41. Luna
Luna
M y entire body feels heavy. When I finally find the strength to open my eyelids, the bright fluorescent lights from above feel like they’re stabbing into my brain.
My mouth is ridiculously dry. It’s like I’ve been stuck in a desert for weeks without a single drop of water.
I let out a soft groan, trying to turn onto my side and hide away from the world.
“Well, well, well, look who’s awake.”
I freeze, my eyes flying open, despite the pain.
Alpha Niall.
Everything comes flooding back. The attack on the pack house. Madden’s limp body slumped over the steering wheel of Chase’s car, blood dripping from his head wound. The mercenary who injected something in my neck, making the world go black.
“Are you ignoring me, you ungrateful bitch?” Alpha Niall’s burnt plastic scent fills my nostrils as he steps closer to me. He’s wearing the same stupid expensive shoes he normally wears. I recognize the familiar stitching.
He wrenches my head back with a cruel hold in my hair, so I’m forced to look up at him. The movement causes me to shift my weight onto my injured arm. The pain rips an involuntary cry from my throat.
Tears start flowing down my cheeks. I stare down at Madden’s T-shirt, still tied around my arm. The white fabric is stained from my blood and the dirt and grime from the floor.
“A couple weeks getting fucked by random alphas and you’ve forgotten your place,” he hisses.
My heart beats so fast I’m afraid it’s going to beat right out of my chest. My peppermint perfume is twisted and sour with my fear.
“You—you attacked them. The Ward Pack.” My pack. He attacked my pack. But I don’t dare say that. I have enough self-preservation to know if I say they’re my pack, it’ll only cause me pain.
“I did. Those idiots thought they could take you from me. They were asking for it.”
“H—how?” There were so many men. It can’t be easy to hire that many people to break into a house as well-defended as the pack house was. “Who—who are you?”
“You know, that’s the first time you’ve ever asked me that question,” he bares his teeth in a crazed grin. “I’m a Council Member. I’ve known exactly where you’ve been ever since you ran away from the Southside, my little omega whore.”
“What—what do you want from me?” I manage to croak out, my voice cracking.
“Isn’t it obvious?” He laughs bitterly, shoving me back down onto the floor. “I’m generous enough to take you back even after you’ve sullied yourself by letting other alphas knot you. You were raised to be my omega, and I refuse to let my investment go to waste.”
Raised to be his omega. I remember the mercenary’s last words before I blacked out. The mention of my mother.
Charlotte mentioned when I first escaped from Alpha Niall and the Southside that my beta parents couldn’t be my actual parents. I never looked like my mom growing up. Could that mercenary have been talking about my actual mother?
“Do—Do you know who my parents are?” I don’t know where I find the courage to actually ask a question instead of laying silently and taking it, but it’s there.
He lets out a long laugh. One that echoes in the cold basement we’re in.
“What an interesting question. So you’ve finally connected the dots, have you?”
“I—I did. It’s impossible for them to be my parents. Two betas can’t have an omega child,” I say, struggling to push myself into a sitting position. The drugs are still making my body heavy.
“Well I have no clue who your father is, but your mother was a whore. One of the best omega whores,” The closest thing I’ve ever seen to a wistful expression appears on his face.
“Before the riot and all the stupid regulations around omegas, there were far more brothels, whore houses, and unregulated heat nests than there are now.”
“There—there are still those things now?”
“Of course there are! There are just fewer, but they certainly exist. You’re in the basement of one right now. I’m very familiar with the owner of this establishment.”
I swallow hard, looking at the room I’m in with a new lens.
“What happened to my mother? I don’t have any memory of her.”
“She was tainted by another alpha,” he growls, pacing the floor in front of me. “You know, you’re lucky you didn’t come back pregnant like she did. I’d be forced to throw away the decades of investment I’ve put into you.”
The crazed, obsessive look in his eye he gets when he speaks about my mother sends bolts of fear down my spine.
“She died in the riot,” he shrugs. “Raped to death by a whole crowd, I believe. But by then, it didn’t matter. ”
“What—what would’ve happened if I hadn’t presented as an omega?”
He shrugs. “There are plenty of beta whores. I would’ve put you to work to try and recoup the loss of having those betas raise you. Lucky for you, you have a much more luxurious life in your future.”
I don’t think we have the same definition of luxury.
“Now then, enough talking.” He snaps his fingers, and a random beta man with a tripod comes into the room.
“What—what’s going on?”
