Chapter Two
Espie
The lack of freezing cold drags me up from the dark. I've woken on that gurney so many times I know its shape in my bones, the way the metal steals heat from my spine, the bite of restraints against my wrists.
My fingers curl into soft fabric. Where I am is soft. Warm. I… don’t have words. I force my eyes open before I'm ready to face reality. Not knowing is always worse.
Light pours through gauze curtains that shift in a breeze I can actually smell, nothing like the recycled chemical air I've been breathing.
Beyond the curtains, beyond a real glass window with no bars and no reinforced wire threaded through the panes, I see trees with leaves catching the light and blue sky going yellow at the edges, which means either dawn or dusk.
I haven’t seen the sky for so long.
I stare until my eyes burn, until the colors swim and blur, until I'm not sure if what I'm seeing is real or just another hallucination conjured up by my chemically-rewired brain.
My father used to say that the toughest plants were the ones that looked fragile.
Mint, he'd whisper in that greenhouse where we built forts behind shelves of tomatoes, looks like nothing.
Delicate little leaves. But you try uprooting it, Espie-girl.
You try killing it. It comes back meaner every time.
I made peace with never seeing trees again.
That's what you do when you're strapped to a table counting ceiling tiles while a man in surgical gloves explains how he’s going to carve you up.
You make peace with the small death of hope.
You let go of windows and trees and sky and all the soft beautiful things that used to matter, and you shrink yourself down to the space between heartbeats, the space where nothing can touch you.
Cinderblock walls. Fluorescent flicker. Wallace's measured voice describing my screaming as notable vocalization response.
Or I'm still wrong. Still dreaming. Still hooked up to one of Wallace's machines, hallucinating freedom while he takes notes on my brain activity and adjusts the dosage to see what happens next.
That would be more like him. Give me hope, then rip it away.
He always said my readings were most interesting when I had something left to lose.
It feels like I’m alive and lucid. Every joint burns like acid in the sockets.
Tremors roll through my muscles in waves I can't control, can't suppress, can't hide. That scares me almost as much as the softness does. I’ve worked hard to control every visible reaction, every flinch, every tell that might give him ammunition. Yet, the bed under me is soft and the breeze can’t be faked.
There are no IV lines snaking from my arms into bags of chemicals. No electrodes stuck to my temples with that cold gel Wallace loves so much. He says my readings are always so interesting when my fear response kicks in.
This has to be a game.
There's always a catch, a trap disguised as kindness.
I learned that at Haven before I ever met Wallace, learned it in the cold room where they left me for days when I didn't kneel fast enough.
Evelyn Mercer with her clipboard, explaining exactly how much pain an omega body could endure.
You'd be surprised, she told me once, while I knelt on rice until my kneecaps screamed.
The body wants to live. It will forgive almost anything if you give it long enough.
There’s a woman in the chair. An alpha. My whole body locks into stillness.
She's watching my every move with intelligent, amber eyes. A scar cuts through her right eyebrow, old enough to be smooth. Broad shoulders. The kind of build that says she knows how to fight. She sits in that chair like she's been there a while. Waiting. Watching.
Her scent hits me. Crushed basil. Blood orange. Sun-warmed cedar.
My body recognizes her before my mind catches up.
No, no, no.
A gasp tears out of me. My pulse pounds in my throat, in my wrists, lower, where I'm suddenly hot and aching and hungry in a way that makes me want to scream.
Every instinct tells me to bare my throat, to crawl toward that scent, to press my face against the source of it and breathe until I can't remember my own name or my own pain or anything except the warmth of her.
Mate. Safe. Home. Submit.
My omega surges toward the words.
Shut up.
Shut up.
I know what this is. Wallace spent months trying to synthesize exactly this response, trying to crack the code of scent-matching so he could manufacture it, sell it, use it to control omegas who would otherwise fight back.
He succeeded. He designed a synthetic alpha to make me stop running, stop fighting, stop being anything except the compliant little omega he always wanted.
This is a trap. She's probably a beta pumped full of synthetic hormones, and your body is too stupid and too desperate to know the difference.
My arms come up over my head as I curl into myself, knees drawn tight against my chest, making myself small.
A sound escapes my throat — high, thin, desperate — and I choke it off instantly.
The silence is worse. The need to let it out has to go somewhere, and my body chooses for me. I start rocking, small movements side to side, my shoulder pressing into the mattress and then lifting, pressing and lifting.
