10. Seraphina
10
SERAPHINA
U sually my days at the OFS crawled by, each hour another slice in a death by a thousand cuts. But with my first “meet and greet” with the pack my parents sold me to looming at the end of the week, suddenly time was flying by.
My early mornings were spent in the pool, getting back into the grind of swim season. My swims and our evening dry-land workouts were always the best parts of the day. Paige had also signed us up for Advanced Accounting and an art elective involving painting with oils that was taught by an elderly beta man who did not appreciate the veiny, knotty schlong I’d created in response to an assignment that directed us to paint “what being an omega means to you.”
On Friday evening, Paige flounced in through the door of the shared bathroom that connected our dorm rooms. We resided on the third floor of the senior dormitory, and Dad had pulled some strings—a weak apology for his behavior—to ensure we had west-facing rooms with views of the hills instead of the rest of the OFS campus.
I’d just fired off a text confirming my plans were a go for the night, and I pasted an innocent smile on my face as Paige looked me over with a critical eye. “Why aren’t you ready?” She waved a hand at my black tank top and lime-green yoga pants. “You’re supposed to be meeting this pack in fifteen minutes.”
“Oh?” I glanced at my watch. “Would you look at that? You’re right.”
She sighed. “You’re not going.”
“I am too going,” I retorted. “Sort of.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m sure I do not want to know what that means.”
“Nope, you do not.”
She groaned and stomped back toward the bathroom. “Call me if you need me to bail you out of jail,” she hollered over her shoulder before the door slammed.
Thirty seconds later, a knock sounded at my door.
When I flung it open, I was zero percent surprised to find Henri standing there, hand on his hip and an impatient look on his adorable face. His platinum-blond hair was coifed to perfection, and he wore his usual work clothes—a crisp lavender dress shirt and fitted navy slacks. He arched a dark eyebrow at me. “Of course you’re not ready,” he griped, waltzing past me, his tablet in hand. “Frankly, I’m shocked to find you on campus at all, much less in your room.”
I threw my arms around his neck and gave him a firm squeeze. “Hey, you.”
A microscopic amount of tension released from his shoulders, and I received a solid back pat in return. “Hey, babe. I know you’re not looking forward to this, but Andrew and Rodrigo are already on campus and on the way to welcome the Montgomery Pack in the Main Hall’s reception room. I’m under strict instructions to throw you over my shoulder and carry you there if I have to.”
Poor Henri. Just when I thought my dads had started to really like him, they’d gone and given him an assignment he was doomed to fail.
I grinned up at him. He wasn’t nearly as tall as my brothers or my dads, but at five foot seven, he still had a good four inches on me in my bare feet. “You think you can carry me all the way across campus?”
He huffed. “I'll have you know I have been lifting weights on my lunch breaks in the gym at work.”
My phone vibrated on my desk. My large, sturdy, built-into-the-wall desk that was situated under the room’s single large window.
So handy.
I needed to get a move on.
“Why don’t you chill over at my desk while I go throw something else on?” I said, grabbing Henri’s hand and pulling him further into the room.
He eyed me with deep suspicion. “Just like that? You’re going to put on something that is not workout clothes and actually go meet this pack? What happened to the righteous anger and refusal to acknowledge that these Alphas even exist?”
I shrugged innocently. “Maybe I’m just changing tactics.”
He narrowed his eyes at me as he sat down in my desk chair with exaggerated slowness. I smiled brightly and disappeared into my walk-in closet. A minute later, I reappeared wearing black cargo pants, boots, and a dark hoodie I’d thrown over my tank top.
Henri’s brows barely had time to hit his hairline before I was at his side, whipping a pair of handcuffs from the front pouch of my hoodie.
I pounced, swiping his phone from his hand and throwing it onto my bed.
“Seraphina!” he screeched as I secured his wrist to the handle of the top drawer of my desk. I’d locked it earlier, so it wasn’t going anywhere.
“I know, I am so sorry, babe,” I said, petting his hair lovingly. “But I will take all the blame for this, I swear.”
I stepped back and snapped a photo of his predicament with my phone. “I’ll make sure I send this to my dads later so they know it wasn’t your fault that you weren’t able to escort me to meet my buyers.”
“Seraphina Bryce, you unlock me this instant !”
I pulled a particularly sexy manga from the other drawer of my desk and set it in front of him. “Here you go. This one’s my fave—two hot vampire boys from warring families fighting their attraction for each other.”
He glowered at me. “I’ve already read this one.”
“Read it again! I’ll be back in no time to unlock you.”
“Seraphina!”
But I was already on the move. I pulled my hood over my hair and slipped quietly from my room, making for the back stairs. I exited the dormitory and headed out across the grounds. Dusk was settling over the city, the violets and pinks of the sunset winking over the hills in the distance, the low light handy for obscuring my visibility as I skulked along the gravel path that led to the groundskeeper’s hut.
