9
lotus
KNIGHT IS STILL knotted inside me. We’re lying on the bed, both face down, but he’s twisted a little so that he’s not lying on top of me. Our bodies are still connected, but our faces are side to side, and we’ve turned them so that we’re staring at each other.
He has this look on his face, a look I really like, one that feels abundantly right. It’s adoration, sheer adoration, and I am basking in it, a warm feeling that radiates out from the way his knot is snug inside me and claims my entire body.
Arrow and Striker are here, but they’re just lounging against the wall, staring at us. They look dazed and sort of hungry. Sometimes, I flick my gaze over to them. I need them too, like this. I need their knots as well.
It’s easy to drown in this good, warm feeling of closeness and belonging and the sweet satisfaction of sex and pleasure.
But below all of that, I feel a current of fear and panic.
This man, Knight, he tried to strangle me.
My neck is actually sore from it, I realize. I reach up and finger the painful places.
He winces, putting his fingers there, too. “Shit,” he breathes. “I bruised you.” He sounds sorry, but he also sounds turned on.
The panic surges. I push his hand away.
He shut his eyes, tucking his hand down between our bodies on the bed.
Striker makes a noise, a disapproving noise.
Knight turns his head to look at Striker. “I know, Striker,” he says. “But I think we have to do it. Knotting her helped a lot. I remember everything.”
“Me too,” I say softly.
Knight turns to look at me. “Yeah?”
I nod. “I remember going into Cedar Falls for my heat. I remember getting the shot that would knock me out. And then…”
“Pretty similar to what I remember,” he says. “I heard things about adverse affects from those drugs they give us there. Heard it could alphas and omegas feral.”
“Feral,” I breathe. “Like animals. It made us into…” I grope for words. “Nothing but instinct, nothing but our animalistic, savage selves.”
“Yes,” he says.
“But that doesn’t make sense,” I say. “Why is scenting you, sex with you, bringing me back?”
“I don’t know, but it’s working, so I think we need to keep doing it,” he says. “I still don’t remember my name. You?”
I search for that within me. It’s strange, all my memories coming back, because it’s not as if they flash before me as they return. It’s more that they’re just there now, when I search for them, and they weren’t there before. I sort through the memories of my former life.
I was a college student, in my senior year. I knew I was an omega, but I almost never went into heat. There’s never much rhyme or reason to heat or rut cycles with alphas and omegas, so irregularity is pretty normal, even though—apparently—omegas and alphas in the Polloi follow the seasons, usually going into heat in the spring and fall, as I understand.
No one knows why that is, but people posit it’s because they live in closer harmony with nature or whatever. Even though I’ve seen the documentaries about those people, and it looks to me like they all live in trailers and big Franken-houses built onto with plywood. They’re super religious, too, and they don’t drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes or eat fast food.
Sometimes people say that’s why our heat cycles aren’t predictable, all those poisons in our bodies.
It doesn’t matter. The point is, I almost never went into heat, so I didn’t have any experience with a facility like Cedar Falls. It was covered on my insurance, though. My last heat was when I was a freshman in college, and my boyfriend at the time, a beta, had tried to get me through it and hadn’t been much help. The facility sounded much nicer.
How long have I been there?
What did they do to me?
How could it be that no one has been looking for me, not my parents or my sisters or anyone?
“Lotus?” prompts Knight. “Your name? Your real name?”
I shake my head. “No. I remember… my mom and my dad and I remember the house I grew up in and I remember that I got a holiday Barbie for Christmas the year I turned six, but not my name.”
He nods. “Yeah, well, maybe if we just keep at it, more sex, I mean, it’ll all come back.”
“I think…” I look over his head, pointedly at Striker and Arrow. “I think I need them. And maybe the other one, too.”
“Other one?” says Knight. “What other one? What are you talking about?”
“Another alpha,” I say. “He got me out of the facility.”
“He works there,” comes Striker’s voice. “I think his name is Calix Beckwith. Huh, that’s weird. When I saw his name tag, I couldn’t read it, but now, when I remember it, I can.”
“You’re sounding better, too,” says Knight.
“Watching you two helped,” says Striker.
“Do you remember things?” says Knight.
“No,” says Arrow, “I don’t, anyway.”
“Me either,” says Striker. “Nothing about my life before, but I have more words, and I can read apparently.”
“I can’t believe you knotted her,” says Arrow, shaking his head.
Right. It’s not done, knotting. Typically speaking, alphas don’t get knots when they’re not in ruts, though. I’ve heard that they would get them for omegas—obviously, they do, because one is in me right now, and it’s wonderful. But it’s very rare for alphas and omegas to even have sex. It’s highly frowned upon for alphas and omegas to be in relationships with each other, and it’s considered extremely dangerous for them to be together in a shared heat or rut.
That kind of thing used to happen, all the time, back a hundred years ago or whatever, but it made the alphas and omegas out of control, or that’s what I’ve heard. In the grip of that, they’d go crazy and hurt people.
But I don’t feel crazy at all right now.
Of course, I’m not in heat, either.
