The Crimson Chain by R. Bruns

I thought freedom was the only thing I had left. I was wrong.

They caught me at dusk, and dragged me to her. Elyanna. She is the Alpha who rules the Crimson Chain, a relic from a dead world, a woman whose age has carved her into something cold and unyielding. She looks at me not as a person, but as a prize. An asset to be broken.

This fortress isn't a sanctuary; it's a gilded tomb built on horror. I see what happens to Omegas here, their spirits shattered serving in the fortress's brothels, and I swear it won't be me. She is my captor. My enemy. I will die before I bend to her will.

But then the fire starts inside me. A brutal, agonizing heat I don't understand. My body becomes a traitor, screaming for a connection I can't stomach, a primal need that terrifies me to my core. It's a biological horror story, this deep-seated craving for an Alpha's touch, for the final, soul-stealing surrender of a knot.

And she feels it. The monster who caged me is the only one my body cries out for.

Worse, my scent pours from me like a wound, a desperate beacon in the wasteland. The Blighted are coming. The vacant eyes of the undead, the perverse zombies, shambling horrors of this apocalypse, are turning towards her walls… because of me.

Now I have to fight beside the woman who holds my chains. Every time our bodies brush in the heat of battle, my skin burns with a hatred so close to desire it suffocates me. My will to survive is at war with an instinct that screams for her touch, her claim, her teeth in my neck.

These aren't just walls and iron bars. These are the chains that bind my very soul to my worst enemy. And I don't know if I'm fighting to break them, or begging them to hold me tighter.