ALEX
Seven and a half years ago
Biting my lips, I look out the window of the lecture hall, scanning the campus garden, and fear tightens in my stomach.
I know it, I feel it, they are out there somewhere, waiting for me, hunting me.
I push my glasses up on my nose and strain my eyes. Ever since Bay left, I’ve started wearing them again. My vision got weaker, everything turned blurry. When we were together, I didn’t need them, but strangely enough, I’m back to wearing my big pink frames.
I glance at Dereck, but after this class he has another one, and mine end for the day, and it doesn’t even matter; what could Dereck possibly do against alphas anyway?
The professor drags the lecture out a little and I am almost grateful for it. I take notes nervously on my tablet but my mind is nowhere near the material.
Should I call the guards again to walk me out, even though they already laugh at me and think I am an attention seeker, dismissing my requests as baseless, but I know exactly what is lurking in the garden.
The Tanners.
It all started more than two years ago after what happened with Jared. When I was in awful mental shape I made the mistake of not going with him to file the report for rape. I wasn’t thinking clearly and that was my fault. I let it go and that only made them bolder, more brazen.
I enrolled Jared in a local high school about twenty minutes from his old one, but that didn’t stop them from harassing him.
They waited for him outside the school and things became genuinely dangerous. If other students hadn’t been around that day he could have been in serious trouble again.
Another time, thankfully, the cameras caught them grabbing Jared and trying to drag him toward their car.
A teacher noticed the commotion and intervened, and the whole thing was recorded on the school parking cameras.
That was when I contacted one of my dad’s former acquaintances, who helped us file for a restraining order.
But that only made them angrier, and more violent. I saw them for the first time in court, and when we were leaving the building, one of them made a gesture that made it clear they would keep watching us.
They quickly tracked down where we lived because they simply followed the school bus and watched where Jared got off.
It turned out to be a blessing that our property was under the watch of security guards stationed just two buildings away.
We installed additional cameras along with motion sensors, but it didn’t change the fact that those guys kept watching us.
Eventually they tracked me too and figured out that I studied on campus.
It became a game for them, walking behind me at a distance of about one hundred sixty feet, pretending to do nothing but letting me know they had their eyes on me.
Oh, how much I hated them. They reminded me of the Hansons, the worst scumbags imaginable. It felt like going from the frying pan into the fire. Those guys disappeared, but the Tanners took their place.
More than two years already were filled with depression, nerves, and the mental weight not only of losing Bay but of everything that kept happening.
It took a toll on Jared too.
He felt hunted, convinced they would get him sooner or later, and the stress and sense of terror crushed him. His grades dropped sharply. I caught him smoking a few times and slipping into a generally negative attitude toward any responsibility at home.
Raising a teenager while I was still so young myself turned out to be far from easy.
◆◆◆
I live in a closed box. There are no joys in my days except for short trips to chess tournaments.
I have nothing else. My only friend is Dereck, but he has a boyfriend and sometimes I feel stupid dumping all my misery on him, all the heaviness, all the constant exhaustion of feeling hopeless and dejected, like a walking embodiment of despair.
Sometimes I regret that Jared ever appeared in my life and that I didn’t just die then, that I can’t simply stop existing because this world has nothing pleasant to offer me anymore.
School, constant stress about the Tanners, growing issues with Jared, a suffocating loneliness, and a never-ending painful longing for Bay, for what we had.
My diary is filled with fantasies and sad notes about the possible paths our lives could take.
I dream of having him beside me every day, and every night when I fall asleep my thoughts wrap themselves around Bay.
When I wake up I reach for him in the bed.
Every sexual fantasy I have revolves around him.
My high sexual appetite has shrunk to nothing more than a daily session of fucking myself with a dildo, something I do just to shut the world out.
Every passing month hurts, and sometimes those darker thoughts creep back in, the ones about ending it all.
After some time, I begin obsessively researching the most effective methods of suicide.
I spend long hours reading about people who have taken their own lives, and it becomes a kind of morbid fascination.
