Chapter Thirty-Seven
Espie
The man reads from the clipboard without looking at me.
His voice never changes pitch when he says my number. No pause. No hesitation.
“Confirmed allocation for Wallace. Transit code seven-seven-nine. Departure at oh-two-hundred.”
Like he’s reading freight inventory instead of a person.
Two other alphas who smell strange are behind him, half in and half out of the light.
I can't hold my head up. It keeps dropping and I have to push it back up and it drops again.
Whatever they gave me is working through me in slow, heavy waves, turning my bones to wet concrete.
My fingers are too distant to feel. The corridor smells of old stone and something electrical underneath.
How long do you think she'll last?
Three months. Maybe four.
Younger than his usual intake. He'll want to run more trials.
She’s small. I'll give her six weeks. An extra fifty says she's screaming inside a week.
That’s not even a bet. She’ll be screaming before the day is out.
They keep talking. I stop hearing the words. I stare at the wall. The wall is the only thing I can hold onto. Letters on tile. Worn black on chipped white ceramic. The ghost of a name that means nothing. There and then gone. Tunnels curve and the air gets colder and another name slides past.
I'm grabbed and hauled upright, my feet dragging on the tile, down an elevator, and then through a door and down a short corridor and into a room that smells of antiseptic and metal. A gurney in the center, under a white light. They shove me down onto it. The back of my head hits the vinyl. Someone pulls my arms above my head and the straps go on my wrists and ankles so tight I can’t move.
The light above me is very bright and everything beyond its edge is shadow. I can't tell how large the room is, can't tell how many people are in it. Only the sounds reach me. The soft tap of shoes on tile. The thin metallic sound of instruments being set down on a tray.
A male steps into the light. Blond hair, not a strand out of place, and he's tall and broad. His face is — it's a normal face. The kind of face you'd forget in a crowd if his eyes weren't so pale. Ice-pale. He looks over me like I'm not a person at all and picks up a syringe from the tray.
“Trial one,” he says. His voice is calm.
That's the thing I keep coming back to, even through the drugs. How calm it is. “I’ll induce her heat and we’ll test the variables, but first we need to establish a baseline.
” His gaze lands on me. His eyes don't change.
Not curious, not cruel. Just — present. Noting.
“You may find the initial onset uncomfortable, omega.”
The needle goes into the crook of my elbow and the drug hits my bloodstream.
The burn starts in my gut and spreads outward in concentric rings.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Not hunger, not want.
I don't have a word for it. My body arches against the straps.
A sound tears out of my throat that I've never heard myself make before.
The ache has no floor. It just drops, and drops, and drops, and my body keeps reaching for something I didn't choose to want.
He stands beside the gurney and watches and his face doesn't change. I am screaming my throat raw as he writes on his file.
Please stop. Please. I'll do anything. Please.
I'm sitting up. My heart slams against my ribs. The air tastes wrong — stone and antiseptic, the cold of the gurney still in my shoulder blades, his pen still scratching, and—
Cedar. Linen. Oakwood.
The nest. The nest, our nest. Cedar at my nose. Aubrey's heartbeat under my cheek. Kev's weight at my back, his arm heavy over my waist. Lex has his hand around my ankle. Ezra is at the edge, his palm settling against my shoulder blade.
I run my fingertips over Aubrey’s bite. Real. Present. Aubrey gave me that. The nest is real. The pack is real. I’m not there any more.
“Espie.” Aubrey's voice, close at my ear. “Hey. Come back.”
“I'm okay.” My voice comes out steady.
“You’re not.” Aubrey shifts, rising over me in the dark. “What was it this time?”
I don’t have the same nightmare, even though the theme never changes. Wallace is always at the center of them.
“The room. The…gurney. But more. There was a name time time. Names on tiles. When they moved me.” I was always drugged between sessions, but the dream allowed me to remember this.
“Names? Of what, sweetheart?” Kev asks.
He rises onto his elbow looking down at me. His clothing is rumpled, his hair is too. I smooth down a section and he tilts his cheek into my palm, eyes half shutting.
“Names on old tiles. The lettering was worn down, but I could still read them. I remember—” I close my eyes. Go back to the corridor. The heavy chemical drag in my veins. The wall, Espie. Look at the wall. Remember. “Colton. Merrith. Haverstock. Ashcroft.”
