Chapter 3
Three
Neil
The return trip to the holding cell area is a blur, my mind spinning through various options, evaluating and then promptly discarding them one by one. One thing is becoming blatantly clear: As things stand, there’s no way I’m avoiding ending up in the ring. Past that… I have no idea.
The security officer takes me to the end of the hallway, stopping in front of the same door from earlier.
He goes through the routine of using his access card to release the lock, pulling open the heavy door, and gesturing for me to go inside.
Seeing no use in arguing, I comply, shuffling through the doorway into a room with plain concrete walls, a single recessed light in the ceiling, a cot, a metal toilet, and Raquel.
My friend glances up, her eyes red and hair in disarray. She jumps to her feet and rushes toward the door as I enter, her attention on the shifter still the hallway. “You can’t just leave us here,” she says. “We have rights.”
The security officer chuckles and shakes his head. “Not here, you don’t.”
“I demand a phone call, or lawyer, or something,” she replies, the slight shake in her voice betraying her nerves.
He scoffs. “You’re no position to demand anything, human.” His gaze moves to me. “Get her in line or Alpha Doyle will.”
There’s no telling what kind of methods Doyle might employ to do that, so I nod and gently take Raquel by the arm. “Leave it,” I say, tugging her away from the door. “There are things about this situation you don’t understand, but I’m doing everything I can to get you out of here.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Raquel spins on me, and the security officer shuts the door as soon as her attention is diverted, the lock sliding into place with a loud clang. Her gaze darts to the door, then back to me and she frowns. “What the hell is going on, Neil?”
I blow out a breath, stalling as I try to gather my thoughts. How much should I tell her? Everything? Learning about the existence might be overwhelming, but the odds of me making it out of this situation are slim, and she’ll need to know what—and who—to avoid afterward.
Full disclosure it is then.
Taking hold of one of her hands, I lead her over to the cot and pull her down to sit beside me. I gently squeeze her hand and take a deep breath to steady myself.
“Under any other circumstances, what I’m about to tell you would probably get me killed, but I think you deserve an explanation.” And I’m pretty much as good as dead anyway. I swallow, my gaze falling to rest on our intertwined fingers. Where to start?
Raquel grips my hands tightly, a slight tremble in her fingers, and I raise my eyes to meet hers. Her brows draw together with concern and she silently studies my face as she waits for me to continue.
“You already know the basics of how I ended up in foster care,” I say.
She nods slowly, her eyes never leaving mine. “Your parents died and you had no other family.”
“Yeah.” I swallow again, the lump in my throat blocking me from forming words.
Human or not, Raquel has been my best friend, my sister in everything but blood since I was fifteen, and there’s no way of telling what might happen once she knows the truth of what I really am—and what I did.
“Except it’s a lot more complicated than that. ”
“Neil…” She cups my face with her hand, her thumb stroking my skin, and I realize there are tears on my cheeks. “You’re my best friend, the person who is always there for me even when you don’t necessarily want to be. There’s nothing you can tell me that will make me abandon you.”
Sure, she says that now… I wince. Sometimes the voice in my head is a real asshole.
Hearing Doyle recite the lines from the police report was bad enough, having to verbalize the truth to the only person who matters to me is almost torturous. No matter what happens after this, once Raquel knows everything, she’ll look at me differently.
At least I probably won’t be around for the aftermath.
I inhale, letting the breath out slowly through my mouth as I try to center myself.
“Growing up, it was just my parents and me. My mom doted on me, but my dad… was not so great. He had plenty of expectations of me and I met none of them.” He wanted me to be an alpha.
“Right after my fifteenth birthday…” There’s no way to explain the rest of the story unless she knows the most basic fact about me.
“Let me back up a second… You see…” I blow out a breath. How do I even say this?
Raquel stares at me intently, biting on her lower lip. “It’s okay. Whatever it is.”
“You say that now…” I mutter, mirroring my earlier thoughts as I let out a watery laugh. “I’m just going to spit this out then. I’m a shifter.”
“A… shifter?” She blinks at me, her face going blank.
“What some might call a werewolf,” I continue. “But we, as a species or whatever, call ourselves shifters.”
“You call yourselves…” She lets out a harsh laugh that borders on hysterical, then pulls her hand from mine and stands, pacing to the other side of the room.
My heart twists in my chest. This is it then. My only friend in the world is going to walk away.
Raquel paces toward me, opens her mouth, shuts it again, then crosses back to the other side of the room, muttering something under her breath. She returns to stand next to where I’m sitting on the cot, pointing at the air with her index finger as if making a point. “Magic isn’t real.”
“I didn’t claim it was,” I say. “Look, I know it’s hard to believe, but—”
“Hard to believe?” Her index finger aims at my face, her pointy pink nail only inches from my nose. “Try impossible. Why are you saying these things? What’s going on? I… I…” Her voice breaks and she dissolves into tears. “I don’t understand.”
“I know.” I pause, staring down at the floor. “And I’m sorry you got dragged into this, but I’m going to do what I have to in order to get you out of here.”
She sniffles and narrows her eyes at me. “There it is again.”
“Huh? There what is?”
“That’s twice now you’ve said something about getting me out of here, but what about you?”
“But… why do you care? I’ve been lying to you the entire time I’ve known you and—”
“Shut. Up.” Her nostrils flare and the fire of anger roars in her eyes. “Jesus, Neil, just because I’m taking a moment to process this wild story of yours doesn’t mean I don’t still love you like a brother. Of course I care.”
“Oh,” I say softly.
