18
knight
STRIKER COMES BACK from the grocery store with some little white board that attaches to the refrigerator with magnets. It has a dry erase marker, and Striker writes a list on the thing.
-Safe place to stay
-Cedar Falls trying to kill us
-Triggered to hurt our omega
-Money
-What if we knock her up?
The last one gets crossed out by Calix, who tells us that they tie the tubes of all the omegas in Cedar Falls, well, the ones who are damaged and being experimented on. He says when he found out, he was kind of disturbed, because he wondered if it was basically an invitation for the guys working with the omegas to be abusing them without any consequences.
“No one ever even touched me inappropriately,” offers Lotus.
She touches the dry erase board where he crossed this out and the sides of her mouth turn down.
“They can undo those,” I say. “Can’t they? They can untie a woman’s tubes?”
“Sometimes,” says Calix softly. He puts a hand on her back, gentle. “I should have thought that through more, breaking that to you. I didn’t think about how that would make you feel.”
She shrugs. “Whatever. More ways that my body doesn’t belong to me anymore.”
“Is that really how you feel?” says Arrow, concerned.
“Isn’t that how everyone feels?” I mutter. “We’re all out of control. I’m attracted to men against my fucking will.”
“Would you get over your weird homophobia?” says Arrow, glaring at me.
“I’m not afraid of homosexual people,” I say. “I just would like some input on whether or not I am one.”
“Newsflash, no one gets to decide,” says Arrow. “If people could decide, they would choose to be normal.”
“I mean, would they?” I say.
“I don’t know if I’d say that being homosexual is abnormal, exactly,” says Striker.
Arrow winces. “Yeah, I could have worded that differently.”
“These are all our problems,” says Lotus, who’s staring at the dry erase board.
“What about your old lives?” Calix says. “You’re going to want to connect with your families, right?”
“I don’t know,” I mutter. My own family and I haven’t been close in a while. I pulled away when I started working with the mafia. I didn’t want to get them involved in anything dangerous. I don’t really make connections with other people, anyway, not like regular people do. I feel a vague kind of responsibility towards my family, but not love, not exactly. And not because they don’t love me. I just have always felt like I viewed the world differently than others. As if I was a little bit detached from everything.
“Yeah, they think we’re dead, don’t they?” says Arrow.
“We need to tell our parents,” says Lotus.
“Definitely,” says Striker.
Arrow scuffs his foot on the floor. “Okay, I guess I should come clean about this.”
“Yeah, about time,” says Calix.
“You know,” says Arrow. “Of course, you know everything about us from those files.”
“What?” I say, folding my arms over my chest.
Arrow hesitates, not meeting anyone’s gaze.
“He’s married,” supplies Calix.
Lotus turns to him sharply. “ What? ”
“If she thinks I’m dead, it’s obviously over,” says Arrow with a shrug. “How long were we in there? Do we know that? I’m sure she’s moved on by now.”
“Why are you being like that about it?” says Lotus, putting her hands on her hips. “What’s your wife’s name?”
Arrow rubs his forehead. “Okay, so that jealousy thing, Calix?”
“I’m not jealous,” says Lotus. “I’m angry. It’s different. You remembered this at some point, but you hid it from us. If I had known you were married, I would have…”
“What?” says Arrow. “Not put my cock in your mouth? Sure about that, omega?”
She hesitates for a long time. “Well, it matters. It just does. Now, I’m a homewrecker, and you made me into that—”
“Come on, it’s not like that ,” says Calix. “She does think her husband is dead.”
Lotus bites down on her lip. “You just don’t seem worried about her at all. Was it a bad marriage?”
Arrow scratches the back of his head, sighing. “I think it was a typical one, honestly. We were high school sweethearts. We got married real young, right out of college, and then we settled in. I worked and she worked. And then we just… got comfy and grew apart. Sometimes, either one of us would sort of try to rekindle things, but we were both busy and it was just easier to let things fade.”
“She’s a beta?” I say.
He nods. “Yeah. I went through ruts with her when we were young, but it was her idea for me to check into the facility, really. She said she was too exhausted to go through that with me again and that I should just go. She said if I didn’t remember it, it wouldn’t really be cheating, and it was easier all around that way. But, uh, we had not been intimate like that in probably six months at that point. It had become something we did rarely, sex, like just for special occasions. I know sometimes men are upset about that, but I really wasn’t. At the time, I remember thinking that it was easier to just jerk off in the shower. Takes three minutes, and it’s over, and… I knew she loved me. I knew I loved her. Sex just seemed like a big production, kind of a headache.”
I raise my eyebrows at him.
He shrugs. “You look at me like that, but I think it’s honestly pretty common. I think people just… I don’t know.” He eyes us. “I’m the only one who was married, I see, so nobody’s going to back me up.”
“It doesn’t sound like a good marriage,” says Lotus.
“It was,” says Arrow. “I mean, I was as happy as anyone is when I checked into Cedar Falls. It’s only that, whatever I felt for her, even at the height of it, when I was crazy in love as a teenager, you know? It was nothing like this .” He gestures around at us. “And, okay, if she was out there, waiting for me or something, I would feel the need to tell her that it was over. But she thinks I’m dead, so who’s being hurt here?”
Lotus considers. “I don’t know. I’m not sure if that’s a good argument. You still haven’t told us her name.”
“Carla,” he says. “Her name is Carla, okay? You happy now?”
“No,” she says, making a face. “No, you’re right. I’m jealous.” Her face crumples.
Arrow puts his arms around her. “Shh, no, don’t be jealous, baby girl. There’s nothing there to be jealous of.”
She snuggles into him. “I don’t know what I think. Part of me thinks you need to call her right now and confess everything to her or something. And then part of me just thinks I need you to knot me, right fucking now.”
