22. Cayenne
Chapter 22
Cayenne
Three AM. The perfect time for system failure, for hearts to break, for the best-laid plans to execute with brutal precision.
I lie in bed counting breaths instead of sheep, each inhale marking time like a death sentence. Seven minutes until the east wing cameras reset—another gift from Finn’s late-night security lessons. “Always know your windows,” he’d said, voice gentle even while teaching me how to disappear. “Time is just another system to hack.”
The USB drive burns in my go-bag like a loaded gun, still tucked under the bed where I staged it three days ago. Everything else stays exactly where it belongs—clothes arranged in drawers, books lined on shelves, pieces of the life I’m temporarily stepping away from. I arrange each item with deliberate care, not props in an abandonment scene but anchors to guide me home.
Ryker taught me the importance of leaving no trace, but this isn’t about vanishing. It’s about having something to come back to. About creating a perfect snapshot of belonging that will wait for me to finish what needs to be done.
Through the ceiling, I track their movements by sound. Jinx’s restless pacing carries the same rhythm as his parkour lessons—three steps, pause, pivot, repeat. “Movement is music,” he’d said, teaching me how to fall without breaking. I wonder if he knows he’s composing the soundtrack to my betrayal.
Theo’s music drifts down in minor keys, each note a warning. He’s been playing darker pieces all week, like he can sense the coming storm. His lessons were always about reading bodies, reading rooms. I guess I learned too well how to make a performance feel real.
Finn’s footsteps trace his security route with mechanical precision. Ten steps to the window. Pause. Check the grounds. Return. The same pattern he taught me to exploit. “Security is just choreography,” he’d explained. “Learn the dance, find the gaps.”
And Ryker...
My throat closes around memories of his hands, his trust, his careful instruction in tactics that I’m about to use against him. “Knowledge is neutral,” he’d said during our last lesson. “It’s how you use it that matters.”
I’m sorry, I mouth to the darkness, to the room I’ve made into home, to the family I never meant to find. But I can’t let him use me to hurt anyone else.
Jinx’s emerald beanie sits on my pillow like an accusation.
I reach for the beanie, fingers tracing each precise stitch that speaks of chaos contained. Of love expressed through craft. Of a sister’s legacy I’ve been trusted to carry.
“Don’t let the chaos win,” I whisper Emma’s words like a prayer as I pull it on. The weight settles like armor and accusation combined.
Six minutes now. Every second burns with memories of their lessons. Ryker’s voice mapping infiltration routes. Finn’s patient explanations of security blind spots. Jinx’s wild grin teaching me to embrace the fall. Theo’s gentle guidance through shadow and silence.
They taught me everything about survival. About fighting. About escape.
Never realizing they were teaching me how to break them.
Five minutes. Theo’s music shifts to something that sounds like goodbye, the notes falling like tears through the darkness. My fingers itch to run upstairs, to curl into his nest and forget about Sterling and his vaccine and everything except belonging.
Instead, I slip from bed with the silent grace he taught me. Every movement measured, precise. A dance of deception choreographed by lessons they never meant to give me, but ones I’ll use to protect them anyway.
Four minutes. Time to begin.
The tunnels were Theo’s first gift to me—his secret for helping omegas escape. The irony of using them for this isn’t lost on me, but they’re also the safest route. The one path even Ryker doesn’t have completely mapped. When this is over, maybe I’ll help him improve the security. Add my own touches to what they’ve built.
Three minutes. I shoulder my go-bag, every movement calculated for silence. The entrance hidden in my closet clicks softly—another piece of Theo’s genius. His voice had been so gentle then, showing me how the mechanism works. Teaching me an escape route I swore I’d never need.
Two minutes. The hidden door slides smoothly on tracks—something else he designed. Always creating, always planning escape routes. My fingers find the catch exactly where he showed me, and the panel opens with a soft click that sounds like a promise.
One minute. I pause at the threshold, letting myself feel the full weight of what I’m about to do. The USB drive sits heavy in my bag, Ryker’s note still folded alongside it. The beanie warms my head, Jinx’s protection settling like armor for what’s to come.
Thirty seconds. Finn’s footsteps pass overhead, right on schedule. Always so precise, our beta. Always so careful to maintain the patterns that make the pack feel safe.
The patterns I’m about to use to keep them that way.
“I’ll come back,” I whisper to the room, to the life I’m leaving perfectly arranged. “When it’s finished. When you’re safe.”
Zero hour.
I step into darkness, letting Theo’s tunnel swallow me whole. “Breaking out of a pack house full of supernatural predators using their own security training against them. There’s probably a merit badge for this somewhere,” I mutter, allowing myself one last moment of inappropriate humor before the mission begins. Old habits die hard—especially the snarky ones.
