Six
No, no, no, no, no. Absolutely not. I don’t mind the nice one, but the asshole and his friends cannot be here in my space again.
If I hide though, I’ll make him look like a jackass for calling everyone over for nothing.
That would be fun because they won’t be able to find me, and better for me because then I won’t have to interact with them.
With that in mind, I leave the alphas alone to talk about their feelings while I go to my room.
I wouldn’t have been able to pull this off earlier, and I’m still moving much slower than normal and having to stop to catch my breath more often, but that blood the new alpha gave me, the nice one, and the actual food I got to eat was enough fuel to get me through at least the night.
Just in case it’s not, I have the bag with the other protein bars and the extra water bottle that asshole alpha brought with him, and they won’t be able to take it away from me.
It’s hard not to overthink things when it’s quiet. When my sister remodeled the house, she got pretty creative so she could hide me. It simply wouldn’t do for anyone to come over and discover she wasn’t what she was claiming to be, so she found a way to hide me indefinitely.
What I call my hallways are actually just the backsides of walls, double sets of studs just far enough apart that I can squeeze through sideways.
I’m pretty sure Winslow blew through all of our inheritance to have them installed in practically every room, but she needed access to me regardless of her location in case she needed a scent boost.
Now, as I make it to my pallet bed made of old blankets and the one used-to-be-soft pillow I’ve been allowed, I curl up under them and rest. That little outburst cost me too much energy.
When our parents passed, I was still young enough to trust my sister implicitly.
She was the only adult in my life at the time, and my parents never paid me too much attention, so losing them wasn’t some great tragedy.
I was confused when they stopped coming home, but when Winslow told me she’d be taking care of me because they got in an accident, I didn’t have too many big feelings.
I was maybe nine, I’m not too sure. Even before that I was kept home a lot.
I think my parents always suspected I’d be an omega and didn’t want the outside world to have access to me.
Natural vampires are much rarer than the turned ones, and some will say that makes us better, but I don’t see why that matters.
My family had it in their minds we were important though, and omegas are pretty rare, too.
Our world is set up for packs, because vampire births are tricky to accomplish when alphas are involved.
With multiple alphas around though, an omega is stronger and more likely to have a successful pregnancy.
It still takes a big toll on the mother’s body though, and that’s if she can even get pregnant in the first place.
It makes it easier when you’ve got money to access fertility treatments and good medicine.
I’m sure my parents thought I’d be their ticket to the world they were always just on the cusp on, because a natural omega vampire female is the only type of vampire without any fertility or birthing complications that can reproduce with alphas, so we fetch a pretty high price for packs.
It’s archaic that dowries are still a thing in our culture, but there’s not much to be done about it when it serves the pitfalls of society so well.
Keeping me safe and out of the public’s eye until I was old enough to present officially was important to my parents.
At least, when I asked why I couldn’t go to school with the other kids, that was their answer.
When Winslow took over my care, I only became more secluded, and she made it clear the ‘why’ of it wasn’t my business
At first, I didn’t really understand why my sister needed my blood.
She was a beta; she had access to every blood bank in the country and could even mail order stuff if she wanted.
I was even more confused when I found her not ingesting it but injecting it straight into her veins with a full medical set up, like she needed it to live.
Every time she’d take a little more from me, and it made me feel sick, but by then she was controlling my blood and food intake, and I wasn’t strong enough to really fight her.
I remember the day she came home smelling like them.
She hadn’t fed me in a few days because she’d been gone, wards set to prevent me from leaving, so maybe I was on high alert when she came home or something, but I could pick out each individual scent on her, and I hyper fixated on them and it became my whole identity.
There was one that reminded me of a cool breeze right before rain, bergamot and sage perfectly balanced and crips.
Then there was one that smelled like the day our parents took us to the sea, a soft, fresh blend of amber and sandalwood.
One of my personal favorites was whoever smelled like dark honey; thick, rich, and sweet.
The orange eucalyptus scent gave me a bit of a head rush the first time I got a hit of it, while whoever smelled of white tea and honey felt like a garden party, just like my fifth birthday.
I always thought that one in particular complimented my omega scent well.
The last scent, but maybe the most memorable to me, was the alpha that wore his black teakwood scent like a sophisticated accessory.
I didn’t know who the scents belonged to, and she wouldn’t tell me at first, but it was clear they knew I was their scent match because my sister came home covered in bites and scratches and slept for 12 hours straight.
Once she woke up, she told me exactly what my scent matches had done to her, and how pleased she was that her experiments were working.
They had no idea she was a beta, she told me, no idea that the wild berry and wisteria scent she carried was a byproduct of stealing it from me.
Everything came into focus for me that day.
From that point on, I was only good for providing my sister with a fake scent, and nobody in the world knew I even existed outside of her.
We’d spend whole afternoons poring over scent binders, her drilling me on the nuances of the alphas’ scents so she could fake her way a little better.
Every one of their scent profiles I correctly matched for her felt like the deepest betrayal, but fighting her or lying about the scent notes never ended well.
If I was living anybody else’s life but mine, I’d have been dreaming about how their scents made me feel and how I responded to them, but all they wanted was my sister, so dreams were pointless.
My very soul seemed to crumple up the first time she let them knot her, even though her anatomy doesn’t really allow that. I had to hear in detail how torn up she was down there as I got my first sex ed lesson, sobbing silently while she made me care for her.
She didn’t love me, and the alphas would never be mine because they believed her lies so easily. I decided right then and there that they were bad men, and Winslow got very good at reinforcing these beliefs.
She began taking clothing from them, bringing their scents into the house to get me to perfume, because my body reacted to them whether I wanted it to or not.
Biology has got to be the worst thing the world has ever created.
So she’d make me scent them, by force, put me in her clothes, and then she’d leave me there on the edge of heat over and over again while she stole my scent and brought it back to them.
Even now I feel so hollow inside, like I’ll never really be happy or feel like anything is worth it, but it’s been fine-ish since I’ve been left alone.
Knowing that Winslow finally took too much of me and it killed her was the final fuck you I always wanted to send her off with, and the house has been quiet and peaceful ever since.
I figured at some point I’d somehow escape the wards she set when I became desperate enough for food, but I was okay with not having a strong plan as long as I had a meager supply of blood boxes and canned goods.
Those alphas ruined everything once again.
If they would have just minded their own damn business, I wouldn’t be dredging up the past I’ve been trying so damn hard to suffocate, and I’d be sleeping in Winslow’s room on her real bed with real blankets and pillows, instead of this shithole she made for me.
I can only pretend it’s nice for so long.
At least the mice that live in the walls are friendly.
My eyes start to get heavy, and this time I know I’ll wake up, but I just don’t know how I feel about that right now.
All I know with certainty, is I will not be going anywhere near the alphas that fucked me over for so long.
I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if they told me they knew the scent they craved was mine, but that they wanted my sister anyway.
They were hers, and I don’t want anything to do with them.