2. Chapter Two
Chapter Two
Emma
D arkness wraps around me like a shroud, familiar and absolute.
I've forgotten what natural light looks like, how it feels on skin that's now as gray as the concrete walls surrounding me.
The mattress beneath me might as well be part of the floor.
Threadbare, stained, reeking of despair, terror, sweat, blood, slick, alpha cum and absolute hopelessness.
I curl into myself, listening to the house above living its life without me. In spite of me. Each muffled sound is a reminder of a world I no longer belong to, if I ever did. My omega status wiped out any choice I might have had in the matter.
Being omega is a biological prison. I’m nothing more than a hole to fuck.
A vessel for alpha seed. An animal driven by heat and need.
I don't even blame society for thinking it because I am that animal. Begging, writhing, desperate during the four terrible heats I’ve endured down here.
No matter how much my mind screamed no, my body said yes please, Alpha. More, Alpha.
I fucking begged for release from the pain of my heat, but not with them. Not that way. Not with alphas who fill me with revulsion and despair. I’d rather die than be filled with their knots. Yet they still fucked me when I was so delirious I didn’t know what I was doing.
Still forced their knots into me.
Still ordered me to present on the dirty, cold concrete like a good little omega, slick running down my thighs thick enough to make me slide across the floor with the force of their thrusts. Just as Hugo and Lars trained me to do.
Such a good little omega. Such a good little fuck toy. My heats are my only value.
That's what omegas are, society's perfect little whores, programmed by biology to submit, to breed, to serve. They dressed it up in pretty words at The Haven Institute—”precious,” “cherished,” “treasured”—until I was forced into the Basement and the truth was revealed.
At least there I had Mira and Leah. They were the only people who made living tolerable.
Here I have no one.
Nothing.
Not even hope.
Just the endless cycling of the gilded lies society chooses to believe of us running through my head.
We're nothing but walking wombs, sex-crazed beings who need to be controlled and contained.
Our bodies betray us, force us to respond to alpha commands, make us wet and willing even when our minds scream in revolt.
Nothing about being omega is a choice.
Half-formed bonds are the cruelest trap.
Their bites mark my neck, forcing their twisted emotions—lust, contempt, dominance—to flood me.
I feel it all. Their pleasure in my pain, their indifference when my heat fades, their contempt when they starve me.
But they never feel my terror, my hatred, or my silent wish for death.
They don’t know what it’s like to be broken in body and soul .
They get their fun, their twisted pleasure, while I drown in their emotions without any way to make them understand mine. Just another way to remind me that I'm not a person to them.
I'm a possession.
A starved, broken one.
My stomach cramped its hunger protests days ago. Now it just sits, a hollow void matching the one in my chest. The sink drips its steady rhythm—my clock, my lifeline, my only source of water when they forget I exist.
I suffered through a total of four sporadic heats locked down here in the darkness.
The first one, though, I experienced on the auction block in a room stuffed full of alphas and their pheromones.
I was bid on and bundled into the trunk of a car.
They brought me down here, bitten and part-bonded before I was lucid enough to know what was happening to me.
I’ve suffered three more heats since that one. Three more hellish heats marked by their cruel attention, their disgusting touches.
I move my legs and the chain connecting me to the wall scrapes on the ground.
The cuff around my ankle, stained with blood and a wound that never heals, is heavy steel that marks me as owned.
As if the bars I’m locked behind aren't enough to keep me.
As if the bite marks scarring my neck aren't enough to stop me in my tracks.
The dripping sink reminds me of my parched mouth. I should get up, should drink. Should fight. But…why? My body made the choice for me when it started to shut down. I haven’t had a heat in months. At least, I think it’s been that long. There’s really no way to tell in the endless darkness.
At least no more heats means no more fuck fest.
I can only be thankful for that survival mechanism. My only defense against my situation.
Paradoxically, without my body doing what it should be doing, I’m worthless.
Defective. A heatless omega. A slickless omega.
Not able to be impregnated if I don’t go into heat.
