Claimed By My Alpha Stepbrother.

40

Azriel.

I have no clue what Commander Vane forced into Seraphina's mouth. But after he did, she woke up. He instructed we let her rest properly before continuing the journey. And after that time, we rarely stopped.

Commander Vane didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to, his actions spoke for him. We walked at a brutal, unrelenting pace. The men were barely allowed four hours of sleep a night. The luxury of the camel was revoked from Seraphina on the fifth day when it collapsed from exhaustion. The men cut out the meat and stuffed it in their bags, and after that, I carried her.

The walking felt endless. Thankfully, after an eternity, we could finally see Millbrook.

"The city!" the boy with the red bandana yelled, a breathless, ragged cheer breaking from his throat. "We made it! Look!"

Exclamations of joy and relief rippled through the rest of them. Men slung their rifles over their shoulders with lazy relief, their postures slumping as the tension fell away.

But for me, my fists only tightened. My jaw clamped so hard a sharp pain shot up into my temples. This was it. The countdown had reached zero. My eyes darted across the barren ground leading up to the barricade right outside the city. It was the checkpoint, although no one was going in or coming out.

My heart hammered in my chest as I looked for any loophole. There was none.

The men didn’t take their eyes off the two of us even as they rejoiced, and I was sure that before I could even make it past the barricade, a bullet would have already gone through my head.

I had no choice but to go along with them into the city, Seraphina perched perfectly on my back.

No matter what I had expected, what Millbrook held inside its walls was worse.

The stench was horrible. A suffocating mix of open sewage, rotting garbage, and death. The buildings were dilapidated and could collapse any second. A few of them were even inhabited.

But it was the people that made my stomach turn.

They looked starved, their skin stretched so tightly over their cheekbones that they looked like living skulls. Hundreds of them lined the muddy gutters, their hollow, lifeless eyes tracking our well-fed, well-armed convoy. Bodies, some dead, some simply too weak to move, lay slumped in the dark corners of alleys, ignored by passersby.

"Help... please," an old man wheezed, stretching out a hand that was missing three fingers. "Anything. A drop of water..."

The commander didn’t even look down. He marched forward, his boots stepping over a puddle of stagnant water with elegance.

"Stay away!" Scar barked, shoving a weeping woman backward with the butt of his shotgun.

Seraphina couldn’t even bear to watch. She hid her head in my back, blocking her eyes from the horror.

We kept walking until we reached the center of the city, where the crowd was thickest. A heavy cart filled with grey, molding grain overturned near the front of our line, and within seconds, a riot erupted. Almost all the starving people around the area lunged toward it, causing chaos immediately. They all fought for even a handful of the spoiled, inedible grain, pushing through our convoy.

"Get back! I said get back!" the red-bandana boy screamed, panicked as three men tackled him to the ground, reaching for his tactical vest.

"Hold them back!" Vane’s voice commanded, but this time, it was drowned out by the sheer, deafening roar of human desperation.

Now.

I didn’t waste a single breath. I gripped Seraphina tighter around me and ran.

I unlocked the strength I had been suppressing for ten agonizing days. My legs drove into the dirt with inhuman speed, turning the world around me into a violent blur of gray concrete and screaming faces. The wind roared in my ears as I leaped over an abandoned stall, clearing ten feet of open ground in a single bound.

"Hey! He’s running!" a voice screamed from behind the chaos.

"Stop! Stop or we fire!"

The sharp, deafening cracks of gunfire shattered the air. Bullets whizzed past my ears, one biting into the brick wall to my left, showering us in white dust. I twisted my body, shielding Seraphina as I ducked into a narrow, winding alleyway.

With my speed, it should have been easy. I was built for this. I was a predator meant to outrun anything on two legs. But as I cut a sharp left corner, my ears picked up the terrifying sound of gunfire and their thumping feet. They were very close. They had just as much speed as I did.

"Dammit!" I growled, pushing my legs to their absolute limit.

I veered violently to the right, bursting out of the alley and into a courtyard of abandoned, half-demolished residential houses. The footsteps were getting closer; I could hear their breathing echoing against the concrete walls.

Running wouldn’t solve this. We needed to hide. I immediately looked around and ran into a house with a heavy wooden door and a rusted iron bolt.

I immediately closed the door behind me and waited, breathing deeply. The room was pitch black, smelling of damp earth and old rot. My heart slammed in my chest as the footsteps got closer, and only calmed down when they brushed past our hiding spot.

The footsteps faded, and a long, ragged sigh of relief broke from my throat. My shoulders dropped as I released Seraphina, placing her down gently. We did it. We were out.

"Azriel..."

Seraphina’s voice didn’t sound relieved. It was a tiny, trembling whimper that shattered the silence of the dark room like glass.

"I know," I whispered, turning around in the dark to find her. "I know it was close, but we're safe now. They missed us. We just need to wait until nightfall and—"

"Azriel, look."

My brow furrowed. I stepped deeper into the gloom of the room, my eyes rapidly adapting to the darkness.

Seraphina pressed against me, her hands shaking in horror, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was staring into the deep, pitch-black corners of the room where some figures moved, and I felt a chill come over me.

"So sweet..." a woman among them rasped, her tongue darting out to lick her cracked, bleeding lips.

They tilted their heads back in unison, violently inhaling the air, their nostrils flaring with a manic, terrifying hunger. They didn’t even look at me. Their dark, glowing eyes were locked entirely on Seraphina, their hands extending toward her, fingers flexing and clawing at the empty space between them.

"Mine!!" a loud roar echoed as they lunged at her.