Chapter 5 #2
Omegas are rare. Almost extinct. If my status gets out…
I have to be gone before it starts. That's all. That's the whole plan, and it's a stupid plan, because I couldn't clear fifty yards yesterday—but it's the only one I've got.
I have to be long gone before my omega biology leaks out. Vincent, Calder, and Killian can never know.
A tray comes up a while later—a knock, the door cracked, someone setting it down and gone before I can see who.
I eat what I can and wait. The light stretches long and gold across the carpet, then greys out.
I sit on the bed picking at the frayed edges of Calder’s t-shirt because I’m not sure what else to do.
Vincent comes late in the afternoon, still in his coat, tie loose at his throat, the cold of outside coming off him. He takes me in—clean, swallowed in his son's clothes, hands in my lap—and the corner of his mouth flinches into the hint of a smile.
"Better," he says. An assessment, not a kindness.
He crosses to the bed and sits on the edge of it, the mattress dipping under him.
He shrugs off the coat and drops it beside him, then starts on his cuffs, folding one sleeve back off his forearm and then the other, and I can't stop watching his hands do it—unhurried, sure, the good watch he thumbs off and sets on the nightstand. He toes off one shoe, then the other.
A man getting comfortable at the end of a long day, with a hostage sitting two feet away, and not an ounce of tension in him about the two facts sharing a room.
That cold wood-and-ice scent rolls off him, thick this close, and my body does its thing—eyes wanting the floor, shoulders folding, the biological pull dragging at me even now, wrung out and scared of what comes next. I pin my gaze to the carpet and keep it there.
"Your mother didn't answer," he says, working a cufflink loose. "Twenty-four hours. Then another twelve. Nothing." He lets it sit. "So we're past the part where this was about getting her back."
Here it is. Whatever I am now, he's about to tell me.
"I've decided you'll stay," he says. "You're going to work off what she took—every cent of it, however long that takes, however I decide it gets paid.
You'll do what you're told, when you're told, by me or by either of my sons.
And in exchange—" his voice doesn't change at all, which is the frightening part, "—you get to keep breathing.
You do the work, you don't die. You run, you make trouble, you become more trouble than you're worth—" a small shrug, "—and you stop being an asset I have a reason to keep. Are we clear?"
My mouth's dry. But I've got nothing left to lose and something in me, some small buried thing, needs to say it out loud to his face at least once.
"I didn't have anything to do with what she did." My voice shakes and I let it. "I didn't know about the wedding until it was done. I didn't know about the money, the safe, any of it. I was in a hospital bed while she—" I stop. Steady it. "I'm not her. I never helped her. I swear to God I didn't."
Vincent looks at me. And then he says, calm as anything: "I know."
The floor drops out of me. I shake my head, trying to piece it all together. "You—"
"I've known for a few days. The hospital records aren't hard to pull.
The timeline doesn't work. You didn't behave like an accomplice from the first minute, and Calder's been telling me the same thing since the apartment.
" His eyes stay level on mine the whole time—pale, cool, nothing moving behind them at all.
"You're almost certainly telling the truth. You had nothing to do with it."
"Then why—" It comes out cracked, disbelieving. "If you know that—if you know I didn't do anything—why are you doing this to me?"
For the first time something in him gives—not cruelty, not kindness. He scrubs a hand back through his salt and pepper hair, and the gesture is so ordinary and so tired that for a second he's just a man at the end of a long day, not the one deciding whether I live or die.
"Because life isn't fair," he says. "You were dealt a mother who used you and threw you away. I was dealt a wife who did the same to me, and took twenty years of my late wife's things on her way out the door."
Late wife?
There’s a hint of tension in his face and I realize that must be a sensitive subject.
He leans toward me, one hand coming down on the mattress between us, and I make myself hold still.
"Starla's gone. I can't collect from a ghost. But there's a debt, and debts get paid, and you're what she left on the table.”
He shrugs, his eyes never leaving mine.
“It isn't personal. It isn't fair. It's just what's true." He tips his head. "I'd have thought you of all people would understand that the world doesn't care what you deserve."
And the terrible thing is that I do understand it. That's exactly the world I've always lived in. He's just the first person to say it out loud like it's a law of physics.
I don't answer. There's no answer. He watches me, and something in him seems almost satisfied by it, like my silence proves his point.
"What are you going to make me do?" It comes out rough. Small.
Vincent considers the question like it interests him.
He's settled back on the bed now, one ankle hooked up over the opposite knee, an arm draped easy across it, sleeve folded to the elbow so I watch the muscle shift in his forearm every time his hand moves.
There's a stillness to him that isn't calm so much as certainty—a man who's never once had to hurry, or ask twice, or wonder whether he'd get exactly what he reached for.
He’s so sure of himself it makes me want to be too.
"Whatever needs doing," he says. "The house. The grounds. Errands. Whatever any of us decides is worth your time on a given day." The corner of his mouth moves, not quite a smile. "It'll be a long list. Debts like this one don't clear fast."
"For how long?"
"As long as it takes." There's nothing in the way he says it; he could be quoting a delivery date.
"You'll do it without the performance your mother liked.
No lies. No running. No scenes. Keep your head down, do the work, and we'll get along.
" A beat. "You've already seen what the other version looks like. "
I have. I look at the carpet.
Then: "Killian said you had pills. That you fell apart over them this morning."
Everything in me goes cold and careful at once. "He tossed them down the drain," I say.
Vincent's jaw tightens, just slightly—the first crack in the calm all conversation. "He does that. Gets carried away." It's not an apology. It's closer to the way you'd talk about a dog that bites, a known quantity you manage rather than trust. "What were they?"
This is the moment. I can feel it—the fork in the whole rest of my life sitting right here in this quiet room. What do I do?