I look at photos of people who hanged themselves, people who shot themselves, bodies pulled from under bridges, and I envy them.
I hide that fixation, of course. I keep a passable attitude around Jared.
Naturally, during those two years, there were quite a few students who showed interest in me.
My program was mostly betas, about thirty percent omegas, and maybe three alphas in the whole year.
Those three were taken, but the betas figured they could try their luck with an omega, which was a terrible idea because I've never been into betas at all.
Unfortunately, they were interested in me and kept calling me pretty, a compliment I heard countless times.
"Oh, how is it possible that someone so pretty doesn’t have a boyfriend?
" I got little notes praising my lips and eyes, invitations to the movies, offers to take me out to dinner or parties, even proposals to buy me a trip to Europe.
All of it just irritated me and made me uncomfortable because I had to decline every single time.
Once, out of sheer exhaustion and boredom, I agree to go to the movies with a guy, a beta named Jed, who is exceptionally insistent and fairly handsome.
He spends half the movie glancing at me and leaning closer, like he wants to kiss me but does not dare. Then we grab something to eat. The conversation does not flow.
Jed walks me home and finally, very obviously, musters the courage, because he suddenly leans in to kiss me.
Repulsion and anger surge through me and I shove him away hard.
Without a word, I turn and run inside the house, leaving Jed standing there, gaping and heartbroken, I suppose. That is the end of our so-called dating.
After I get home, still shaking with a strange irritation, I sit on the bed, wrap myself tightly in a blanket, and open Bay’s diary.
I know it so well now, every page, every memory, each one dear to my heart.
I run my fingers over the pages held together with clear tape.
My eyes stop on my favorite entry.
From the day we made love for the first time.
I can see how Bay’s handwriting trembles there. His emotions are almost visible. He describes everything in broken sentences, some without verbs, fragments of thought.
"Insane. What I felt was so new, so strange, and yet so powerful. Alex’s eyes stayed on me the whole time, with such patience, drawing courage out of me. It was like light was falling on me, and wherever he looked, the darkness pulled back. I burned for him. I melted into him. And he healed me…"
Trembling slightly, I squeeze my eyes shut and reach for my inhaler. The memories drift through the corners of my mind like an endless river.
It hurts. So much.
◆◆◆
There is, of course, one more thing that occupies my time, aside from the suicidal thoughts and reading Bay’s diary.
I spend a lot of time trying to figure out which of the Lowens is my father. I treat it like a strange side hobby. I have their entire family tree laid out on a huge sheet of paper. I map out probabilities, physical traits, talents, professions. And none of it fully adds up.
Thor, who looks-wise is a good candidate, didn’t even live in Florida at the time.
His home was in the neighboring state where the Lowens originally came from.
The odds of him showing up at a lecture by a detective specializing in complex criminal cases were close to zero, though not entirely impossible.
Victor seems much more likely, since he owns a press company and could have been interested in an interview with that famous detective to gather material for an article.
That could fit, but on the other hand, he was already the head of the entire press agency then, and would more likely send one of his journalists.
It is still possible that twenty years ago he did some of the reporting himself, but when I comb through every issue of East Time Magazine from that period, there is no article, no report, no mention of Detective Dupont’s lecture.
It doesn’t rule Victor out entirely, but it lowers the odds.
As for the patriarch of the family, when I was conceived, he was around sixty and still actively running the family business with Thor, dealing with investments, real estate, and government contracts.
Tracking his whereabouts back then isn’t easy. He now has a residence downtown in one of the buildings the Lowens own, and if he had it back then as well, he could theoretically have attended such a lecture, so I can’t fully eliminate him.
The rest of the sons are all omegas, although one of them, Jacob, is a super rare gamma subtype of omega.
He has two young children born from his husband, another omega.
Jacob is supposedly the sire, he is the biological parent of his children, but I doubt he is mine, especially because when I was conceived he was eighteen. And my dad was forty-two.