“I’m recording you. You’re going to say you’re renouncing your placement with the Ward Pack.”
For some reason, that’s not what I expected.
“What? Do you really think they’ll believe a video if I look like this?”
I wave down at myself. I look just as good as you’d expect someone who was shot, in a car crash, and kidnapped.
“Unfortunately, you made some very public appearances. The purpose of this video is to get the authorities that will inevitably be looking for you off of my back enough to make us disappear. I have some lovely little homes in the mountains where no one would ever find you.”
I shake my head. There’s no way I’m going to make this any easier for him. If the rest of the Northside’s government is full of alphas like him, there’s a chance that any video where I say what he want would actually give him a chance to make me disappear.
“N—no. I have a pack. I have alphas that I love. I—I’m not going to give them up.”
“Love!” He sneers. “Such a silly little concept. Do you really think they care about you beyond what you can offer them as an omega?”
“They—they do!”
“You will say that you renounce their pack,” Alpha Niall barks, taking a menacing step toward me .
I clench my jaw shut, my throat closing. Every single muscle in my body locks as I fight the compulsion with everything I have. I focus on the feel of my fingernails digging crescents into my palm. My chest heaves, and I taste bile at the back of my throat.
There’s no way to describe how soul-crushingly wrong it feels to not obey an alpha’s bark.
I feel the last shred of control slipping, and my mouth starts to open.
“There you go,” Alpha Niall laughs. He waves to his beta, and the red light on the camera starts blinking.
I throw my head back into the concrete wall behind me, making my vision go white, and my teeth clack together with the impact. The pain makes a cry of pain leave my throat.
But the pressure of Alpha Niall’s bark disappears.
“N—No,” I grit out, panting. “I won’t.”
“You dare disobey me?” He hisses, throwing me to the ground with a savage grip on my hair. “You’ll regret doing things the hard way.”
Niall digs the heel of his expensive shoe into the bullet wound on my arm. The piercing shriek that leaves my throat leaves my vocal cords raw. It echoes in the room around us, bouncing off of the cold concrete.
The beta, who’s still standing behind the camera, winces.
The pain radiating from my arm is all-consuming. It feels like I’m getting shot all over again, minus shock’s natural anesthetic effect.
“Have you changed your mind?” he asks, lifting his stupid leather shoe from my arm as he takes a step back.
I tremble as I roll to my side, vomiting bile all over the concrete beneath me from the pain. My vision is growing hazy, and everything sounds like I’m underwater.
I still clench my jaw shut, refusing to give him an answer. Because I haven’t changed my mind. I’ll never give up my pack. Ever. Especially not for someone like him .
A bucket of ice cold water splashes all over me and the puddle of my vomit.
“Fine,” Alpha Niall huffs, nodding to the beta, who’s holding an empty bucket. “I’ll leave you to think about your decision then.”
I curl up into a ball, the cold seeping into nearly every part of my body. Well, every part of my body except for my still throbbing and now burning arm.
A whimper leaves the back of my throat. I’m no stranger to pain, but I’ve been pampered since my escape. I don’t know how much of this I can take before I break.
My sleep is dreamless. I don’t know whether it’s the drugs or the exhaustion from the adrenaline crash of the situation, but I’m luckily not haunted by any nightmares. Though, I’m not sure if you could call it lucky, considering I’m living one right now.
My eyes fly open and I jerk away when I feel a soft touch brush hair away from my face.
“Wh—what?” I blink away the sleep, trying to remember what’s going on. My teeth start chattering as I glance around.
I’m still stuck in the basement Alpha Niall threw me down into. But it isn’t him kneeling in front of me.
There’s an absolutely stunning omega, her raven black hair falling around her face in expertly done loose barrel curls.
Her storm grey eyes are outlined in eyeliner so sharp it could cut a man if he got too close.
Her scent is also earthier than any of the other omegas I met at the center.
It reminds me of the smell of everything right after it rains.
I do my best to push myself up, but my body is sore from sleeping on the ground. Plus, any movement reminds me I have a hole in my arm and the killer headache I have, probably from banging my head against the concrete wall .
She’s dressed casually in a pair of leggings and an old, threadbare hoodie, a small bag tucked under her arm.
“You don’t have to do that, Bambi,” she says, shifting her weight.
“B—bambi?” I croak out.
“Yeah, you’ve got these big innocent eyes. You look like a deer.” She shrugs.
“Who—who are you?”