“I pick number two,” says Arrow huskily.
“But—but you’re married!” she wails.
“Not in my heart,” says Arrow.
“That’s the most bullshit thing I’ve ever heard,” she says, pushing out of his arms. She leaves the kitchen.
I go after her. Maybe she wants comfort.
But she shuts herself in the bedroom that doesn’t have a splintered door and pointedly locks herself in.
I stand outside the door for a few minutes, thinking about knocking. Eventually, I put my hands in my pockets and then walk back up to the front of the house.
Arrow is getting beer out of the refrigerator.
Calix is mid-sentence. “… go back to work in the morning, of course.”
“She okay?” says Striker, as I enter the kitchen again.
“She locked herself in one of the bedrooms,” I say.
“Shit,” says Arrow. “I fucked up.”
“We’ve all fucked up,” I say. “We’ve hurt her and we’re all out of control.” Plus, I’m… whatever I am. I can’t pretend I can really be a good thing for a woman. I’ve never wanted a relationship before, let alone one with four other people. No way I can even do this.
“We need to prioritize Cedar Falls,” says Striker. “And the fact we’re wanted by law enforcement.”
“Are we?” I say.
“I think if the police find us, they’ll turn us over to Cedar Falls,” says Striker.
“Assuming they don’t shoot us first,” says Arrow. “Which they might do if they feel we’re a danger. And Acker has made us sound like rabid beasts.”
“Maybe I could help somehow,” says Calix. “Maybe we could fake your deaths. I could report it to Cedar Falls.”
“Fake our deaths with no bodies?” says Striker.
“Of course, that would mean that you couldn’t contact your families, not without putting them in danger,” says Calix. “So, maybe it’s not the best plan.”
“Even if we fake our deaths,” I say, “we still get triggered by whatever the hell it was that Acker did to us in there. We could hurt Lotus, and she’s right, we keep not wanting to face that about ourselves.”
Striker sighs and Arrow does too.
“What the fuck did Acker do to you, anyway?” says Calix.
“You work there, and you don’t know?” I say.
“We only have vague ideas about it,” says Calix. “I’ve heard rumors she, um…” He shifts on his feet. “That she, like, masturbates the hounds?”
I grimace.
“Shit, that’s true?” Calix runs a hand through his hair. “That’s incredibly unprofessional and fucked up. What I can’t figure is how she has free rein to do things like that.” He considers. “On the other hand, what we do to the omegas there is pretty bad, too. The whole place functions under an air of secrecy and entitlement. They’re getting away with shit there, and it’s probably because they have money.”
Yeah, this hits for me.
I never felt particularly guilty about taking money from organized crime, or even for murdering people, because it seemed to me that all big organizations that make a lot of money are corrupt in some way. And even if they don’t directly cause people’s deaths, they do cause suffering.
People aren’t good, that’s the thing.
But they spend most of their time worrying about the bad outside of themselves, blaming everyone else. People don’t look at the bad in themselves. They don’t try to fix themselves.
Calix eyes us. “I’m only working for them because I’m stealing drugs from them to suppress my ruts. But if we’re a pack like this, I don’t need my ruts suppressed. So, maybe I should just quit my job.”
“No,” I say. “You’re the only one of us who’s gainfully employed.”
“Well, I don’t want to take their money,” he says. “I’ll get a different job.”
I think this through. “You know, I might have some contacts if we wanted to have fake documents made up, driver’s licenses, that sort of thing. That way, we could get jobs.”
“Good,” says Calix, pointing at me. “That’s the kind of thing we’re going to need.”
“Don’t quit your job yet,” says Striker. “You have access now, and we might need it.”
He nods. “Yeah, I guess that makes sense.”
“Arrow, I know you’re not crazy about making contact with your wife,” says Striker.
“Ex-wife, come on,” says Arrow.
“But I want to contact my family,” says Striker. “I can’t go back to my old life or anything, but I don’t want to pretend it never existed. Except right now, doing that only puts a target on my loved ones’ backs, because we don’t know what Cedar Falls will do.”
“Yeah, they’re shady,” says Calix. “They kept you guys a secret, experimented on you without any consent, faked your deaths, the list goes on.”
“They should go to jail,” I say.
Everyone looks at me like they never expected me to say something like that.
“What?” I say. “They’re breaking laws, right?”
“How are we going to prove it?” says Arrow.
“We just tell them what happened,” I say. “Hell, we show them that we’re not dead. That should prove something.”
“They’ll be ahead of that,” says Arrow. “Besides, if we go to formally file a complaint against Cedar Falls or Dr. Acker or whatever, we’re going to be taken into custody and given over to those assholes. We’d probably be dead before anyone followed up. The wheels of justice move slow.”
“So, they just get away with it, then?”
“Maybe we can stop them ourselves,” says Arrow.
“What are you talking about?” I say.
“I don’t know,” says Arrow with a shrug. “But if it’s the three of us against Acker, I think we could handle her, couldn’t we? She trained us to kill. It’s a little poetic, if you ask me.”
I have to agree.
“But then,” says Striker, “we’re outlaws forever, aren’t we? We kill her and it proves her accusations about us to be correct. And it doesn’t really solve the problem entirely, because Cedar Falls is bigger than she is.”
“You want to take the whole place down?” says Calix. “Gut the place? Because I might be able to help. Maybe I could figure out how to set free every hound in that place, every captive omega. I think I have a security guard who might be willing to help. Maybe he’s got friends.”
“I’d be down for that,” I say.
“Yeah,” says Arrow.
Striker lets out a long, slow breath. “That’s a massive undertaking. It’s a lot of planning, a lot of work, a lot of risk. I say we only do it if we’re positive that it’s worth it.”