Back and Stronger: Alpha's Daughter
Chapter 60

The feeling of confidence that had started in Aolith, when they’d left the apartment, had turned more and more sour the further they had driven into Tibald. A few times Sophia had felt that shadowy vulture lurking, circling, and would even come out to give her a testing peck, taking her determination and nerve apart, piece by piece, until it gave way to a sense of foreboding and uncertainty.

She couldn’t put her finger on it entirely, the reason for why the creeping dread that they were making a mistake somehow would keep gnawing at her resolve, but she thought it had to do with how things didn’t seem normal around Tibald for some reason.

Not that she had exactly gotten around much in over five years to be the best judge of how things ‘normally’ looked or felt around here, but whether it was a feeling in the air, or rather due to things looking eerily quiet not only on the streets but in the shops they had passed earlier as well, something was definitely out of the ordinary.

The three men thought so too. They were looking around as though they could figure it out by scanning the area for anything strange in their surrounding area, which was the parking lot a few blocks away from her old home.

My ‘old home’, Sophia wondered at her own choice of inner expression of where she’d lived her whole life before she’d escaped. That must have meant that she had a new home then. Needless to say that it was with Neil and Scott, whether it was at the apartment or not. She just knew within her heart of hearts, that wherever they would go, she would follow, and she would be home. With them. Always with them, especially Neil.

Her gaze involuntarily landed on the man in question. He had told her last night that he didn’t care about the scars – or more accurately, the ‘craters’ – of her past. That it didn’t matter to him whether she’d been tortured, beaten down, condemned, or sexually assaulted and that she was permanently affected by it. He didn’t care that she had lost so much of herself, because he believed it was what made her stronger and how she had to go about rebuilding herself.

Neil had practically admitted that that was what he admired in her, the strength and resilience it took to do that. He even said that it was what made her beautiful to him.

But most of all, what she still couldn’t get over was that he’d called her his moon. His moon… It was something she could only truly have been if they had been marked as mates, which they weren’t, so Neil saying it with the knowledge that she wasn’t his true mate, was a pretty big deal.

It made her spine light up like a Christmas tree, flashing with an array of exhilarating colors, while at the same time sending a chill spider-walking down the groove of that very same spine. She didn’t want to tempt fate. Tempt the Goddess, even though she had started to suspect that whatever the Goddess had been smoking when she’d written Sophia’s fate, had given her a wicked sense of irony, as She had given Sophia the one mate that would make life exponentially worse for her, while keeping her from the only one that she wanted more than anything. The one she called home.

As though he was able to hear her thoughts, Neil smiled and winked at her in approval, or maybe he just wanted to reassure her that everything was still fine, while it seemed to her like it kind of wasn’t so much anymore. It was becoming clearer and more evident that something was seriously wrong the longer the four of them sat in the van, waiting.

According to the plan they’d discussed on their way here, they were to wait here until their informant from the middle school, the one that had called with news of Leo regularly and had sent those pictures of Leo and Bella when they had still been safe. They were still waiting for him past half an hour to their agreed time to meet here, and the men’s anxiousness was becoming palpable within the confines of this small van.

“There he is,” Neil said from beside her, and she followed his gaze to a guy walking their way.

He looked to be about Scott’s age, in his mid-twenties, and had ginger red hair. He was attractive in a way and clearly worked out, looked fit and combat-ready like the three other males in the van. Neil had told her earlier that he had served with them in the military and that they trusted him, but the moment they called him before they had left the apartment to get intel from him on the status of Leo and find out what Tamryn, who had been spying on the Tibald house, what Thorin’s movements had been like in the past few days so that they could get a good indication of what to expect. But the moment he had told them that he’d rather meet them at this parking lot to tell them, as the call lines weren’t ‘safe’ for them to talk about it over the phone.

Sophia had thought it strange, and she had seen the suspicion flash in Neil’s eyes as well, but they still insisted that they could trust him and that he must have had his reasons for thinking the lines had been compromised, but when she saw this stranger glancing with uncertainty around him, and even behind him as he walked to the van, the vulture took another swooping nip at her. Something was definitely off.

Neil opened the sliding door for the man to get into the van and closed it immediately once he was inside. He nervously looked around him at the three guys until his eyes came to a standstill on Sophia in question.

“Who is this?” he asked with suspicion.

“Jackson, this is Sophia – Sophia, this is Jackson,” Neil introduced them, and she saw the astonishment in Jackson’s expression upon hearing her name.

“This is Sophia?” he wondered, his surprise evident. “I must say, you aren’t what I expected, and I didn’t expect you to come with– Why didn’t you tell me?” He was directing the question at Scott.

“What does it matter, Jackson?” he asked from the driver’s seat, turning around to face them at the back. “The information we need from you and Tamryn doesn’t make a difference whether Sophia is with us or not.”

“Of course,” Jackson said, looking nervous but trying to cover it with forced nonchalance. “I was just wondering out loud.”

That was when Sophia got the impression right then that he wasn’t just ‘wondering’, he seemed to be stressing about it for some reason, and she could feel Neil’s wariness in response to picking up on this as well.

“What’s going on, Jackson?” Neil asked, his eyes narrowing in concentration to catch any indication that he might be lying or warranted more doubt for any reason whatsoever. “Why couldn’t you tell us anything on the phone? And why isn’t there a single fucking soul out here except for us?”

Neil had pretty much asked the burning questions all of them had had swirling around in their anxious-ridden minds for the whole time.

Jackson just looked between them carefully, before he said something that sounded very strange and apocalyptic-like, as though it was something that came straight out of a movie. “A city-wide lockdown had been ordered this morning. No one is to leave their homes…”

“Why the hell would Thorin order that?”