After confirming that neither the groundskeeper nor his staff had decided to hang around to groundskeep on a Friday night, I slid into one of the three golf carts they used to putter around campus.
“Okay,” I muttered. “Time to see if the internet lied to me about how to hot-wire a golf cart.”
I pulled my lock picks from the little pouch I wore on my belt and got to work on the ignition key next to the cart’s steering wheel. After a minute of finagling with the pick and the rake, I managed to get the power clicked on. Thank you, Daisy, for teaching me to pick a lock like a pro . A few taps on the accelerator to engage the engine, and we were golden.
“Fuck yeah,” I whispered as I sped away. My first stop was the OFS’s westernmost gate, which was used infrequently and locked with a rusty chain.
When I arrived at the gate, my co-conspirators were there, waiting for me.
“Did you hot-wire a golf cart?” Dylan asked, shooting me an impressed look through the iron bars of the gate. She was dressed in what Cam called her “cat burglar” outfit—black leggings, a nondescript black T-shirt, and a ball cap that hid her dark auburn hair.
“Yep,” I replied, grinning as I hopped out of the cart.
“You need to show me what you learned sometime,” she replied. “You never know when that might come in handy. Right, Derrick?”
Dylan’s twin brother loomed next to her, his hands jammed into the pockets of his dark jeans as he rolled his eyes at the both of us. “Sure, Dyl. Next time we’re breaking and entering into a country club and need to make a hasty getaway.”
She snapped her fingers and pointed at him. “Exactly.”
I rubbed my hands together, giddy excitement building. “Did you guys get what I asked for?”
Derrick reached into his backpack and produced a rubber grenade. It was a crowd-control blast ball that would detonate with an earsplitting bang before spraying tear gas all over the place. While I was certain Bryce Solutions had things like this lying around a storage room at HQ, I was banned from the premises for the foreseeable future, and I couldn’t exactly ask Jere or my brothers to procure one for my use. Lucky for me, the St. James family had its own resources.
Derrick passed the grenade to me through the bars of the gate with a pointed look. “You sure this is the way you want to play this?”
I took it from him and pulled a glitter pen from my pants. “Yep,” I replied as I doodled a big heart and XOXO Sera on the grenade’s rubber shell. “This is the lowest-grade version, right?”
I didn’t want to severely maim anyone, after all. Just severely piss them off.
“Yes.”
“Good. I need to send a message to this pack. One that says, ‘This chick is fuckin’ psycho and not worth our time.’”
“There’s no one better at fuckin’ psycho than you,” Dylan said.
A title I was proud to own. “Thank you.”
Derrick huffed and rolled his massive shoulders. “Just let Dylan and me loose in the meeting. We’ll pick a fight, bust a few heads, and send those rich fucks packing.”
A sharp bite of his aggro pheromones told me he wasn’t joking. Derrick had quickly become another older brother to me, since the three overprotective monkeys already on my back apparently weren’t enough. Austin, Seth, and Cam did seem to appreciate Derrick’s ability to jump into things where a Bryce would’ve had to step lightly, which was how he’d gotten into a fistfight with the lead Alpha of a particularly sleazy pack at one of last year’s all-college parties. Those assholes were the offspring of some big donors to the OFS, but they were also disgusting creeps who didn’t respect personal boundaries.
I’d thrown a punch at one who’d gotten handsy, then Derrick jumped right in to pound the pack leader into a bloody smear on the flagstone patio while his buddies from the gym held the others back without breaking a sweat.
Austin would’ve had to at least pretend to be diplomatic before he beat the shit out of a courting pack Alpha, but his pack had better things to do these days than attend OFS college parties.
I was pretty sure Derrick was their spy, but he kept his nose out of my business unless some douchebag put a toe out of line. Then he got to work out some of his residual anger issues on their face. It was a win for everyone.
“No can do,” I told Derrick. “Apparently Andrew and Rodrigo are in attendance, and Dylan can’t be caught acting as my accomplice to any of this. I don’t want to endanger her ranking as number-one daughter.” I quirked a brow at her. “Do my brothers know what you’re up to tonight?”
She grinned. “We have an agreement that anything concerning you and your situation is on a need-to-know basis. They want to have plausible deniability when this inevitably blows all the way up.”
“Mmm, smart,” I replied. “Our dads would make their lives hell if they got caught helping me pull off a stunt like this. But this is what my parents get for putting my back up against the wall.”
“And for letting you spend significant time training under Jericho,” Derrick added. “That crazy rubs off. And they can’t think you’ve been doing nothing but paperwork all this time.”