Thank fuck I never conceived. Maybe fate did smile on me in her own sick and twisted way.
I can almost feel her arms opening to welcome me into the void. Maybe finally she’s taken pity on me.
I’ll eagerly slip into the great nothingness if she’ll take me.
The thought of death should frighten me, but it doesn't. Nothing really frightens me anymore. Fear requires hope's shadow, and hope died in this basement a long time ago.
As it does in all basements, no matter what form they come in.
I experienced freedom once, for a few precious hours after Mira, Leah, and I escaped Haven.
I breathed in fresh air, stood on soft, cold earth.
We'd planned our escape for weeks, knowing our first heats were approaching.
Hugo and Lars took sick pleasure in describing what awaited us when biology decided we were old enough to reach omega maturity…
the auction block, the highest bidders claiming their prizes, our bodies sold to whichever pack could pay the most.
So we memorized the guard rotations, learned which cameras had blind spots, hoarded the few supplies we could.
The night we escaped, we ran until our feet bled and even then we didn’t stop but when I heard the baying of the dogs, I knew we had to separate.
It would be harder for the guards to track three targets instead of one.
So I’d hugged the only sisters I’d had. We split up and I can only pray to whatever God is still listening that somehow they survived.
I have to believe they escaped the fate Haven planned for us even if I didn’t.
My freedom lasted mere hours before the dogs caught my scent and pinned me down with teeth and claws and the violence they’d been taught. Hugo and Lars weren't far behind. They took me back and sold me to the highest bidders on the same night. My forever alphas. My blessed pack.
Only there was no happily ever after. Instead, there was another basement as my new home. As if my life as an omega is meant to be lived underground, in darkness. Forgotten.
Each soft plink of water against the basin is another moment in this eternal darkness. Each drop is another reminder that I'm forgotten. Each drop is another reason to stop fighting, stop hoping, stop being.
The drip of the sink counts out endless seconds .
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
I slip back into my fantasy, where I’m walking on my beach.
The wind is freezing, whipping my hair into my eyes.
The sand is frozen underfoot. The slate gray sky burgeons with sleet too heavy to hold, but it does.
Just. The waves that wash over my toes make them numb.
I don’t care because I’m the only person on this beach for miles and miles and miles.
The cold keeps everyone away. Keeps me alone and safe.
I let the frigid air blanket me. Let the freezing waves wash over my body and seep into my bones.
In my mind, the water closes over my head, and I’m surrounded by beautiful, muffled silence.
My eyelids grow heavy as unrelenting fatigue cuts a path down to my core.
Maybe this time I won’t wake.
Maybe this time, the ocean will sweep me out to sweet oblivion.
Matthew's rage hits me first through our half-bond, a blistering wave of fury that burns cold and hot.
A gasp chokes out of me as my eyes flare wide and the beach is forced from my mind.
The prime alpha's anger has always been the worst. Calculated, controlled and only promising retribution.
My stomach clenches, knowing that whatever's happening above will eventually be taken out on me.
Derek's rage follows, messier and more volatile than Matthew’s. His emotions are broken glass, the sharp edges cutting through our partial bond. Behind his anger lurks familiar contempt, the disgust he never bothers to hide when he looks at me.
Then comes James's cold disdain, clashing against the others' hot rage. His emotions seep into my veins, churning with his brand of vileness. Sick dread slides through me with an oily promise of what’s to come. I press my forehead against my knees, trying to block it all out but it doesn't work.
It never works.
Thumps and angry voices filter down from above, unusual enough to make my heart rattle. The basement's concrete walls usually muffle everything, leaving me in my own silent hell, but these sounds are distinct. Sweat breaks out across my skin despite the basement's perpetual chill. This is new.
New is never good.
My alphas' rage pounds me, but there's something else.
They're afraid. My alphas are never afraid, which means whatever's happening must be truly terrible.
And they always take those terrible things out on me.
My wish to fade away is too late. I should have stopped drinking from the sink weeks ago, should have let dehydration take me before this moment could arrive. Should have…
Silence.