28. Nine
Nine
Taryn
Half a dozen missing-presumed-dead omegas stared up at me from the coffee table in the boys’ living room. Their smiles—bright, unknowing—morphed in my mind into death grimaces. Grotesque circus masks that brought goosebumps skittering over my skin.
Detective Banerjee at least had the courtesy to remove Clint Hooper’s photo from the table after it nearly brought my lunch up onto her shoes.
Clint Hooper. Otherwise known as my attacker. My would-be rapist and kidnapper.
I’d looked away from the photo as fast as I could. Not quick enough to shield my eyes from the gray-blue lips, or the little black hole centered on his forehead. I’d hidden my face in Brea’s shoulder, shivering. Caine, cursing, had confirmed that it was the right guy.
Clint Hooper. Bounty hunter. Hired on the dark web to bring me, alive— small mercies, I guess?— to the client. Clint Hooper, who’d wanted just a little bit more than the fifty grand he’d been hired at.
The printouts showing us all this had also been cleared from the table. Now all that remained was a bunch of ghosts. Vikki’s voice barely cut through the heavy mist clouding my senses, isolating me from the others.
“Lyla Kinsey, age fifteen, disappeared four years ago.” Her finger pointed to a photo of a petite girl with a dark pixie cut and shimmery eye makeup.
It moved to the next one. Cori Conner, fifteen, blonde and beaming, disappeared six years ago.
Nova Morgan, sixteen, demure and blond, who’d vanished six years ago.
I couldn’t hear the rest. Their names buzzed in my ears like flies around a body.
Brea sat to my left, one arm tight around my shoulders and the other grasping my hand in her lap. It would’ve been comforting if I didn’t have the sense she was clinging on to me as though worried I’d— poof!— right into thin air.
Caine sat on my right, Lin and Brooks standing behind us.
Vikki sat across the coffee table, an overstuffed messenger bag on the floor beside her.
Grim lines traced across her forehead and from her eyes, mouth.
Maybe they were smile lines. Or maybe they’d set in after a lifetime of furrowed brows and pinched lips.
Lin broke the silence next. “What makes you think any of these are connected?”
“Different time periods, different areas, different looks,” Caine continued seamlessly. “The only thing they have in common is they’re omegas.”
Vikki gave a small, sad smile. “No,” she said quietly.
“It’s not.” We waited for her to continue.
She shifted in her seat and sat up straighter.
“All of these omegas disappeared within a year of presenting. And all of their mothers participated in the same pilot program for an anti-nausea treatment when they were pregnant with them.”
Brooks shifted behind me, his gentle scent sharpening. “This would’ve been, what, twenty, twenty-five years ago? I’ve never heard of anything like that.”
“They did it quietly,” Vikki replied. “Nearly two thousand participants across the state in a five-year spread.”
“And only”—Brea counted the photos still ogling us from the table—“eight people missing?”
“The only children of the treated pregnancies who presented as omegas,” Vikki said. “Every one of them. Except you.”
Goosebumps pebbled my skin again, dread sitting in my stomach like lead. Caine issued a barely audible growl, leaning in closer on my right. Lin reached forward, squeezing my shoulder. I just shook my head. “That…that can’t be right.”
Vikki held up a folder. “This is a list of every single person treated in that program, connected to the birth certificate of every pregnancy that went to term. Alessandra Sylva Lennox,” she read from the page, “entered the program six months before she gave birth to Taryn Rose Lennox at New Gilden General.”
My fingers were numb.
“And these,” she said, pulling out a stapled stack of papers, “are the compiled designations of every child delivered after treatment.”
She handed the stack toward me. I watched my hand reach out and grab it.
I blinked a few times, trying to focus as I skimmed over the page.
Lots of names, lots of birth certificate numbers, and dates, and random configurations of letters and numbers.
In the right-most column, a sea of BETA s ran down the page.
I flipped through one page, then another.
A fair few ALPHA s broke up the column, maybe a dozen per page.
The first OMEGA appeared on page eight. Even with so many entries, it was impossible to miss, highlighted in yellow as it was. I quickly fanned through the rest of the pages, finding all seven other highlighted OMEGA s.
I flipped the packet back to the front, trying to control my breathing.
Every omega. Except me.
“They missed me because I wouldn’t have been on this list,” I said, voice sounding dead even to my own ears.
