talia and Cameron had moved. After finally coming home from war, alive and mostly intact, I couldn’t stand the thought of being far from either of my siblings. Even with the city abandoned and nature having taken over, there was no shortage of space to live. I knew several Wolves thought it was ridiculous that I chose to live with my brother when I could finally have peace and quiet, but those were the Wolves who had no idea about the voices that screamed in the silence.
Corland was still struggling to get on its feet too. We weren’t necessarily lacking in bodies who were willing to fill up the empty spaces, but we were lacking in experts that knew how to get a war-torn city back on the grid. We had electricity after five months, running water after seven. My first hot shower after a run with the moon, I wept silently with my head pressed against the tile, my fist in my mouth to muffle my sobs, praying my brother wouldn’t hear my tumble into weakness.
Danyal would only hover—partly due to him being an Omega, but mostly because we were one of the rare few who had blood kin still alive and within reach. My mother had been profoundly lucky to have birthed three children so close together in her lifetime—especially two who were born Alphas. I’d never met a single Wolf growing up with more than one sibling and never two of the same status. We’d been something like freaks at school, but I didn’t care. Especially not when the humans started to strip us down to nothing, and all we had left was each other.
We rebelled before the humans began to take children away from parents, but it was a damn-near thing.I wasn’t sure that fear of losing Danyal and Talia was going away any time soon. Not entirely, no matter how much victory we claimed by the end of this blossoming second war.
My instinct, of course, was to protect my siblings. It always had been, and it had been agony when I left for the front, and they were at home knowing it was likely they would never see me again. Danyal was the first face that greeted me in the Capital when the Equinox Treaty was signed, and even then, I had seen it on his world-weary face. He knew as well as I did that this was not over.
In spite of living with him now, which was a strange feeling because I hadn’t shared a house with him since we were kids, he was rarely there. His brilliant mind was locked in his labs, attempting the final stages of an experiment Kor believed we needed in order to bring our people home. My brother was a geneticist, and he was using Misha—the human turned Omega—as his muse. But the very idea of genetic manipulation used on our own people made me feel sick to my core. I had argued until I was blue in the face, but the Head Alpha was unmoving.
“It’s only step one in this endless fucking battle to regain actual power back from both the Wolves in our government,” he insisted at every objection, “and from the humans we all know are capable of so much worse.”
But fighting fire with fire was something that terrified me down to my bones. We weren’t human, so why use their tactics? Danyal swore it was the only way to get close enough to stop them, and just like Kor, he wouldn’t consider an alternative. “We won’t be able to get ahead of them if we don’t know what they’re doing,” he said. “This isn’t just about using their methods against them, it’s about unraveling them so we can save our people when we get them back.”
I understood, but I just wasn’t sure that’s where his head was at. We were all creatures of war. We existed to fight, to kill, to take down those who would leash us and force us back into cages. And I had no doubt Wolves like Kor would do anything they had to, no matter the cost.
Frustration was mounting, and I was starting to question whether or not we had made the right choice in making Kor our leader. It had seemed like the only choice at the time. Orion had petitioned the Council for his appointment, and at that point, his arguments were solid.
“He’s injured, but he’s strong. You all know how capable he is. You’ve been fighting with him for years, and he hasn’t lost his fire. But more importantly, he’s an Alpha the rest of the Wolves will follow.”
But I was starting to wonder if bonding to a human—even one that had been turned into something else—was affecting his ability to put our people first.
Of course, those were only moments of fear and frustration. I did trust Kor. I had trusted him with my life when he was a young Alpha leading our people to victory after victory. And I trusted him when he returned to the compound, blinded and weakened—tortured by the humans and then mated to one.
I was just desperate for a plan B, because I wasn’t convinced plan A wouldn’t make us just as monstrous as the humans we were fighting.
When the door opened to the apartment, I glanced over, having felt Danyal in the pulse of the pack bond. He looked exhausted, but not nearly as defeated as he had been over the last few weeks, which told me he was making progress. I wished I believed in his theory enough to celebrate, but manipulating Wolf DNA terrified me more than I had words for.
“Why are you up?” he asked, dropping his bag on the chair and taking a seat on the sofa. His head lolled back against the cushion, and I could only just make out the glowing orange in his irises as he sank back into shadow.
“Usual shit,” I admitted. I didn’t talk about the war or my nightmares with him. Not in detail, anyway. Danyal never pushed me, and it didn’t take a genius or a pack bond to know he was grateful for it, because he couldn’t handle the reality of all that fighting. “How was your night?”
“Our first test subject did well,” he told me.
My stomach twisted in on itself. They were testing manipulating status and pheromones on Betas in an attempt to create a flawless spy that could sneak into DC—behind the walls of ComTech—where the humans were storing all of the information on their labs. And at first glance, it wasn’t a terrible plan. Humans had been employing Omega Wolves for a while now as an attempt to bridge the gap between our two people. It was an easy way to get spies on their side, but the Omegas hadn’t been trained their entire lives for battle—and there was no mistaking that getting the information we needed would be a battle.
