49. Siren
Chapter forty-nine
If you’d asked me a few weeks ago if I’d ever let the walking anxiety diagnosis anywhere near my room again willingly, I would have punched out your lights. But here she is. Sitting on my bed. Watching me rifle through my closet.
I’m not confident that I’m going to find a ton of clothes that will actually fit her, but this crazy ass plan Cross came up with requires that she and I look as identical as possible.
Thankfully, she’s put on some weight since being with us and doesn’t look liable to blow away in a light breeze anymore, but I’m not exactly a supermodel.
Still, if we can get Delilah bulked up with some extra layers, then it should fool someone looking from a distance.
The silence stretching between me and Delilah feels cavernous, and I don’t know what to say or how to fill it.
I’ve been meaning to talk to her since we took the chip out, but this isn’t exactly an easy subject to approach.
Hey, so um. Remember your old prime alpha?
The one who was brutally murdered in your nest?
Yeah, so that was my brother that I hadn’t spoken with in, like, a decade. Can we chat about him?
Perfectly normal small talk, obviously.
“Do you think this will work?”
The sound of Delilah’s soft, barely there voice makes me jump slightly as it cuts through the air and I turn, leaning against the doorframe of my closet with my hands in my pockets.
I let out a long sigh as I look at her. She’s doing that thing that Joker sometimes does, where she doesn’t sit normally.
This time, her legs are crisscrossed, but she’s hugging her knees. God, omegas are so flexible.
I shrug with one shoulder. “It might, and no one’s come up with a better one in the last few days, so it’s a risk worth taking.”
Delilah nods, looking at a spot in the air between us thoughtfully. “I still can’t believe someone put a chip in my neck and I can’t remember how or when or why.”
“Well, the why’s pretty easy,” I start with an ironic chuckle. “It was to track you, just in case you ran.”
Delilah looks up, her naturally perfect eyebrows furrowed. “Run from where? From the facility? That place was locked down tight.”
My lips twist sideways and I give her a knowing look. “Sure, that place was. But no one was ever meant to stay there long term, remember?”
Delilah’s eyes go wide as she finally meets my gaze. “Do you mean…”
I nod. “Based on what I’ve been able to find in the chip’s data, and the website it leads to, those chips were in all of the omegas.”
What I don’t tell her is how many omegas’ information I found when I hacked into the Love Wins network.
How many chips, how many sales disguised as donations, how many different facilities there are all across the country.
She’s already having night terrors as her memories have started coming back.
Best not to overwhelm her with details of the scummy underbelly of our world.
“Joker…?”
Her trailing question pulls me out of my thoughts and I shake my head. “Cross did a full exam on him and I never found any data in the systems I’ve hacked to suggest he has a chip. I don’t think he was there long enough, or drugged out enough, for the procedure.”
Delilah nods, laughing to herself about something. “He was more…lively than the rest.”
I chuckle along with her. I didn’t spend much time monitoring his comms while he was playing spy, but I heard enough for me to piece together the picture.
“You said the police were looking for me, or at least they were right after we…left Love Wins. Why didn’t the facility give the police my tracking information?” Delilah asks, her brow pulled down in thought.
“Oh, trust me, cupcake. They’re still looking for you. My best guess as to why they didn’t share the tracking info? Because admitting they’ve been putting dog chips into omegas would open a whole can of worms. And the police are stupid, but not ‘ignore a human trafficking ring’ stupid.”
Delilah hums and stares off into space again, and I let out a sigh. While we’re on the topic of the facility, this seems as good a time as any to ease into the other thing I need to know.
“While you were in there, did you ever hear from anyone? Maybe family members of your former pack?” I say, testing the waters with a softball question.
Delilah’s expression drops, and my alpha instincts almost make me retract the question. Her scent turns sour as it drifts toward me, and she hugs her knees a little tighter.