Caine shook his head. “Everyone’s on—”
“The Census,” I said, staring at the papers in my hands. “I never Registered—Gran, she didn’t—I—”
“She only Registered this year,” Brea finished for me. She gave a gentle squeeze of my hand. “After the shop incident.”
After Heath.
I looked back down at the packet in my lap. The logo at the top read Phoenix Labs. My eyes trailed down to the bottom of the page, though, noting a file name in a small font: WWCorp_PL_DesRes_9703.
WWCorp. Wainwright Corp. Had to be.
The room spun around me, air suddenly too thin, too too thin.
We’d been working under the assumption that Heath was the one behind my second attack. And while he had plenty of money, it was finite. He’d have run out eventually, or gotten bored, or found a new perfect bride to take his attention away from us.
Heath had been a daunting opponent, but a beatable one. Or, at least, an evadable one.
Multibillion-dollar corporation, though?
There was no running from that. No waiting them out until they moved on or gave up. They had enough resources to pay for a million different bounty hunters, a million rewards.
I practically leapt from the couch, breaking myself from the various vise grips on my arms and shoulders and hands. It was claustrophobic. I stood at the end of the coffee table, running my hands through my hair and focusing on my breathing.
“Okay,” I said, swallowing down the bile threatening to overtake me.
“Okay, so…so they tested some anti-puking drug a few decades ago. And now they’re taking omegas.
So they clearly weren’t testing some fucking anti-puking drug.
” I crossed my arms, stepping closer to Vikki.
The three alphas in the room all growled, still not trusting the woman we’d warily let into our midst. I didn’t care. “So what are they doing?”
Something like respect sparkled in Vikki’s eye. “They’re trying to find the designation gene. They’re trying to figure out how to create omegas.”
Brooks
“No fucking way,” Caine growled. “There is no designation gene.”
My heart raced in my chest, my brain working twice as fast. Designations seemed to happen totally randomly. Scientists had been looking through data for ages, trying to suss out any possible rhyme or reason, any correlation they could explore to figure out how to tweak designations manually.
They never figured it out. Alpha numbers decreased, omegas’ drastically so, and we were no closer to understanding the mechanism of designations to begin with.
“Strictly speaking,” I said, mind still half-distracted as I sifted through every bit of knowledge I had on the subject, which wasn’t much but was probably more than everyone else in the room, “we don’t know that that’s true.”
Caine sat forward the couch cushion, shooting his death glare toward me. “It doesn’t run in families. Alpha plus alpha doesn’t equal alpha. Beta plus beta doesn’t equal beta. Alphas and omegas aren’t even guaranteed to give birth to alphas and omegas. It’s fucking magic.”
“No,” I said. “It’s science. It’s just science we haven’t figured out yet.”
“Bull—”
“UV rays existed before humans learned how to detect them,” I cut him off. “Bacteria still existed before we could see them. Designations aren’t magic. Bond bites aren’t magic. It’s biology. It’s—it’s—chemistry.”
Caine opened his mouth to argue back, but Lin beat him to it.
“It doesn’t matter if it exists or not if they’re trying to find it. All that matters is that they are. ” He turned to Vikki. “So what do we do?”
What a question. What do we do against the megacorporation apparently hellbent on taking our omega as their own for god knew what? Vikki all but confirmed as much when she answered.
“The police are on the take,” she said somberly.
“Omegas being targeted should be front-page news, but they’ve buried every single one.
Done the minimum to keep family or friends or whoever off their backs, fed them lines about doing all they can do, and wait for people to give up or forget about it. ”
“We didn’t fucking—”
“But people care,” Vikki said. “People care about their loved ones being targeted with shady medical testing or abductions and abuse. And people care about omegas being taken and killed.”
“And what makes you so different, Detective ?” Caine snapped as he charged off the couch and loomed over Vikki. “What the fuck is in this for you?”
Brea stood. “Caine—”
“He’s right,” Lin said, standing as well. He nodded at Vikki. “She just told us the police are bought and paid for, so why isn’t she?”
Vikki shook her head, shifting in the light brown leather chair. “I wish I had a sob story to give you. If I could tell you about a sister or…or a lover who’d been taken, that may make you trust me more.
“We had five missing omegas come through this station in sixteen months. Two through New Gilden. One in Eagle’s Peak. And no one is doing anything about it. They tell us they’re runaways, or the trails are cold, and they move on.