But, there were smaller Betas and larger Omegas who could seamlessly masquerade as one or the other, if not for the eyes. Humans couldn’t tell them apart by scent, so it would be easy to send someone over the border…if only we could disguise that lingering bit of identity.
I wasn’t sure who the first person was to propose the idea of a temporary genetic shift, but it wasn’t a leap to imagine how quickly my brother jumped on the opportunity. This was, after all, his entire life.
And the plan made sense, logically, but I hated it. There were too damn many ways it could all go wrong. If we were going to send one of ours over, I wanted to know I could trust our spy as much as I trusted myself, and that made for an impossibly short list of Wolves.
In reality, Orion was the only Beta I would have ever agreed to send out, but that was an impossibility. Not only would Kor refuse to send his second-in-command, but the thought of Orion being put into danger like that—knowing that he likely wouldn’t come home—made me want to tear the city walls down.
Which left us, again, without a guarantee that any of this would go our way.
“I know you’re upset with me,” he started, but fell quiet when I lifted my hand and turned to face him.
“I understand that our options are limited and that you’re doing everything you can to help. I just can’t agree with the means, even if we get what we want in the end.” I paused, taking a deep breath. “I want to be better than the people who are trying to hurt us.”
“So do I,” Danyal said very quietly. “You’re not the only one who has been violently affected by the war.”
I flinched, guilt racing through me, because it was easier to believe that those who weren’t on the front lines never felt the pain and trauma that we did. But I could see it in Danyal’s eyes, the way he flinched at loud noises, and the way he was always afraid that another attack was coming. Another bomb dropping.
It was in our blood. There was no escaping who we were, and I knew that just as much as I did, Danyal craved a peace neither of us were likely to find.
Danyal was an Omega who had declared early on that he would never take a mate. He had spent one heat with an Alpha—a Wolf he refused to name, likely knowing I would find the bastard who abandoned him in the middle of the night and tear him limb from limb. Of course, Danyal was never one to let either of his Alpha siblings fight his own battles, so he quietly announced his plans to marry himself to his work, and told Talia and I both to get over it. Which, of course, we did our best. We knew he was doing everything in his power to save us from being forced back into hiding, and that was more important than a mate bond.
But like me—an unmated Wolf—I knew he felt the absence of a partner keenly.
It made us just a little more sharp and a little more cruel. And maybe a little bit more reckless when we felt like we had so little to live for after we saved our people.
“You should get some sleep,” I said into the silence. I felt Danyal’s eyes on me, even though I couldn’t bring myself to look over. “I know you have a long day tomorrow.”
He let out a small grunt, and I heard the sofa creak as he stood. “And you?”
“Meetings,” I told him. And city repair and then more meetings. We were so far from being established, and so mistrustful of other bases, that I wasn’t sure we’d ever be able to form a cohesive resistance. But Kor was determined, and we had agreed to stand behind him.
“Zane,” he said, my name like a resigned sigh on his lips. “We’re both doing the best we can.”
“I know,” I told him. I still couldn’t bring myself to look over. I wasn’t ready to see defeat in his eyes. I loved my brother, but sometimes—in spite of our differences—we were far too alike.
Chapter
Two
ZANE
I was no stranger to the crushing weight of insomnia, and it dogged my heels as I made my way to the little coffee shop that had just opened not far from the Council building. Those little indulgences—grocery stores, coffee shops, restaurants—felt like living in a fantasy world. We hadn’t been kept underground long, but I had anticipated being away from the open sky for much longer than it took for us to get Corland on its feet.
We were working mostly on trade at the moment, but Kor had been putting together a team to live and work outside of the city limits, and funnel in weapons, tech, and food, which was going as well as it could. We were stealing most of our resources—but since we were still small, none of the other larger cities in the area had realized it just yet.
It wasn’t sustainable, but it would work for long enough. Or, at least, most of the Council believed.
I was always the skeptic, but for now, I would take advantage of what I could. Small comforts were enough to get me from minute to minute.
The line for coffee wasn’t long this early, with the sun barely cresting over the horizon, and as I opened the door, I was only vaguely surprised to see Orion and my brother-in-law standing at the counter. They had met at some point before we went underground, and theirs was a friendship I never entirely understood. I had initially fought Orion when he suggested that Cameron would be an asset to incoming Wolves we rescued from both battle and from the humans.
It was another one of my quiet, shameful regrets.
Cameron had always been a strange Omega. He was bigger than most, and his scent was close enough to a Beta’s that he often fooled people who couldn’t see past the foggy coating on his natural eye to the orange beneath. I never knew if his strength was in spite of his blindness or because of it—or maybe neither, but I had always been too cowardly to approach him about it.
I had avoided him when he and Talia first started dating—his scarred eye and his guide dog were unsettling. He was a living, breathing reminder that we were not invincible, and before Kor returned to the compound, I didn’t think any Wolf could survive being disabled that way.
And it wasn’t as though I hadn’t seen it. War had torn so many Wolves to shreds, injuries setting in faster than our bodies could heal. But they had returned home and were quietly put on the shelf, and I told myself that’s how it had to be.
We could only afford to outfit the resistance with able-bodied, capable fighters.
