Chapter 27 #2
There is nothing to be embarrassed about. So why does my face heat when I see the way Torin is looking at the roach trap beside a hole in the trim near the kitchen?
“Our parents are involved in Asylum,” Callum says. “That’s the best place to start.”
My muscles tense, and I regret calling them. Everyone has heard about Asylum, a private members' club made up of super wealthy alphas who spent decades abusing and trafficking omegas. I read about it in the newspaper. And they are part of it?
I get ready to lock myself in the bathroom and call the cops.
“Not us,” Torin says softly, “which is the source of all our problems.”
I eye him warily. “I don’t understand.”
“When you know all of their secrets and refuse to join in their sick club, they can never let you wander too far in case you tell those secrets to someone who might lock them up,” Callum says.
I sit back on the couch, my eyes flicking between them. “How bad are those secrets?”
“Rape, murder, abduction, trafficking,” Torin says. “Bad.”
“I don’t understand why you can’t just go to the police and tell them that. They’d go to jail, and whatever hold they have over you would disappear,” I say.
“It’s not that simple.” Callum leans on the brick wall beside my window and crosses his arms.
“They held auctions where they literally bought, sold, and traded omegas,” Callum says.
“They have tried to control us by taking our independence from us. Torin and I have trusts that were set up a long time ago. We inherited a lot of money from our grandparents, and it's ours. Our parents can’t take our millions, but they can control us in other ways.”
I’m almost too afraid to ask, “What ways are those?”
“They have Lottie,” Archer explains.
Scrunching my nose, I shake my head. “Who’s Lottie?”
“Charlotte Meeks. She was our neighbor. Since we were kids, we planned to get away from our families, but then she started to get sick.” Callum glances at Torin. “Other stuff happened later.”
“What he’s hinting at is that I had an old girlfriend, Sophie.
” Torin takes over, avoiding my gaze. “Growing up, my mom was too much in love with my dad to have much time for me. Her indifference turned to hate when she accused me of tipping the cops off about where my dad was one night, and they arrested him for trying to abduct an omega.”
“Abduct her!” I stare at him, horrified.
He meets my gaze, bright green eyes hooking mine with their intensity. “They are not good people, Juniper. Be glad you’ve never met them and hope you never do.”
An icy chill settles over me, and I wrap my blanket tighter around my shoulders. “Did you tip off the cops about your dad?”
“Yes,” he admits. “It’s why she’s made it her mission to destroy me any way she can.”
“And she used Sophie?” I ask.
He nods. “My mom paid Wilkes Booth, my old best friend, a lot of money to seduce her.”
“Did you love her?” I whisper.
“I won’t say it didn’t hurt finding them in bed together, but I should’ve known my mom would get revenge somehow.”
Torin doesn’t answer my question, but he doesn’t have to. He must have loved Sophie a lot for his mom to use his best friend to hurt him like that. “What happened to Sophie?”
“Left the country,” Torin says. “Wilkes used her and threw her away, and she was never the same after.” The look on his face says he isn’t surprised by that, and neither am I.
If I knew someone used me to destroy someone else, I would never be the same either. “And your mom sent Wilkes to use me to hurt you?” I ask.
Torin nods.
I feel sick and afraid. My eyes settle on Callum. “There’s more, isn’t there? You said you were going to run away before, but something stopped you. What was it?”
Callum says, “Lottie is sick. Her parents died when she was a kid, and her uncle, who raised her, is involved. We got her away from her uncle, but my dad has her now. He controls the medicine she needs to survive. That’s what stopped us from running.
He could stop giving it to her anytime he wants, and none of us can do a thing to save her. ”
I stare at him. “That’s sick.”
Archer rubs a hand over his face, looking tired. “We know.”
“What do they want you to do?” I ask.
Torin shrugs. “Keep our mouths shut and stay close. Trying to run made them more paranoid than if we’d stayed, but we had to leave.”
“And if you go to the cops or run, they’ll stop giving Lottie the medicine she needs?” I say.
They all nod.
“And is she…” My voice trails off before I can ask exactly what Lottie is to them.
They must care about her a lot to try so hard to save her.
I once saw them laughing with a beautiful omega.