“But I wanted to know why. So I looked for why. I found other people who wanted to know why. Every bit of this information came at great risk and cost, believe me.” Vikki’s tone took a defensive edge, just for a moment.
“But there’s never been a witness. Never been a survivor.
” Her gaze turned to Taryn. “Until now.”
Taryn paled. Brea shook her head. Lin—calm, collected Lin—snarled, a burst of rotten blackberry exploding from him. “Absolutely not.”
“I have someone inside. Deep inside,” Vikki said, standing herself.
“We’ve been painstakingly smuggling all this out over the last three years, trying to build our case.
But if we don’t get hard evidence—photos, video, witness testimony from a living victim—there’s no chance in hell this will stick.
I told you before”—Vikki looked to Brea, still seated with her brows knotted together—“we have to have irrefutable, undeniable proof, or they will walk and this will be for nothing. And you’ll still be in danger. ”
Everyone began speaking over each other, Brea and Caine standing from the couch, all three alphas arguing with Vikki, who never once faltered or faded, arguing right back at them.
What a fucking mess.
Taryn’s voice was the one that quieted everyone. “What if they’re still there?”
Everyone turned to her.
“They’re missing, presumed dead, yeah? Which means no one’s ever found a body?” She took a shaky breath. Fuck me, she was trembling. “If they’re doing research…what if the omegas are still…wherever they were taken?”
Brea shook her head. “That’s not your responsibility.”
“Maybe not,” Taryn replied, “but if I were stuck in some prison being treated like a lab rat, I’d sure hope that if someone had the chance to get me out, that they’d at least try.”
“Teacup,” Brea said gently, “this isn’t shopping local, or…or calling our legislator. This isn’t a social justice rally you can go to in the morning then come home for lunch.”
“You think I’m not aware?” Taryn cut back. “I’m the one who was tied up and almost fucking raped in my own house. I am acutely fucking aware.”
Brea’s face twisted into a pained expression. “Taryn, love—”
“Out.” Caine’s voice lifted above all the others. We stopped, staring at him. He glared over at Vikki, pointing to the door. “Get the fuck out. Right now.”
Vikki stood taller, like she was going to resist. Caine let his alpha take up a little more space in the room. “You’ve told us all you have to share. Which means we’re done with you. Get out right now, or I call the cops and let them sort out how to deal with all this intel here.”
Vikki froze, hesitated for just a moment, then gave a single nod.
She packed up her papers, taking out a business card from her bag and leaving it on the coffee table.
She looked around at all of us but ended with Taryn.
“We could make a difference,” she said before straightening and bolting from the room.
Before any of us had a chance to speak, Taryn did the same. “Don’t follow me,” she said as she charged down the hall and slammed the door to the room she and Brea shared with a crack that broke each of us just a little bit.
At work the next day, I struggled to focus on my patients. All I could think about were Taryn and Brea back at home. How small Taryn had looked, curled up in the bed when I’d gone in and softly kissed her forehead before leaving. The stony look of devastation on Brea’s face.
How’d everything gotten so absolutely fucked?
I took advantage of the midday lull to grab a sandwich from the cafeteria, sitting in moody silence and eating it in tiny, non-appetite-having bites.
“Ah, Dr. Arceneaux,” a friendly voice called from behind me.
The hospital's amiable mail clerk, Stu Kline, approached. With concerted effort, I gave the sweet older man a smile. “Hey, Stu. You see they got Aggie’s brownies today?”
“Oh, don’t you worry ‘bout that. Aggie’s got me on speed dial. Knows to call me the second they come out the oven.” With a chuckle, he tossed a package onto my table. “Was just headin’ to your mailbox, but since you’re here.”
The brown envelope was plain, no return address, no stamps. Just Dr. Brooks Arceneaux scrawled over it. I held it up to him. “Someone dropped this off?”
Stu was already strolling away, cart ahead of him. He half turned back with a shrug. “I just pass ‘em out, doc.”
“Thanks, Stu,” I murmured far too quietly for him to hear as I examined the envelope some more. Opening it was probably a foolish choice, given everything going on at the moment. Then again, I’d been known to make a fool of myself on occasion.
I ripped open the envelope, and immediately another envelope—smaller, white—slid out.
Just in case. -V