Chapter 5
CINDY
I ’m already dressed in the mandatory work polo, but I’ve done my best to fight the beige with Halloween flair by adding bat pins on the collar, orange-and-black-striped tights under my skirt, and spider earrings that jingle when I move.
Professional, technically. Festive, definitely.
According to Harper, I’m serving corporate goth lite.
According to me, I’m just trying not to scream into a pumpkin bucket.
The brewery booth at the festival is always packed the first night, everyone wanting to try our seasonal Halloween brews. There’s the Vampire’s Kiss stout, Witch’s Brew IPA, and my personal favorite, the Pumpkin Massacre ale that tastes like autumn decided to fight cinnamon and everyone won.
Harper is picking me up in an hour, which gives me just enough time to add some orange eyeshadow and maybe that spiderweb bracelet she got me last year. I’m debating whether temporary tattoos are too much when my phone rings.
No caller ID.
I usually ignore those. They’re either telemarketers or wrong numbers or someone trying to reach me about my car’s extended warranty on a car I don’t own.
But something in my gut, that same instinct that told me to run two years ago, that whispered danger when Van’s hand first tightened on my arm, makes me answer.
“Hello?”
Silence for a heartbeat. Then: “Cynthia.”
The world tilts. My knees buckle, and I have to grab the dresser to stay upright, my fingers white-knuckled against the wood. That voice. Perfectly modulated, never too loud or too soft, with just the right amount of disappointment permanently woven through it like a thread of poison through silk.
My mother.
My chest constricts. I can’t breathe. The room spins, and I’m not in Whispering Grove anymore.
I’m back in Greyridge, I’m seventeen and being told my opinions don’t matter, I’m nineteen and watching my sister get married to a man she met twice, I’m twenty and my mother is putting pins in my hair for my wedding while telling me to be still, always still, never moving, never speaking, never being anything but what they need me to be.
“How…” My voice cracks like glass. I clear my throat, try again, but my mouth is desert dry. “How did you get this number?”
“You changed your name to Cindy,” she accuses, and she says it like I’m a child who put on Mommy’s makeup and called herself Princess Sparkles.
Like my new identity, my freedom, my entire life here is just a silly game.
“We have ways of finding things, darling. Your father has connections everywhere. And Van heard enough when he found you. Did you really think you could just disappear?”
My father’s connections. The same ones that found Van a loophole in every law, that made bruises disappear from medical records, that turned a forced marriage into a romantic fairy tale for anyone watching from the outside.
“Where have you been?” she continues, and I can picture her perfectly.
Sitting in her pristine living room with the white furniture no one’s allowed to actually sit on, not a hair out of place in her steel-gray chignon, probably wearing the pearls my father gave her after Juliette’s wedding.
The successful daughter’s wedding. “We’ve been sick with worry. ”
Right! Not “I was worried” or “I missed you” or even “I wondered if you were alive.” But “we.” Always the collective, always the unit, never the individual. Never just my mother caring about merely me.
“You just ran out like that on your wedding day.” Her voice rises slightly, the only sign of emotion she’ll allow herself. “Who does that, Cynthia? Who leaves their family in such embarrassment, in such a predicament?”
I sink onto my couch, my legs liquid, useless. The memories crash over me like a wave I’ve been running from for two years, finally catching up, finally pulling me under.
Her hands in my hair, placing rhinestone pins in.
Each one pressed in hard enough to hurt, little pricks of pain I wasn’t allowed to flinch from.
“Stop fidgeting. An Omega must always be still, always perfect. We are not like Alphas, who can afford to be rough, or Betas, who can afford to be forgotten. We must be porcelain dolls, beautiful and breakable, worth protecting.”
But who protects us from our protectors?
“Your sister never had these issues,” she’d said that morning, comparing me to Juliette even on my wedding day. “She understood her role. Smiled when told, spoke when asked, spread her legs when required.”
She hadn’t used those exact words, of course. Mother would never be so crude. But the meaning was clear in every lesson, every lecture, every look of disappointment when I asked why, when I suggested maybe, when I dared to think.
I remember the weight of the dress, how it dragged at me like hands pulling me down, down into a life I didn’t choose. The corset so tight I could barely breathe, and wasn’t that perfect? An Omega who can’t breathe can’t scream.