“Had to,” says Knight, sighing. “No choice in the matter, really. She needed it, anyway.”
“I did,” I say. “But you needed it, too.”
“Definitely,” he says in an affected voice.
We exchange a look again, a look of adoration, and I know it’s mutual. God, I adore him, too. But then, again, that panic rises. I touch my neck again. “Why?” I say.
He breaks our gaze. “I told you,” he says roughly. “Training.”
“You said that before,” I say. “But I don’t know what it means.”
“We’re called hounds,” says Striker. “We’re trained to hunt down omegas and kill them.”
Alarm rushes through me. I try to roll away on the bed, but the knot stops my movement. I let out a whine, something animal, and I contort, instinctively, as if I could get my mouth down there and… and… what? Bite it off to get myself free?
That makes me feel even more horrified. I freeze in place, my breath coming in gasps, my whole body alight with terror.
Knight rolls back onto me, pressing his knot deep into my body, settling his girth against me, pinning me to the bed.
This has the horrifying effect of dual sensations. One is that I’m soothed and comforted, my body accommodating him, submitting to him, and the other is that I’m even more afraid, because he can just do that to me.
He shouldn’t be the thing I fear and the thing that makes me feel safe all at the same time. That’s wrong .
My throat tightens and tears prick my eyes.
Knight grunts, beginning to gently thrust in me. “Shh, omega, shh. Take your alpha’s knot a little. This is what you need.”
“It is not ,” I manage, tears leaking out of my eyes. “What I need is for someone who’s trying to kill me to not be stuck inside my fucking body.”
He recoils, moving off me. Suddenly, his knot deflates. He pulls free of me and gets off the bed.
I’m alone and empty now, and I start to sob. I can’t help it. I curl into a ball and my whole body shakes with the force of it.
Striker rushes to me, wrapping his body around me, holding me against his strong girth.
I press into him, rubbing my face against his chest, but I say, “No, no, no. You want to kill me too, don’t you?”
“No,” says Striker. “I don’t want to. I promise I don’t. None of us do.”
Knight’s voice is dull from the doorway. “It’s psychological is all, Lotus. We spent god-only-knows how long with this twisted scientist lady there. She never let us have orgasms unless it was associated with killing and blood and stuff. It’s just psychological association. I read about this study they did on rats where they got them to associate sex with the scent of lemon or something.”
“What?” says Arrow.
“Yeah, apparently, they did some study, and they exposed virgin male rats to the scent of lemon every time they got laid or whatever. So, then, every time they smelled lemon after that, they got erections.”
“Seriously?” says Arrow.
“I mean, maybe it wasn’t the scent of lemons,” says Knight. “But, whatever the case, your brain hardwires things like that. Something to do with oxytocin or vasopressin or whatever.”
“When did you read about this rat study?”
“I don’t know!” says Knight. “The study isn’t important. What’s important is my point.”
I shake Striker off, sitting up. I’m half-dressed, my pants and underwear pushed down to my knees, and I struggle to pull them up. I see that Knight has already rearranged his clothes, probably when I wasn’t looking. “Okay, I guess I get that. We were all lab rats in there. It’s obvious that’s how they treated us. They did experiments on me too. But the fact remains, Knight, you were able to get an erection.”
“Yeah,” he says.
“Because you strangled me,” I say.
“I wasn’t going to kill you,” he says, sulky.
“I also seem to remember saying that for it to work, you had to believe that you were going to kill me!” My voice is shrill.
He winces.
“Is that true?” I demand.
He shrugs. “I didn’t kill you, though. I don’t think I even really could. You’re…” He gestures with his hands. “I’m yours or something. You’re mine. I know you feel it, too, so stop being all weirded out.”
“What is that?” murmurs Striker, rubbing his chin. “Why do we all feel that?” He looks at the others. “I felt it first with you two, and then I felt it with Calix Beckwith, and then, with you, Lotus.” He turns to me. “It’s ten times as intense with you, like you’re this missing piece that ties us all together.”
“Okay, sure,” I say, furious now. “That’s interesting or whatever, but let’s not get distracted here from my point, which is that Knight was two minutes away from actually killing me. So, it doesn’t matter, really. Because no matter how much we belong to each other or whatever, I’m not actually safe with any of you.”
“You are,” says Knight.
“At any time, that psychological training could rear up, and you’ll snuff me out. You could have done it while we were fucking,” I say. “I would have to be crazy to let any of you anywhere near me.”
“No,” says Knight, shaking his head. “They’re not going to hurt you. Have either of them hurt you yet? It’s only me. I’m different.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Why?”
“I don’t know, I guess because I’m a mafia hitman or whatever, and I’m used to killing things,” says Knight.
My eyes widen in horror. “You’re what?”
Knight scrunches up his face. “It occurs to me that wasn’t exactly a reassuring thing to say, was it?”
I get up off the bed and stalk out of the room, hands clenched in fists. Okay, okay, I’ve seen this movie and read this romance novel, and I’m not this girl. I’m not too stupid to live, and I’m getting the fuck out of here.