The air tastes like secrets and salvation, like every omega he’s helped escape while I’ve been playing it safe above. My fingers trace the walls as I move, remembering how he showed me each turn, each marker. Pride swells in my chest—not just at executing the perfect exit, but at how I’ll use these same paths to end Sterling’s game once and for all.
The soft emergency lights guide my way, marking a path toward victory. His Mustang waits exactly where he showed me—that gorgeous machine he drives too fast while blasting classical music. Another piece of his brilliance I get to borrow.
My fingers find the hidden key exactly where he taught me. “Everyone needs an escape plan,” he’d said that day, not knowing he was giving me the tools to save them all.
The Mustang roars to life, but it’s too recognizable. Too easy to track. Every lesson Ryker drilled into me about tactical retreat screams that I need something untraceable. Something they won’t expect. I can almost hear his voice in my head, approving of my strategic thinking.
Three blocks east, I find what I need. An old Honda, invisible in its ordinary-ness, left running while its owner grabs late-night coffee. The kind of opportunity Ryker taught me to look for without meaning to teach me how to save them all.
I leave Theo’s Mustang in its place—a calculated move, using his escape vehicle to enable someone else’s mission. His lessons about protection and escape merging perfectly with Ryker’s tactical training.
The emerald beanie sits heavy on my head as I point the Honda toward the city limits. My thumbs tap out a rhythm that only exists in my head—or maybe in Theo’s. One of his compositions from this morning, the notes all wrong but the feeling perfect.
The last few days have felt like a fever dream. Too everything. Too mundane. Too easy. Each moment weighted with purpose they couldn’t see coming.
“Alright you son of a bitch.” I pull over five blocks from Sterling Labs. My pulse hammers against my ribs like it’s trying to break free of my chest. A metallic tang floods my mouth, sharp and electric, each swallow thick with the chemical cocktail of fear and determination my body’s dumping into my bloodstream.
Hell, I’d even jump out of another plane with Finn. Or... my chest aches remembering the soft conversation I’d overheard between Theo and Ryker this morning. Their discussion of heat arrangements, of waiting, of including “ Their beta. The way Theo’s scent had carried notes of both hope and hesitation when he returned to the kitchen.
I’m a part of them but not with them.
Never really with them. Even Theo’s heat—they’ll wait, they say, but in the end they want that time alone. Sacred, Ryker called it. Just another reminder that I’ll always be on the outside looking in. Maybe that makes this easier. Maybe that makes what I have to do next hurt a little less.
But maybe that was the lesson all along. To just jump.
See, I know there will never be a safe house or a place where I can view the drive without Sterling knowing. No, he made damn sure of that. But maybe that’s his weakness—his need for absolute control, for perfect systems. Because he left me one blindspot, one path he’d never expect.
Right under his fucking nose. In his own goddamn building.
Wiping my palms down my black cargo pants for the tenth time, I pull out the drive and sit back in the cooling car, turning it over and over in my hand. My chest aches as a memory surfaces—one I’ve kept locked away until this exact moment.
“Do you have plans this week?”
Such a simple question. Such an ordinary moment. And yet it’s the one that haunts me—my mother in her hospice bed, asking about my weekend like we had all the time in the world. Like death wasn’t already claiming its territory in yellowed skin and brittle bones.
We always wonder what life would be like without those we love. But we don’t experience it. Hell, we don’t want to experience it and we don’t want to imagine a life without those we love.
But here we are, in a fucking hospice room, my mother actively dying, and she’s asking me about plans this weekend.
“Well. I think I might throw a party.” Don’t cry, don’t fucking cry.
“That sounds lovely.” My mom blinks her brown eyes at me, her freckles swallowed by the jaundice of her skin. If I imagine hard enough, I can picture her red hair spread across her pillows. And her smile not full of pain because her red hair means the pain meds don’t work as well.
“Irish wake.” She adds, smiling at me. “Do not mourn me in a church.” She makes a gagging sound.
I nearly choke on my own tears. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Don’t let them not serve you either.” She gets serious for a moment. “Get drunk. Get laid.”
“Mom.” I cackle even as tears run down my face. There’s no stopping them now. They flow just as fast as her laughter.
“I mean it.” She grips my hand, her strength still punishing despite the life slowly leaving her. The same strength that let her raise me alone, that kept us moving, kept us safe. Kept us free.
“Mom,” I lick my lips, about to ask something I probably already know the answer to. “Do you want me to call him?”
We both know who I’m talking about. Dad. Dear old dad. The bastard.
“Ew, no.” She shudders, wrinkling up her face. “Never. He doesn’t deserve to know about my life. Or yours for that matter.”
I sigh. I never get anything out of her regarding my father. All she ever gave me was his name. And now, sitting outside his tower, I understand why she held that secret so close.
“Go grab something for me, would you?” She pats my hand. “In my shoe.”
“Your shoe?” I wipe away the tears and walk to her closet, grab her shoes, and hand them over.