I shudder because those names only mean horrible things happening to me. Cold corridors. Colder rooms and unending fire inside me.
“I know Ashcroft. Axel took me there.” Aubrey shudders, a full-body thing he doesn't try to stop. “We went underground. I could never get the smell out of my nose after.” He presses his nose against my neck, breathing me in. “I'm so sorry you were there.”
I swallow hard, trying not to give into the pain running between us because of this nightmare.
“There were other omegas there too. I never saw them. I heard their screams echoing down the corridor.” I press my face into his shoulder. “There were so many of them, Aubrey. I couldn’t stop it. Couldn’t help them—”
His arms tighten around me. “Neither could I.”
“I know Ashcroft Station.” Kev is already out of the nest, on his feet, moving through the patio door into the house.
He comes back with his tablet, drops back into the nest and pulls up a blueprint, the screen throwing pale light across us.
“Levi's been mapping every decommissioned underground station between Silverpine and Canton City.” He traces the network. “Ashcroft is here.”
Lex leans in. “That network connects both cities.”
“Yes.” Kev taps the screen. “They’ve been raided. There’s nothing but three floors of deserted offices. No evidence of activity for years.”
Aubrey stares at figures at the edges of the map, his fingers moving through the sequence of numbers as he speaks. “Forty-three. Seven. Twelve. Negative seventy-nine. Twenty-two. Five.” A pause. Then again. “Forty-three. Seven. Twelve. Negative seventy-nine. Twenty-two. Five.”
“Those are latitude and longitude coordinates, Aubrey.” Kev sits up. “But that last number. Five. That's not part of any location.”
Five. Something about five.
The lurch as we descend. Sometimes I’m on my feet. Sometimes I’m slouched in a wheelchair. In my mind, I see a panel on the wall beside the door, half-obscured by a guard's shoulder, timing down as we drop. One, two, three, four, five.
“Numbers counting down,” I say. My gut would sink when I saw those numbers, but perhaps it wasn't all in my mind. Perhaps it was a physical sensation. “I thought it was a room but it wasn’t. It has to be a lift.”
Aubrey's head comes up. “A lift with a red floor?”
Red. The color of blood. I want to be sick when I nod. I curl my fist over my stomach, swallowing down the bile. “Yes.”
“Axel took me there. In a service lift with a red floor. I noticed it because… I…” He wraps his fingers around his neck.
Lex kisses his temple, drawing Aubrey back from the brink. “Feel us here, Omega. You’re with us. Not back there. You’re never going back there again.”
Aubrey blinks and thankfully the light stays in his eyes. He exhales a shaky breath. “Axel took me there. They trafficked omegas, they…used the lower levels. Brought omegas in from all over the country. Swapped them at their meetings.”
Ezra goes still. “Meetings?”
“Other alphas came. Traffickers. The omegas they brought — they were checked out.
All of them. Just — blank. Like there was nobody left behind the eyes.
Wallace would walk through and look at them.
Sometimes he'd take one. He'd say they weren't any good for anything more than what he was going to do to them,” Aubrey whispers.
“How did this go on without anyone discovering them?” Lex says.
“Because Axel went to great lengths to hide them.” Aubrey swallows hard. “There is a trapdoor hidden in a storeroom floor. No one would know it was there. That’s where we went down to get to level five.”
Kev stares at the blueprint. “The official record shows three subterranean floors. That's how he's stayed invisible. They haven’t gone down deep enough.” He ploughs his fingers through his hair, spiking it up all over again.
“How could he have built two more floors beneath the station?” Ezra asks.
“There’s money in omega control and trafficking,” I say.
“If we'd known.” Kev’s voice is rough at the edges. “If we'd had this information earlier — you might have been found. Both of you. Years earlier.” He stops. “I should have dug harder. I should have—”
“Don't do that. Don't take on Axel's sins. Or Wallace's,” Aubrey says. “And Wallace will pay the same way for what he did to Espie. I'll make sure of it.”
His vow moves through me, bound by grief, sorrow and heat. He means it. Every word.
“Aubrey.” My voice comes out soft. “We all suffered. Not just me.”
His damaged fingers find mine.
“I hate that it happened to you,” he says.