Raquel steps toward me and awkwardly kneels in front of me, the tight silver fabric of her dress riding up her thighs as she gives me a watery smile.
“I’d blame my reaction on hormones, but I think this would be a lot even for someone who wasn’t pregnant.
” She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, then gives herself a shake before moving to sit next to me again, her steady gaze focused on my face.
“Okay, you’re a shifter. Got it. Now, tell me the rest.”
I stare at her, open-mouthed. She’s taking this slightly better than I expected.
When I don’t immediately continue talking, she prods me with her elbow.
“You’re going to owe me a better explanation of the whole shifter thing, but first I think you need to tell me what you mean by doing everything you can to get me out of here.
” She narrows her eyes. “You’d better not mean that how it sounds.
We don’t do the whole self-sacrifice thing, remember? ”
“Uh… well…”
“Seriously?” She pokes me in the chest with her index finger, nail stabbing painfully at my sternum.
“I thought we had an agreement after what happened at the Mitchells’ house.
You know, when I tried to take the blame for the food you took so you wouldn’t get a beating your first night there?
You’re the one who insisted that’s not how this friendship was going to work. ”
I mean, she’s right. I did say that.
But I also knew, as a shifter, it would be a lot easier for me to take the beating than it would be for her.
“Fine.” I sigh and offer up a weak smile, then give her a brief overview of my conversation with Doyle and what I sort of agreed to. She nods slowly along with my words.
“You realize he’s full of shit, right?” she asks when I’m done. “I mean, what does ‘put on a good show’ even mean?”
“I have no idea.” I squeeze her hands. “But I would have agreed to just about anything to make sure you got out of here.”
She presses her lips together and shakes her head. “Are you kidding me? Even if I wasn’t a human in on your super-secret shifter society, I still stole from this alpha guy. No matter what kind of deal you made, he’s not just going to let that go. One way or another, we’re in this together.”
“But Doyle said—”
“Does he have some kind of mental power to get you to believe his BS? Is that a shifter thing?” Her eyes widen when I don’t immediately respond and most of her irritation seems to drain away. “Are the fanfics right? Growly alphas who can control people and mates and knots and stuff?”
I let out a shaky laugh. “No knots, but the rest of it? Yeah, pretty much.”
“So, Doyle can control you? Is that what happened?”
“It doesn’t quite work like that,” I say. “He could definitely make me perform a specific action and possibly cloud my mind, but not so much full mental control. Not that I’m aware of, anyway.”
“Okay…” She rubs at her chin as she thinks over my words. After a few seconds of silence, her eyes go wide again. “Wait a second… is this an omegaverse?”
The laugh that escapes me is part shock and part relief. If she’s focusing on that, then she’s not thinking about the whole self-sacrifice bit. “Yeah,” I say. “Your fanfics got some of that right too. I’m pretty sure some of them may even have been written by shifters.”
She giggles, but the sound is more subdued than usual. “Tell me everything.”
So, I do. For the first time since I’ve known her, I sit there and tell my best friend the truth about what I am and the world I spent the first fifteen years of my life in.
I start by explaining the basic hierarchy: An Alpha runs a pack, and each pack has their own set of laws they follow while the triumvirate is in charge of mediating disputes between packs and upholding the laws that govern all shifters.
“Over the past seven years, I’ve managed to pretend none of that matters anymore.
I thought finding myself in the human foster care system after my parents’ deaths meant that I was free of pack politics and shifter laws.
And I was glad of it. If I could have stayed away from the shifter world for the rest of my life, I would have.
” I sigh. “Unfortunately, this casino is actually owned by Doyle and security recognized me as a shifter as soon as I walked in.”
Raquel’s face falls, her hand covering her mouth and her eyes growing damp. “I chose the target. This is my fault.”
“No,” I say firmly before letting out another sigh. “The shifter world was bound to catch up to me eventually. Since I’m not an official pack member, I’m not technically supposed to be in Vegas at all, not without permission from the Alpha, anyway.”
“What does that mean? Why aren’t you a pack member if you were born here?”
And here’s where things get a little more complicated…
“My birth was registered with the pack, but no one can become an official member until after their first shift.” I shoot her a wry smile. “And a crap ton of paperwork.”
She returns the smile, but her brow is still furrowed.
“Well, my first shift happened a couple days after my fifteenth birthday—the same day my parents died.” I go silent, again unsure how to say this next part.
Raquel reaches for my hand and gently squeezes my fingers. “Something happened with your shift then?”
“Yeah.” I avert my eyes, staring down at the floor.
“My dad always wanted me to be an alpha—the designation, not necessarily a capitol ‘A’ Alpha who leads a pack. That’s normally something you can tell right away, so when I never showed any alpha traits, he resigned himself to having a beta son.
” I swallow. “But it turns out I’m not even a beta. I’m an omega.”
“And your dad didn’t like that.”
I let out a watery laugh. “No, he did not, and it certainly didn’t help that he was blackout drunk at the time.”
“What happened?” she asks softly.
“He attacked my mom for ‘birthing a useless mongrel’ and she was dead before I could do anything to help.” My voice goes hard. “But my wolf and I made sure he paid for her death.”
She pulls me into a hug and rubs my back. “He deserved it,” she whispers near my ear. “You’re entitled to feel however you want about what happened, but in my eyes, a bad man got a fitting ending.”
“Thanks,” I say, holding her tightly.
“And now that that’s out of the way, how about we try to come up with a way out of this?” She releases me from the hug, grips my chin, and forces me to meet her eyes. “Together.”