She adjusts in her bed, only grabbing one shoe and letting the other fall to the floor. “Now.” She reaches in, pulling out a folded up letter on yellowing paper. “I wrote this the day you graced this world.”
My heart stops and I slump back in my chair, my eyes on her. “What...”
She goes to hand it over and waits until I grab it, clarity washing over her features one last time. “Only open it if you absolutely have to know. If the truth becomes more important than the mystery.”
I wrinkle my brow and hold the letter to my chest, not daring to open it.
“Now come nap with me, I’m tired.” She yawns as I crawl into bed with her and snuggle with my mom one more time. “I love you lady bug.”
As she scratches my head, I fall asleep in her arms one last time.
Because that was the last time I felt her arms around me.
The last time she told me she loved me.
The last nap.
Because she never woke up.
The memory fizzles and I grip my backpack, my fingers shaking as I open the zipper and flip it inside out. There at the bottom, I tug a thread until the little cotton patch falls away and the letter falls out. With shaking hands, I open the letter, finally reading it after a decade of her no longer walking this earth with me.
As her elegant scrawl stretches across the yellowing paper, my eyes land on the opening.
Dear, ladybug.
It’s as far as I get before an inhumane sound leaves me and I need to pause. My heart breaks from her death all over again. And this time it’s worse as Sterling’s tower looms over us, a glass and steel monument to everything she tried to protect me from.
Gathering my courage, I begin again, this time just letting the tears drip from my eyes. Because they need to fall. I need to feel this moment. I need it to give me the courage I need to break into my father’s tower.
Dear Ladybug,
Today, you’re just hours old, sleeping peacefully after screaming with such fierce indignation that I laughed through my tears. I already see the fighter in you.
I never planned to tell you about your father. I wanted to protect you from that truth forever. But I know one day you’ll have questions I can no longer avoid answering.
Your father is Roman Sterling. Yes, that Sterling. When I met him, he was everything I’d been taught to want—brilliant, powerful, charismatic. He saw me differently than other alphas saw betas.
Or so I believed.
I discovered the truth too late. The medical research he spoke of so passionately wasn’t meant to help betas—it was meant to erase us. To correct what he saw as an evolutionary flaw. I found his labs, saw the data on disappeared test subjects, all betas who thought they were receiving treatments.
When I became pregnant with you, his interest changed. You became his new project—the child of an alpha and his “enhanced” beta. He wanted to see how his work affected you before you were even born. We became his living laboratory.
I might have remained blind if not for the night his mistress appeared at our door with a baby girl—Mona. The betrayal cracked everything open, and in that broken moment, I finally saw clearly. I saw what he might plan for you. How he’d use his own daughter as he’d used others.
Your half-brother Alexander was already being shaped in Roman’s image when I met them. There was a hollowness in that child’s eyes that terrified me. If you ever cross paths with him, trust your instincts about what kind of man he’s become.
There are others—half-siblings whose names and faces I don’t know. Children he’s collected like specimens in his grand experiment.
I ran that night. Not for my heart, but for your life.
I don’t know who you’ll be when you read this. I hope I’ve lived long enough to give you strength, wisdom, independence. Everything you’ll need.
Because if you’re reading this letter, it means Roman Sterling has found you, or you’ve found him. Either way, remember this:
He doesn’t see people—he sees genetics. He doesn’t love—he acquires. He doesn’t nurture—he molds.
And whatever he wants from you will destroy you.
Be smarter. Be stronger. Be the woman I know you can become.
All my love,
Mom
I crush the letter to my chest, tears no longer falling as my eyes land on Sterling Labs. I have siblings. Half-siblings. That are probably nothing like me. And Alexander—already twisted into Sterling’s image before I was even born.
It changes nothing.
Grabbing my backpack, I shove everything back in it as I climb out of the car and rush to the alleyway, pulling out the tire iron. My heart pounds against my ribs as I scan for the manhole cover. There—exactly where the blueprints showed it would be. I work the iron under the edge, muscles straining as I lift the heavy metal.
The plan is to infiltrate Sterling Labs from the bottom up. When we were here before, sneaking in to get Quinn’s data, I took a moment to pull up the building’s complete blueprints. I told the guys it was to double check our exit route, but where we needed to be then wasn’t anywhere near where I need to go now.
There’s an access point in this tunnel that leads directly to their servers. Get in, open the drive, box it up and email it to every news outlet in Puritan City. Then everyone will know exactly what my father has been up to. Or at least just Ginger—she’ll know what to do with it.
In and out.
Smash and grab.
Easy peezy.
Right?
My palm sweats around the tire iron as I stare down into the darkness. Like mother, like daughter—both of us crawling through dark places to expose Sterling’s sins. Only this time, I’m not running away.
I’m running straight at him.
What could go wrong?