Maybe that was her. I hated my scent matches then, and I hated her too.
It’s a little harder to hate her now, knowing their parents are using her as a hostage.
“Is she?” Archer prompts.
I avoid all their gazes when I ask, “Were you together before she became a hostage?” I haven’t forgiven them for hurting me, and I’m not sure that I can, but asking if they’re in love with her is too painful. They are—or were—my scent matches, and the thought of them being with anyone hurts.
“Why would you think we were together?” Archer asks, voice so quiet I have to strain to hear him over my pounding heart.
I don’t dare look up.
“Juniper?” Callum asks in the same quiet voice Archer used. “Did you think we were cheating on you with Lottie?”
Yes.
Taking a breath, I release it quietly as I lift my head. I look Callum in the eye when I admit, “I saw you laughing with her when Veronica brought me back from the heat clinic you sent me to. I thought that was why you’d done it. You couldn’t bear to touch me because you already had an omega.”
A muscle in Torin’s jaw twitches, and his eyes are wide with shock.
Archer stares at me, his chest rising and falling as he breathes hard.
Callum’s face is white. Utterly white, and he’s barely breathing.
This isn’t guilt. It’s disbelief.
Without another word, Callum walks over to me, dropping into a crouch right in front of me. “I had no one else after my mom died, and she became like a sister to me. When she got sick, I promised her we would all get out together. We became a family.”
I study his serious expression for a long moment, wanting to believe him, then I look at Torin. “But she’s an omega.”
“Yes, she is,” Torin says. “But she’s not ours. You are.”
“Lottie is the sister I never had,” Archer confirms quietly. “When we get her out, you can ask her yourself. We never cheated on you, Juniper. Not with Lottie or with anyone else.”
My gaze returns to Callum. “Then what was she doing with you at the house?”
“We get one thirty-minute visit with her a week,” he says, voice hard and bitter. “And sometimes not even that. My dad dangles those visits over our heads constantly.”
I sit back against the couch and wrap my arms around my raised legs as Callum gets up from his crouch in front of me and crosses my apartment to lean against the wall beside the kitchen.
“You were flirting with a woman at the party you abandoned me,” I say to Callum. “It looked like cheating to me.”
A flash of emotion chases across his face too fast to read. Regret, I think.
“I wanted to hurt you, humiliate you. I knew you were listening, and I wanted you to get the wrong idea. It was cruel, and you didn’t deserve it. But I didn’t cheat on you, Juniper. That’s a line I could never—and would never—cross.”
I study him for a beat, then nod. “Say I believe all that, why did you shut me out? I wasn’t involved in any of that. We never even met before.”
“We thought you were another spy that Callum’s dad sent to watch us,” Torin says. “Callum’s dad told us to pick an omega from the Haven Academy end-of-year ball, or he’d choose for us. We thought we’d lucked out and found our scent match.”
“Then the next morning we find you having a cozy breakfast with the enemy,” Archer says. “And when he admitted he chose you himself…”
“He was lying,” I grind out.
“Which we didn’t believe, and we should have,” Callum says, holding my gaze. “We should have believed you over someone we already knew we couldn’t trust, but we didn’t.”
“So you’re saying you treated me like that because of your parents?” I ask.
“No,” Torin says with a firmness that surprises me. “People have had worse things happen to them, but they don’t call their scent match a whore, humiliate her, or send her to a heat clinic.”
He holds my gaze even though I want to look away. They all hurt me so badly, I don’t know that I can forget or forgive. Some wounds are soul-deep.
Torin continues, “Everything we told you just now were the things happening in the background. The reason we reacted the way we did. We wanted to hurt you because we didn’t trust you.
It’s no excuse for having treated you the way we did because there is no excuse.
We should have asked you when you met William.
Better yet, we should have told you about our parents before I slept with you. ”
“But you still want me to forgive you?” I ask him, frowning.
He nods. “Yeah.”
I hug my knees. “I don’t know if I can do that. The way you all treated me…” My voice trails off when I remember a year that stretched out forever and felt like it aged me ten years. “You all left scars inside me. I can never forget that.”
He gives me a resigned smile, his eyes swimming with regret. “I know that too.”