38. Honey
Honey
It was awfully trusting of Phoenix and Zephyr to simply point me in the direction of where I could find Evangeline, the other omega here, and tell me to go find her.
I wandered the hall for a little bit before finding a door painted a soft blue color that seems slightly out of place.
Carefully, I ease it open.
“Mayhem! You said assembly would be about an hour. It’s been ten minutes. Close the door and go away,” the little blonde omega says.
Evangeline is sitting on the floor, her legs stretched wide and her nose pressed against her knee in a magnificent stretch.
“Sorry!” I squeak before stepping back out of the room.
Well, I found her, but they didn’t take into account that maybe she doesn’t want friends. Maybe I should have knocked?
My face flushes.
“Oh.” Evangeline pops up from her stretch, sitting straight before the door closes. “You, I don’t mind. Come on in.” She flags me in with her hand in a delicate, graceful movement.
I push the door open again, and Evangeline smiles wide as I step across the threshold.
“I was going to track you down after dance and before being doted on for the fifteenth time today.”
I can’t get over how effortlessly she moves.
In one minute, she’s on the floor, stretching all over herself, and the next, she’s popped up and walking toward me.
Her white-blonde hair is pulled up out of her face into a tight bun behind her head, but it’s her bright, hauntingly beautiful blue eyes that cut into me.
I haven’t seen her since they removed the tracker from my arm. It’s nice seeing her again. A familiar face, not that I’m ungrateful for Lazarus, Phoenix, and Zephyr. But there is something special about seeing another omega, especially a happy one.
“You’ll have to forgive my bad manners. My alphas are on my shit list right now, and they’re trying to make it up to me.” She shrugs.
“Your alphas?” I whisper, looking back over my shoulder at the door that’s closed behind me.
Her alphas? Wouldn’t she just be their omega? Maybe it’s just how they say things? Surely she doesn’t get to claim them.
Evangeline ushers me inside the spacious room. Floor-to-ceiling mirrors take up two walls, and windows line the third wall high above our heads, casting a soft light around the room. A chair sits in the corner with a music player set on the floor near it.
“Your alphas?” I repeat, overwhelmed already.
It’s been a long time since an omega was friendly with me, well, other than the one who helped me escape. I never understood why the other omegas didn’t want to be friends with me, but now I wonder if it didn’t have something to do with the apostles constantly punishing me.
“Well, I’m sure as fuck not owned by them. Though they’d like you to think that.” She laughs, wrapping her arms behind her back, continuing to stretch.
“I don’t understand how any of this works. Your world sells omegas that they alphas buy, and the buyer owns things.” I draw a steadying breath and wish I could be writing this down.
“But they didn’t buy me. They stole me and claimed me against my will.
It was complicated for me to finally love them and claim them back.
But that doesn’t mean they own me.” Evangeline bends herself over, face heading toward the floor while her arms go up in the air.
“You’ll have to excuse me. I’m not trying to be rude, but I’ve an audition next week, and my heat is due immediately after.
The assholes are hovering, and if I don’t practice the audition, it will be for nothing. ”
“You claimed them back? That’s allowed?” As Evangeline twists, I notice the column scar marks of their bites in her neck.
Evangeline stops stretching. “They weren’t kidding about you coming from some sort of cult where omegas are super sheltered, were they?”
I shake my head. “I know what the tome says. That omegas are to serve their disciples. They should be quiet and well mannered. The more I learn about being here with Zephyr, Phoenix, and Lazarus, the more I find I don’t much care for my old community.”
“What was it like?” Evangeline yawns as she bends.
This time I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a body move in that position before.
She’s practically bent in half. “I mean, you don’t have to tell me, but as someone who has recently had her world upended .
. . maybe we could, I don’t know, trauma bond about it or something? ”
“Well, if a disciple catches you being . . .” I search for the word, trying to come up with something that encompasses what life was like.
“For going against the structure of the community, then you’d be punished.