And on the morning they’d decided to finally make their move, no less? That was the other unspoken question all of them were itching to ask.

“He didn’t give a reason, just said that it was mandatory and that no one goes to work, to the shops, schools, etcetera. We were just told to stay put in our homes until we have been notified to do otherwise.”

That was strange indeed, never before has Sophia heard about there being a lockdown ordered for no good reason. Never had there ever been a lockdown ordered, period. What was he planning? What did he hope to achieve through this? Did he somehow know that they were coming to rip his whole operation apart? If so, why would he make it go all ‘Judgement Day’ in the city all of a sudden?

Sure, her father was getting crazier by the day, but this was a new level of insanity, even for him.

“And why couldn’t you have told us, warned us, about this on our way here Jackson? You know how important preparation and intel are before entering hostile territory,” Connor spoke up for the first time in a while. “Why couldn’t you have told us any of this already?”

“I had a hacking scare a few days ago, and I suspected that Thorin might have gotten a scent of what I was doing and was fishing around.”

As he’d said this, Sophia thought, the only ‘fishing around’ I see is you coming up with excuses…

When she gave Neil a sideward glance, to see what he thought of this whole thing, she could see that he too didn’t seem to trust Jackson entirely anymore, but couldn’t make his mind up about it either.

“Tamryn just let me know ten minutes ago that the babysitter, Elsie, had arrived and that Thorin had left the house like he has been doing every morning, and would then only return in the late nights again,” Jackson informed them. “She said it should be clear for you guys to get into the house and get Leo out unseen in no time.”

“Wait, I thought your phone was compromised,” Neil reasoned. “Why are you still contacting each other then?” Sᴇaʀch Thᴇ FindNøvᴇl.nᴇt website on Gøøglᴇ to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

“We send coded messages,” Jackson said, his temper rising now. “Look, I’m risking a lot here. I have been risking a lot for you guys for a long time now. Why am I getting these suspicious looks and questions from all of you?”

It was true, he had been risking a lot, and didn’t deserve to be treated the way they’d been questioning him and suspecting him of lying. Just because the bird of prey and foreboding had been eating away at her, didn’t mean that she should suddenly turn against someone and see things that weren’t necessarily there.

“Alright,” Scott said from the front. “Let’s drive by there, slowly at least. See what the situation looks like over there. If the coast is still clear, we go in and out quickly. As for the babysitter, we can subdue her first to make sure she doesn’t scream and make the neighbors curious.”

Everyone nodded their agreement to the plan, and soon after were driving down the road again, to her father’s house.

Sophia felt the trepidation and the excitement of seeing Leo again, hoping and praying that her father hadn’t hurt him or Bella like in the way he’d done in her dream. The vulture circled again though, as she watched Jackson, how he appeared to be anxious and sad.

As they rolled by the house slowly, Sophia couldn’t help but feel the utter strangeness of seeing it again after such a long time. Nothing seemed to be going on inside the house though, from the little they could see through the windows anyway. It was dead silent as the rest of the neighborhood seemed to be as well.

Everyone jumped and had their guns out and ready the moment there was a shrill alarm going off between the tension of everyone focusing so hard on what was going on outside the van.

“It’s the alarm at the apartment,” Scott said with a startled expression as he took his phone out and unlocked the screen.

Sophia felt her heart drop to her stomach. An alarm at the apartment? Did that mean that there had been a break-in? But she found herself watching the screen, feeling her stomach drop even further at the sight of a bunch of people running through the front door with guns held up as the camera hidden in the living room was picking up everything in terrifying detail.

“Well, I guess I’ll get a slap on the wrist for that, telling them that Sophia would be home alone and most likely defenseless,” Jackson said, and too late everyone turned to see that he was still holding his own weapon up to Sophia’s forehead. “Never did I know that these two guys with such notorious hero-complexes would actually train you, which they clearly had,” he said as his eyes moved to the guns strapped to her legs and the combat knife on her belt, “and even less would have expected that they would bring you along on this suicide mission – and if you so much as move Neil, I will shoot your pretty little girlfriend in the head.”

Sophia lifted her hands in surrender, and saw that Neil was glaring at Jackson as though he was able to rip his heart out with his eyes alone. He was even growling with fury at the sight of him pointing a gun at Sophia – a wave of fierce anger she felt for the same reason as him, and was what made her react without planning or thinking about it.

Within a blip of a flash, she ducked under his gun, pushed herself forward, and came back up with the bottom part of her palm pushing skyward with a force and speed that hit his nose from below and straight up, that the crack of his nose breaking came a split second after she had ducked. Holding his nose in pain and utter shock, Jackson whimpered as he staggered and tried to grab for the lever of the sliding door to get out of the van.

Before they could stop him, he fell out of the door and onto the tar road, bleeding profusely from his nose as he moaned, sounding like a goose chortling under the water. The sight and sound of him would have been hilarious and Sophia would have laughed if she wasn’t still shocked by her unexpected reaction. What she’d done on instinct. Without thinking. And she knew that Neil would have been impressed, giving her that amused smile of his if he wasn’t rushing out of the van after Jackson to catch him before he could make his escape or ruin their plan of doing this quickly and stealthily.

But that particular plan turned out to be impossible after all anyway, as Sophia looked up at that moment, and saw that there were suddenly dozens of military soldiers approaching the van from all sides.

No amount of training could have prepared her for this moment. This ambush. This harrowing moment of realization, that this might be it. This might be the day all of them would die, and that everything she had suffered, and all the small victories she had worked so fucking hard to achieve, had been for absolutely nothing.

They were surrounded within seconds, so many weapons pointing at them and so many dark barrels she could see into, but all Sophia could think was that she should have listened to that damned vulture…

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