“Not once I was inside. But before I was transferred there, when I was in the hospital, a few of them visited. But once they realized I couldn’t remember anything, they were…less supportive,” Delilah says, starting off strong but trailing off to barely above a whisper.
I straighten, my shoulders rolling back and brow coming down. “What do you mean?”
Delilah shrugs. “I was on a lot of meds to keep me stable, so I don’t remember a lot of it. And I don’t blame them for being upset. I might have lost my alphas, but they lost sons, and brothers, too. I don’t think they were upset at me, but at the situation.”
“Did they blame you?” I ask through gritted teeth.
Delilah nods, and I let out a growl. I don’t have to stretch my imagination very far to think of the things my parents might have said to Delilah in the aftermath of losing their precious golden boy, Roman.
“Sorry. We don’t—I don’t have to talk about them. Probably shouldn’t, really,” Delilah says, shaking her head.
I can see the way she shrinks herself in real time as she speaks, and some weird, instinctive part of me is almost offended by it.
Why should an omega like her make herself small for me?
I’m not like Bones or Phantom. Omegas don’t submit to me, not really.
Well, Joker never has. But I’ve been fine with that.
While I like having him as a teammate, and while I’ll jokingly flirt with him, we both know it’s not like that between us.
I’ve always thought my non-binary-ness just didn’t allow me to be attracted to omegas. But looking at Delilah…
I shake myself mentally. No. I’m just feeling sorry for her. It’s just pity making me want to comfort her. Nothing else.
“Why?” I ask, definitely out of objective curiosity.
She lets out a long sigh. “Because it hurts, remembering them.”
I flinch slightly when she looks away. What a dumb question. Of course, it hurts thinking about her brutally murdered bond mates. But I just need to know.
“Were they good to you? Treated you right?” I mumble.
Delilah shrugs. “Roman, Isaac, and Alex did. Or at least, they treated me as well as they knew how. I’ve been talking with Joker a little, and I’m starting to see how old-fashioned things were with them. How much I let slide because that’s what I thought I should do as an omega.”
I snort sardonically. Yeah, sounds like Roman. We came from a very old-fashioned upbringing. It doesn’t exactly shock me that he would enforce the same standards our father enforced on us. Though I will give Roman credit for allowing Delilah to have multiple bond mates.
“Is there something you want to know?” Delilah asks, breaking through my train of thought.
I look up, not sure when I dropped my gaze to the floor, face a little warm.
She’s looking at me with those big grey eyes, and I swear she can see right through me.
But this is the first time she’s pushed in a conversation.
Good. She should learn to have a backbone after all the people she’s allowed to walk all over her.
“Did they ever talk about their families?” I ask, still trying to ease into it.
“Sometimes. Isaac was an only child, but had lots of cousins. I never got to meet them, but he talked about them a lot. Alex and Roman were sort of estranged from their families, so they didn’t talk much—”
“Estranged? Why?” I ask, cutting across her and standing up.
“Well, Alex’s parents got sucked into a weird doomsday cult and basically disowned him when he wouldn’t move our pack to their compound.
And Roman just kept his parents at arm’s length.
Called them controlling and judgmental, so he went no contact.
And after meeting them in the hospital after his death, I definitely understood why. ”
I stand there stunned for a long few heartbeats. Roman got away. He pushed our parents away. I let out a chuckle, a breathless and disbelieving sound. “I knew he had it in him,” I whisper to myself, shaking my head.
“What do you mean?” Delilah asks sharply, almost alarmed.
I clear my throat of the sudden lump, shaking my head. “It’s nothing.”
“No, it’s not. Did you know Roman?” she asks, sitting up straighter and releasing her knees.
I look at her for a second, and I seriously consider lying. But those fucking eyes stare back at me, refusing to let me shrink away. I can see why Roman fell for her. She’s not quite the omega I saw in the news clippings, but the echoes are there. Maybe she isn’t as frail as I thought.
“Y-Yeah,” I stammer. “I knew him. He was my brother.”