I clench his hand. “But the good thing, the only good thing, is that it brought us here. To each other.”
Aubrey strokes my cheek, my jaw, but the tremor in his hand grows as sorrow floods our bond. Sorrow for all the years they stole from us. Sorrow for the pain inflicted on us because of a designation. Ezra makes a low sound and Lex shifts closer to us. Our alphas are protecting us. Comforting us.
Kev’s nostrils flare as he scents our distress. “I need to kiss you, Omega. Need to make sure you’re all right. That is if you…need that too.”
Aubrey stills. The damaged fingers in my hand loosen. His cedar deepens, chamomile thickening warm with his desire. He looks at Kev, his eyes clear.
“Yes, Alpha,” he says. “I would like that.”
Kev cups Aubrey’s face with both hands, thumbs resting along his jaw as he leans in. The kiss begins slow and careful, deliberate enough to give Aubrey room to pull away if he wants to.
Then Aubrey makes a broken sound against his mouth and grabs fistfuls of Kev’s shirt, and restraint disappears completely.
Kev groans under his breath and hauls Aubrey tight against him, one hand sliding to the back of his neck to angle him exactly where he wants him.
Aubrey rises onto his knees in the nest, pressing into Kev’s chest, his body moving instinctively against him as cedar crashes through the patio air in a wave dense enough to flood my lungs.
Kev breaks the kiss to drag his mouth along Aubrey's jaw, his throat.
Aubrey tips his head back, baring his neck, his breath coming apart in small urgent pieces, and Kev puts his lips against the pulse there and bites softly and Aubrey shudders full-body and says please in a voice that has nothing performed in it at all.
Lex's sandalwood deepens beside me. Ezra's purr climbs a register.
Kev pulls back far enough to look at Aubrey's face. The flushed jaw, the bitten mouth, the eyes fully present and wanting.
Kev drops his forehead to Aubrey's. “Thank you, Omega. Thank you for letting me kiss you.”
Kev presses one more kiss to his mouth, soft this time. Then he eases Aubrey back and turns to me.
“Espie. May I kiss you too.” Kev holds out his hand. Open, waiting.
I look at his hand. Then at his face. At the tiredness around his eyes that's been there since Sera left and has only gotten worse.
I know what this hand has done. Held Aubrey through months of nothing.
Built a greenhouse because I needed one.
Let me go at every single turn when letting go was the harder thing.
I put my hand in his and he pulls me into his lap, settling me astride him, his palms spreading wide across my hips. The solid weight of him beneath me pulls a breath from my chest. He holds my gaze for one beat, searching, making sure. Then I close the distance and press my mouth to his.
He kisses me like Sera isn't missing and the clock isn't running.
Like there is nothing else in the world right now except this patio and this nest and his mouth on mine.
His hand slides up my spine, and the other tightens at my hip, and every point of contact sharpens.
Kev groans against my mouth as his tongue slides against mine.
Lex puts his hand at the back of my neck.
Ezra's palm spreads between my shoulder blades, his purr moving through me from behind.
Aubrey rises to trace a path along my collar bone with his hot tongue, and I am held from every direction, Kev's chest at my front and Lex's hand at my nape, Aubrey beside me and Ezra's warmth at my back.
Kev drags his mouth to my jaw. My throat. He finds the place beneath my ear and lingers. “When we get her back. I want everything.”
I fist Kev’s shirt, because I know now. This is where I belong. There’s no version of my future that doesn’t include them. “You'll have it. All of it.”
We all feel the missing space where Sera should be. His thumbs press into my hip bones, one slow pass as his breath shudders.
His phone rings. His mouth goes flat as he answers the call. “Adrian.”
My heart starts racing as his scent turns sharp and bitter at whatever Adrian says.
He lowers the phone slowly, his gaze moving over all of us. I've seen him angry. Controlled. Exhausted. Afraid.
This is none of those.
This is worse.
“Kev.” My voice barely makes it out. “What happened?”
“A finger was delivered to the OHC.”
Each word lands separately, like he has to force them out one at a time.
“Adrian confirmed the print.”
My stomach drops out from under me. Aubrey's grip crushes my hand and I hold on just as hard.
Kev swallows once.
“It was Sera’s.”
His voice breaks on the last word.
“Someone cut off her finger and delivered it to the OHC.”