Chapter Thirteen – Bradford
As the evening turns into dusk, I find myself oddly uneasy. It’s a feeling I can’t shake, something that gets worse as the sun sets outside and night encapsulates the world. As much as I’d like to claim I don’t know the cause of it, I do.
The girl. Mackayla Prim.
Or just Kayla.
I can’t get everything that happened today out of my head, which is a very bizarre thing for me. Everything from in the morning, when I tried to catch her scent in the air, to when I found her on the floor, her legs bleeding… to when she said she had a meeting with my father at his office downtown.
That meeting should be long over with by now. I can imagine how it went, but that’s the issue here: I can imagine it easily.
I know what my father does. I know what he’s capable of. And, beyond all that, I know the world would never miss someone like her—and that’s what sticks in my head the most, the thought echoing the loudest.
The world would not miss her, but I think I would.
It is a ridiculous thing for me to think, and it’s not something I’d ever admit to anyone out loud. What would be the point? I don’t know why I would miss her; it isn’t like we’re long-lost friends or anything. We hardly know each other. We only met a few days ago.
It’s asinine is what it is. It doesn’t make sense.
If my father did something to her, what could I do? I’m stuck in this fucking house, as good as helpless. The world would never take my word over his, anyway. To worry about her is to waste time, and yet that seems to be all I can do tonight.
Waste time. Waste time and think about her. Worry about her.
The possibility that came to me earlier comes back in full force: what if she’s not who she says she is?
When that thought occurred to me earlier, I was able to push it away.
It wasn’t my place to suspect her of anything.
But then I found her on the floor, and she looked so damn small…
I wanted to help her. I wanted to scoop her up and take care of her myself.
Not a thought that came to me on a normal day. Not a desire that ever surfaced before.
Now that I’m thinking about it, now that I can’t stop thinking about her, I wonder if that innate desire to help her came from the same primal urge to smell her.
I’m not saying it doesn’t happen between alphas and betas. It does, but it’s very rare. More common, on the other hand, would be an alpha reacting this way to an omega. Even that doesn’t quite make sense to me, because I’ve met many omegas before and none have ever elicited that kind of urge in me.
She’s so… thin. Her thinness makes sense if she’s skipping meals. There is an explanation for that: she’s not well-off. She basically begged me not to fire her when I came upon her on the floor. She needs the money. It’s as good of an explanation as any.
As good as that explanation is, however, there is also another one, one that fits with the thought that came to me in the morning.
She’s not a beta.
It’s about nine o’clock at night when I meander to my office. The possibility that Kayla is not who she says she is is one I cannot ignore anymore. I need to do some searching. I need to look some things up, and since I’m old, important things like this feel like something I need the laptop for.
I sit in my high-backed leather chair and open my laptop. I have to give it a few moments before it fully turns on, and once it’s connected to the internet, I open up a search bar.
Hmm. What to type in?
After a moment of thinking, I type in: what happens when an omega starves herself?
Results populate, and it doesn’t take long for me to find an article about an omega who got kidnapped when she was very young, only thirteen years old.
She was kept in the basement, chained up, and starved.
Because her body did not have the ample nutrients it needed to function properly, she never had a heat.
She wasn’t fertile. It allowed her kidnapper to rape her whenever he wanted without having to worry about getting her pregnant.
She was thirty years old when she was found, and she had to go into a psychiatric unit and get lots of therapy, along with a slow introduction to what real meals were. Once her body got what it needed, she went into heat.
That story was from fifteen years ago, and since she wasn’t a child when she was finally found, there are pictures—and I hate to report she looked exactly like Kayla does: skin and bones, her head too big for her body, eyes so wide and hollow they look like they might pop out if you’re not careful enough.
I go to the next link. This one is a study, done by scientists to better understand what exactly kickstarts an omega’s heat. I skim it.
The hypothesis they give for heats being skipped when an omega is deprived of food is that heats are tremendously taxing on the body.
They require a lot of energy and calories—something you can only get through food.
They theorize if an omega does not have the required energy stored in their body, heats would become too much, to the point where they might fall into a coma as their body shuts down other processes.
So, to avoid this outcome, the body compensates by not having a heat at all.
The same scientists took evidence from multiple criminal cases where omegas were starved. In every single one of them, once the omega was somewhere safe, once they were amply fed and taken care of, their heats came.
They even looked at high-profile athletes, people who spend most of their days training and working out. They found similar results: omega athletes expel so much of their energy on their workouts that with the amount of food they do eat, they don’t stockpile enough to go into heat.
It’s not something they talk about in the news.
Omegas have heats; it’s drilled into everyone from a very young age.
Their heats are when their bodies are beyond fertile, when they practically beg to be bred, and alphas are always ready to meet that challenge head-on.
Being with omegas and helping them through their heats means alphas don’t fall into feral ruts.
I do think the threat of an alpha turning feral is vastly overestimated, although I’m well aware I’m not your typical alpha. My case is… it’s been different since before I presented. Turning feral was never an option for me, and being with an omega has never sounded appealing.
Up until recently, the thought of all that desperate touching, the claiming, the marking, the growling… none of it sounded particularly fun to me. Not a single part of it was appealing. I thought such desires were broken out of me, or that I was the broken one.
But today was eye-opening in many ways, and as are these articles.
It isn’t to say a beta cannot starve themselves, that they cannot have an unhealthy relationship with food, but to put it in simple terms: betas have less to gain by starving themselves.
Omegas have more. All Kayla would need is a fake ID and, to the world, she suddenly becomes a beta with the stature of an omega.
Some people would look at her and think she’s a little out of the norm, but they wouldn’t spend too much time on it. They’d move on. Why would they linger when there are bigger problems in the world than an omega masquerading as a beta?
An omega would never have been able to get this position. That would be reason enough—but it sounded like she’s been starving herself for a long time.
Why?
She’ll be here again in less than twelve hours. Not only do I want to see how the meeting with my father went, but I should also address this. The question is: how? What would be the correct way to go about this?
It’s not like she trusts me. I’m her employer. I haven’t exactly shown her overflowing kindness. I’m well aware I can be cold, a bit of an asshole. She has no reason to open up to me, even if I press her on the subject.
I lean back in my chair and think of Hayden.
She seems to be close to him. Perhaps I can fill him in on my suspicions and get him to pry.
If she had to pick one of us to open up to, I’m sure it would be him.
She looks comfortable with him, relatively speaking, as comfortable as someone could be with someone they just met this week.
This week. Has it really only been a few days? It’s almost crazy to think about; my mind doesn’t want to compute. It feels as if it’s been so much longer than that, but then again, it could simply be due to the fact I am stuck here in this house.
A punishment in more ways than one.
I get up and wander to my room. Strangely enough, though the room is dark, it feels empty. The whole house does, actually. This is my house, sure, but it’s also the house I grew up in, a calculated move on my father’s part.
A reminder, though that reminder had ceased to be hurtful a long time ago. I’m forty-five years old. The pains of the past might haunt me and occasionally guide my actions, but they’re no longer painful by definition. I am who I am now, and there is no changing it. No changing me.
I sit on the edge of my bed, my shoulders hunched.
Frankly, I probably shouldn’t push Kayla. It’s none of my business why she’s doing what she’s doing. What would I gain from exposing the fact that she’s an omega, besides the satisfaction of being right? In a way, it makes sense to keep it to myself.
But… no. I don’t know that I can. She’s clearly not well. The last thing I want is for her to die because she skipped one too many meals.
Something has to be done, one way or another. I’m just not sure what.
Good thing I have all night to think about it.