Sometimes it would be extra work, but most of the time it would be sequestering. I spent a lot of time sequestering.”
“Like, being locked away alone?” Evangeline’s rigid frame drops. Her whole body goes lax, and she shakes her head. “I know what that’s like. I can’t imagine it happening for longer than it did.”
She may be lax, but I stiffen. My chest is tight, and instinctively, I find a seam on my clothes and run my fingers along it, trying to calm my racing heart. “Is it common to lock omegas away here?” My voice shakes a little.
Evangeline shakes her head. “No, no, no. Nothing like that. It’s complicated.
But most omegas don’t get locked away. I actually don’t know of anyone but me who has ever been cut off from the outside world for a while, and even then, it’s not like I was alone, alone.
My alphas came home every night. Even if I didn’t want them to.
” Evangeline laughs, it’s full bodied, her shoulders rising and falling.
“I sound like a crazy person. Defending them.”
“So then what’s it supposed to be like?” I shuffle my weight to the other foot, stuck between wanting to see what she has to say and keeping all the bad stuff to myself.
“Supposed to be? I guess I can’t answer that.” Evangeline points to a chair behind me. “If you wanna grab a seat while I work?”
I pull the chair she pointed to, wooden with a soft cushion, clearly made for an alpha, away from the wall a little before sitting down in it.
The scents clinging to it are very alpha — woodsy, earthy, dark.
Nothing like the sweet smells of Phoenix and Zephyr.
I miss their scents and the comfort they bring me.
This other alpha isn’t bad but clearly isn’t for me.
“They’re supposed to care about you and want what’s best for you.
Like Fox wants me healthy, and even though he knows I hate it, he sneaks kale into my smoothie for breakfast.” Evangeline stands next to a wooden rail supported by metal bars.
She rests her hand on it gently before contorting her body and moving.
“And they’re supposed to be protective of you.
Like Revenant would never let me leave the apartment if he thought I wouldn’t kill him in his sleep. ”
“The sequestering.” I relate to her. “But he does let you leave.”
“I can come here anytime I want, mostly, kinda, and I have my career in dance. I go to fancy parties with Fox, and I visit my uncle from time to time. So, yes, I go out, even if Revenant would prefer I stay in a fortress of his making.”
“That is much different from what I am used to. The disciples would restrict omegas. It’s for their own good.” I let out a sharp sigh because I don’t believe anything they did to me, locking me away in the dark, scolding me, and withholding food, was for my own good.
My words cause Evangeline to laugh. “No, it’s for their sanity.
Mayhem gets off knowing when I do everything and anything.
I mean, he’s obsessed with me. Some days, he even monitors when I pee.
He likes knowing, it makes him feel better.
Revenant keeping me safe makes him feel accomplished.
Fox keeping me healthy makes him look like a good alpha.
” Evangeline moves her leg out and up. Then she’s balancing on one foot before repeating the motion time and again.
“So they do it for themselves.” Her words sink through me as I recall Phoenix on his knees before me, the way he placed his tongue at my entrance, and the way he made my slick rush. He made me dirty for him. Zephyr was the same when he used my mouth.
“I see I struck a nerve,” Evangeline says softly. She’s stopped the movements she had been pushing her body through.
“You don’t like anything they do for you? We’re not supposed to?” My face heats.
Are the times they are nice just a little break from how things ‘should’ be? Were the disciples and apostles not that much different than here?
“I didn’t say that.” Evangeline shakes her head, flicking her hair back and forth, and she starts to secure it with a band from her wrist. “There are perks to having alphas. Mayhem knowing everything about me means that I don’t have to think about the little stuff.
He just takes care of it and me. I have a schedule that’s planned out pretty extensively, but I’m never worried about forgetting something or double-booking myself.
And Revenant being overprotective means that I don’t worry about my safety.
Hell, not even other omegas look to start shit with me, and ballerinas are catty as fuck.