Don't make noise. Don't draw attention. Just rock. Just breathe. Just survive until it stops.
I want my father. I want the greenhouse. I want to be nine years old again, hidden behind the tomato plants, listening to him tell me about seeds that survive anything. But I can't get there. The door to that place is locked and I don't have the key anymore.
“You're safe, sweetheart.”
The alpha’s voice is low, warm, the way you'd talk to a feral cat you're trying not to spook. She doesn't move toward me, doesn't reach for me, just sits in that chair with her hands loose on the armrests and her eyes steady on my face like she's got all the time in the world to wait.
I almost laugh. I’ll never be safe. I need to know who this alpha is. What game we're playing, what the rules are so I can survive them.
My mouth opens. Nothing comes out. The word catches somewhere behind my tongue and dies there, and I'm watching her face the whole time, watching for the flicker of irritation, the tightening around the eyes that means punishment is coming.
Speaking without permission. Speaking at all.
Hugo used to backhand me for less. Wallace preferred the electrodes.
“Wh—”
It comes out broken, half a sound. I flinch, shoulders curling in, bracing for the hit. She doesn't move.
“It's okay, sweetheart.” She half lifts from the chair and forces herself back down again. “You can talk. You can ask me anything.”
It's a trap. Permission always came with punishment, but I have to know.
“Who...” The word scrapes out raw. I force the rest through teeth that don't want to unclench. Who are you?
I don't remember the last time I used my voice for anything but screaming.
Wallace liked my screaming. Said it helped him calibrate his instruments.
Said I had excellent vocal range for pain response documentation.
She doesn't flinch at the sound of it, doesn't look away or wrinkle her nose, doesn't do any of the things that would tell me she finds me disgusting.
She should find me disgusting. I'm the thing they made me, a body that's been opened and closed so many times there's more scar tissue than original parts.
She just holds my gaze with those amber eyes.
“I’m Sera Vidal. Head of Omega Affairs, Silverpine County.” A beat, a breath. “I brought you here.”
Sera. Like we're friends. Like she wants me to trust her. I was right. Now I have her name. Now I can add it to the list when she inevitably proves herself to be like every other alpha.
Another question claws at my throat. I have to push it out, have to know.
“Wh—” My voice catches. I swallow, try again. “Where—”
The word comes out thin, cracked. Her face shows nothing. No narrowing eyes, no sharp exhale, no I told you that you could speak but I didn't mean you could keep speaking. She just waits.
I'm testing her, looking for inconsistencies, holes in the story, the moment she contradicts herself and proves this is all performance. If this is Wallace's game, there will be tells. There are always tells. You just have to watch carefully enough to find them.
“We’re at the Omega Healing Center. Canton City.”
Canton City. Different county entirely, maybe different state. I tuck the information into the back of my mind.
“H-how?” The word scrapes out. I flinch at my own voice, at the stutter I can't control. “How did you... find me?”
She leans forward, and the basil in her scent sharpens. Her scent is fresh. Untainted. Wallace's synthetics never smelled like this. They always had a flatness to them, a chemical edge underneath the surface notes that made my omega recoil even while my body responded.
“Omega Affairs. We got a tip from a source in Canton City.” She stops, swallows, doesn't finish. She grips the armrests in a stranglehold. “I got you out.”
Got me out for what? I don’t expect help.
No one helped when they dragged me out of my home at sixteen, freshly presented and legally collectable.
Mom and dad could do nothing to keep me.
It was all legal. All sanctioned. An omega being collected for mandatory placement.
Nothing worth intervening for. No one comes. No one ever comes.
She wants something. They always want something. Nobody does anything for free, especially not for an Omega. I can't figure out what she's after, and that makes my skin itch.
My wrists. I don't look at them. I know what they look like. Layers of skin torn away where I twisted and pulled against restraints that never gave.
“The other Omegas.”
She shakes her head. Her scent goes heavy with grief, cedar and basil wilting. “You were the only one there.”
Wallace moved them then. Or they were already dead. Or they were never real at all, just another hallucination in the cocktail of drugs he pumped into my veins.
I close my eyes. The tremors are getting worse. Withdrawal claws its way through my system now that whatever Wallace was feeding me has started to leave. He’s cut me off drugs before to observe the withdrawal process.
It always hurts.
But what if he’s feeding me new drugs?
Ones that feel like withdrawal. Ones that fake a scent-match.
Because that’s what she scents like to my omega.
Mine.