“No, they aren’t quite that clueless, unfortunately,” I replied. “I mean, they don’t know I’m participating in jobs, and they definitely don’t know I’ve pulled the trigger myself on more than one occasion. But they’re at least aware that Jere’s taught me basic self-defense and that I’ve been spending enough time with your mom to be able to fire a gun and hit a target.” I shrugged with a casualness I didn’t feel. “A near-miss kidnapping attempt and being shot at while in a moving vehicle would do worse to a person.”
Dylan frowned, shaking her head. “I’m still sorry about how fucked up that day was.”
Fucked up was an understatement. Back then I’d been just a clueless, sheltered rich girl who thought her problems were the worst , and they consisted of existing amongst the bitches at the OFS and coming up with creative ways to irritate the courting Alphas.
Then I got a taste of Dylan’s world. Life for omegas outside the palace gates was so much worse, and the caravan of killers that had been sent after us only failed to run us off the road and take me, my sister, my mother, and Dylan hostage because of Dylan and her mother’s fast thinking and expert shooting.
That feeling of total helplessness, of mind-numbing terror —I never wanted to feel that way again. I never wanted to be the girl cowering in the corner while other people took care of business and saved my life.
My dads understood that I needed to feel safe, which was why they entertained my new little “hobbies.” But here they were, trying to wrestle the tenuous control I’d managed to gain over my life away from me by forcing me at this pack they picked.
My problems paled in comparison to the things that happened to Dylan’s girls—like the ones that happened and almost happened to Rosa and Alissa—but that didn’t mean I was going to take them lying down.
“I’m glad it happened,” I told Dylan, and it was mostly the truth. “That experience made me who I am today, and that is the girl who is going to drop a crowd-control weapon on a bunch of Alphas who think they can move me around like a piece on a chessboard.”
Dylan sighed. “Just be careful. Deliver the package and then get the hell out of there.”
I saluted her and shoved the grenade into the pocket of my sweatshirt. “Well, I’m off. You two scram before campus police decide to hit this desolate corner on their nightly patrols.”
They waved goodbye as I climbed back into my cart. I zoomed back toward the main quad, one hand on the wheel and the other silencing the third missed call from Andrew, who was no doubt unhappy with my tardiness.
I’m on the way, Dad. Just you wait.
While Austin and Seth were pretending to be neutral observers in this arranged-bonding train wreck, Cameron was a bit more willing to get involved. As the angelic beta boy from next door who Seth fell in love with as a teenager, he was much more impervious than the other two were to criticism from my parents. He could truly do no wrong, especially in the eyes of my mother.
So when I’d messaged him earlier in the week, asking for blueprints of the OFS Main Hall, he’d sent them over an hour later without question. As the son of software moguls, he was the techiest of the group, so he’d just hacked into the city’s Building Department to grab the originals filed by the builder when the OFS was remodeled fifteen years ago.
Anything for his Sere-bear.
I’d studied those blueprints for three nights after I was sure Paige had gone to bed and wouldn’t come bursting into my room to gush over a text from one of the packs she was talking to or to insist on overanalyzing a friendly email from Professor Hart. I planned carefully and memorized my route, just as I would’ve if this had been one of Jere’s jobs.
And that was how I found myself crawling through the space above the Main Hall’s drop ceiling and then inching along next to the aluminum panel of the air duct as I traversed the space between the faculty bathroom and the OFS reception room next door. Cam had warned me that it was unlikely the ceiling tiles would support the weight of even me, a small omega woman, but the copper piping of the plumbing that ran alongside the air duct looked sturdy enough. I clung to it like a crazed monkey as I scooted along.
I paused after just a few feet, the point where I’d estimated the reception room began. I could just make out the low murmur of masculine voices below. Carefully, I dangled a boot and nudged the tile below me to the side, revealing just a sliver of the room beneath me.
A waiter in a crisp white shirt holding a tray of cocktails passed through my field of vision first, pausing to hand a glass to someone I couldn’t see. He moved along, revealing the back of a hulking figure that was definitely Rodrigo. He was engaged in conversation with someone else outside my view.
It was all the confirmation I needed. With as much speed as I could muster without making noise, I yanked the grenade from my hoodie and pulled the pin with my teeth. At the same time, I shoved the ceiling tile a little further to the side, and then I dropped the grenade without a second look below.
When the initial bang blasted through the room, rattling the walls around me, I was already throwing myself down through the bathroom ceiling and into the toilet stall closest to the window. While the alarmed shouting reverberated through the hallway, I climbed back out of the window I’d jimmied open earlier and jumped right into my getaway cart that awaited me where I’d maneuvered it into the bushes below.
By the time my dads and the fabled Montgomery Pack would’ve fought through the tear gas and found their way out of the room to begin the hunt for their attacker, I was already speeding back across campus, the thrill of victory singing in my veins.