Plus, with Fox micromanaging my diet, it means I’ve never been stronger. ”
“So it is good? They are supposed to be —” A loss of words hits me again.
“Supportive? Caring? Adoring?” Evangeline offers. “Yeah. For all the bad shit they do, my alphas are mine, and at the end of the day, I know if they do something I dislike, we’ll find a way to work through it.”
After putting her hair up, Evangeline moves to the other side of the wooden bar and does the same thing with her feet. “But, I feel like you’re not asking about them taking care of me like that. You need surgery. It’s what makes your heat short.”
I nod. “If I tell you, will you tell them?” My shoulders are rising up around my ears.
“I’ll only have to tell them if it’s something that could hurt you,” she says pointedly.
I weigh this. Where I came from, they didn’t see things the same way.
“Phoenix and Zephyr, they do these things to me. Things that feel so good. Things that are sins and bad. But no one ever came back from their impure time saying anything like it.” I cover my eyes with my fingers, resting my palms on my face, feeling the warmth of embarrassment.
“The covenants say that an omega’s center is not for pleasure but for creation. But I have a short impure time and —”
“You’re having orgasms,” Evangeline says, and I rip my hands away from my face to look at her.
She nods. “Yeah, that is definitely an alpha perk.” Her voice gets wistful.
“Between that and the knots when going through heat. Yeah. I don’t quite understand the concept of sinning.
But gods be damned if I’d ever give up good sex. ”
My brain is whirling. So much of this conversation is things I didn’t know I needed to say, and more of it is what I didn’t know I needed to hear. It all feels wrong to say, yet it feels right to confide in a friend or at least someone who understands and isn’t judging.
“I know things were different where you’re from.
But from what I’ve been told, you’re not going back there, and instead, you’re the filling in a twin sandwich.
Things could be a shit ton of a lot worse.
” Evangeline pushes up until she’s standing on just the points of her toes.
It looks dangerous. “What does Lazarus have to say about it? I know he’s a monotheist.”
“He says that what the alphas here want is different from House of Apostles.” I draw a deep breath.
“I’m afraid. I need surgery, and I very barely understand what that means, but from what the disciples and apostles said when another omega needed surgery, it is very dangerous.
” Unbidden and unprompted, fears I didn’t know I had spill out of me, and I try to move my hands up to stop the spewing, but they twist together in my lap.
“What if they could have another omega, who isn’t broken, and they choose her instead of me?
What if I go through all this for nothing? ”
Evangeline shakes her head. She walks over to me and crouches down so she can look me in the eye.
“That’s not up to you. Zephyr and Phoenix are Barons, and well — I know you’re not familiar with that last name or what it means yet, but I promise you that they’re really good at getting what they want.
If they wanted better, then they’d find better.
” Evangeline holds up two fingers on each hand and curls them as she says ‘better.’ “But they’re really intent on having you, and they won’t change their minds. ”
I am reassured by her words.
The door opens, and Evangeline growls, “Mayhem, you said assembly would be an hour. It’s been twenty minutes.”
“The Barons want to take Honey to the nexus for more imaging. Don’t shoot the messenger,” a beta, not Mayhem, says from the door. He holds his hands up in surrender.
Evangeline giggles and offers a hand out to unnecessarily help me up from the chair. “I really am going to like having another omega around here. I’ll make sure when the guys get you a phone it has my number in it.”
I have no idea how to use the phones they carry, but I just nod along politely, pretending that my whole world isn’t shifting, my stomach isn’t in knots, and that ‘imaging’ isn’t something I’m afraid of.
“Thank you.” I give her a smile, it’s as wholehearted as it can be despite everything going on in my brain.
“Anytime.” Evangeline steps back, giving me more space.
I approach the beta. His name patch says Salem, and I vaguely remember a story in the tome with that city name. I open my mouth to ask about it, but he’s not known to me, and it feels rude. I smile gently at him instead and follow him out into the hallway.