“That’s my past,” I manage, my voice stronger than I feel.
Each word is a fight, pushing through years of conditioning that tells me not to talk back, not to disagree, not to be anything but grateful for whatever scraps of autonomy they allow me.
“I’m no longer that person. The daughter you had is dead. ”
She laughs. The laugh that used to make me feel two inches tall and incorrectly shaped, like I was a puzzle piece hammered into the wrong spot.
“Oh, you were always so dramatic. You get it from your Aunt Alina’s side, I suppose. That woman filled your head with such ridiculous notions.”
Aunt Alina. Even her name has my chest aching with missing.
She was the one who’d told me stories about Omegas who were warriors, healers, leaders.
Not just wombs with decorations. She was the one who’d taught me to cook not because it was my duty but because creation was power.
She was the one who’d whispered, “You can run, you know. When the time comes, you can just run.”
And I did.
My hands are shaking now, violent tremors that start in my fingers and work their way up my arms. But anger is mixing with the fear, turning it into something else.
“What do you want, Mother?” The word tastes bitter. “I’m not coming back. I’m not marrying Van. Nothing you say will change my mind.”
“Tsk.” I can hear her shifting, probably smoothing her skirt even though no one’s watching.
Or maybe Father is. Maybe he’s sitting right there, listening, judging, calculating how much this phone call is worth.
“I finally find out where you are, ring to see if you’re okay, and you treat me like this?
The world doesn’t revolve around you, though you seem to think it does. ”
“No,” I say, surprising myself. “I thought it revolved around you. Around Father. Around what the family needed. I was just a spinning cog, wasn’t I? Until I stopped spinning.”
“You left our family with such a huge debt,” she continues as if I hadn’t spoken. They always did that, talked over me, through me, around me.
“A debt?” I laugh, but it’s fake. “You mean the money you got paid for selling me? How much was I worth, Mother? What’s the going rate for an Omega daughter these days?”
I remember finding the papers. The contract. My bride price listed like I was cattle. Half a million to clear their debts.
She sighs like I’m being deliberately obtuse, like I’m five years old and refusing to understand why I can’t have candy for dinner. “An Omega’s job is to strengthen family bonds, create alliances. I did it. Your grandmother did it. Your sister did it beautifully, I might add.”
“And look how happy Juliette is,” I snap. “Two happy children, never leaves the house without permission.”
“Your sister is fulfilled. She has purpose.”
“She’s miserable.”
“She’s an Omega who knows her place.”
The words hang between us.
“Even your cousins understood their duty,” she continues, relentless. “Every Omega in our family has done what’s necessary. Except you. And your Aunt Alina, of course.”
“At least Aunt Alina was happy,” I say firmly.
Another sigh, heavier this time, theatrical in its disappointment. “And look how that ended. Alone, no children, died with her cats for company. Is that what you want? No family around you when you’re old?”
I think about Aunt Alina’s funeral. How packed it was.
Friends, neighbors, people she’d helped over the years.
The library she volunteered at closed for the day in her honor.
The community garden planted a tree with her name on it.
She had more family than my mother ever will, just not the kind that shares DNA.
“Yes,” I say immediately. “That sounds perfect, actually. Cats don’t try to sell you to pay off their gambling debts.”
“Cynthia,” she says sternly. “Your father had some unfortunate investments?—”
Silence.
“Cynthia, darling,” her tone shifts to what she thinks is warmth but feels like a Venus flytrap opening its petals. “I don’t want to argue. I’ve cried many nights worrying about you.”
Cried. My mother, who didn’t shed a tear at her own mother’s funeral because public displays of emotion were common.
Who told me when Whiskers died when I was eight that tears didn’t bring back guinea pigs or change facts.
Who watched my father backhand me for speaking out of turn at dinner and merely reminded me to ice my face before the swelling started.
“Van finally found you and told me, putting me out of my misery,” she continues, and my blood goes ice-cold. They’ve been talking. Coordinating. Of course. “And then you speak to me so rudely when I only care for you, love you.”
“I’m fine,” I say flatly, staring at my miniature Whispering Grove street I put together, the tiny perfect world where tiny perfect people live tiny perfect lives. “Please leave me alone and tell Van to stay away. It’s over. I’m not going back.”
“Well,” she says. “Van mentioned you have another Alpha. Is that true?”