57. Chapter Fifty-Seven #2
Alphas of this fortress are lifelong soldiers who never thought they would ever see an Omega, let alone live next to one.
At times, it can still be intimidating and unnerving the way they stare at me with longing, but I understand that it's not personal.
Alphas are drawn to Omegas. It's purely biological.
Zero has never shown any such compulsion, and from the very beginning, he treated me as a person before an Omega.
The Prime Alpha clears his throat and taps the manifest. "Final group is checked and ready. Everlyn cleared all ten to travel, though she wants the older Beta in my group monitored at each stop. Weak lungs, poor circulation, and a stubborn refusal to admit either."
"Sounds like he’ll fit right in," Viper says.
Then Zero looks toward the line. "We move in five minutes."
Viper’s fingers press once against my neck before slipping away.
I turn toward the survivors, wanting to see the faces of the people about to embark on a life-changing journey.
And that is when my gaze catches on something familiar.
It's a battered canvas bag that sits at the feet of a man in Zero’s line.
Faded brown fabric, frayed leather straps, and a rope tied around the middle because the clasp gave out years ago. There’s a dark stain near the handle from the summer one of my cousins dropped it in the mud behind the pigpen, and no amount of scrubbing ever got the mark out.
I know that bag.
My family used it for trips into town, harvest days, and rare visits to neighboring compounds.
I used to pack apples in it, carefully wrapped in old cloth so they wouldn’t bruise before market.
I carried it to the river when my aunts sent me to wash clothes.
I dragged it down the hallway with shaking hands on the day I thought I was leaving to meet my Alpha.
The same day I learned I had been sold into the "Companionship Program" instead.
For a breath, the courtyard disappears beneath the memory of lemon fizz sweating in a pitcher, polished heels on our porch, and my father’s voice ordering me to collect my things.
The bag shifts.
A weathered hand tightens around the strap, knuckles pale with age and the cold. The thumbnail is split. There’s a scar across the thumb, an old white line from a logging accident I used to hear about whenever he wanted sympathy at dinner and to avoid washing dishes.
The world narrows to that hand, and then the man holding the bag turns his head.
There stands my father.
Wind gusts through the courtyard, and now that I'm focusing, I can smell a familiar scent that haunted my childhood and adolescence. Tree sap and misery.
For years, his control over me made him larger than everyone around him. A booming laugh on the porch for everyone but me, a cruel sneer on his face as he denied me education and basic rights, his disdain for my very existence other than fetching him a fat payday.
The man in front of me is smaller than that. Maybe I made him larger in my memory.
His shoulders have narrowed beneath a threadbare coat. Gray is streaked through his beard. The old charm is still there, tucked into the slant of his mouth and the careful lift of his brows, but it looks worn thin now. Like a tool he has used too many times, and now it's failing.
The moment his eyes lock onto mine, the color drains from his face.
The hand around that old bag tightens until the rope creaks. His gaze flicks over me, taking in my coat, my boots, and the soldiers who respectfully dip their heads when they pass.
There is no surprise in his plain brown Beta eyes. He has been living in Blackgate for weeks, which means he knew I was here and chose not to approach me because he remembers exactly what he did.
The courtyard noise thins around me until all I hear is the scrape of a pen across a contract.
The dry whisper of pages turning beneath Official Gould’s manicured nails while my father stood beside her, smiling like the world had finally given him what he was owed.
I smell lemon fizz, left sitting in the sun to go sour in the hot weather.
I feel porch boards beneath my feet, rough through the thin soles of my second-hand sneakers. My skin is still raw from my first heat spent locked in a shed without anything but a bare mattress and a ratty old blanket.
Defective.
The word comes back with teeth.
I remember the way my father’s face changed when he saw the compensation figure. First shock, then hunger, then delight he didn’t bother to hide from me.
Twenty-one years of obedience bought and sold in less time than it took me to pack a bag.
Go collect your things.
Then the Beta assistant had pressed a phone into my hand and whispered directions to sanctuary.
I remember the truck door screaming open.
My hands shaking around the key.
My father’s voice tearing after me as I drove away.
Halley! Halley! Halley!
I blink, and Blackgate comes back.
Cold stone instead of porch boards. Mountain air instead of summer dust. Soldiers instead of officials. Viper’s scent in the courtyard, woven through leather and snow.
My father is still staring at me from the survivor line.
This time, I don’t run.
Viper reaches me before I take my next breath.
He doesn’t touch me at first. He stops close so that his heat settles against my back, and his scent wraps around mine, dragging me the rest of the way into the present.
His gaze follows mine across the courtyard.
I feel the exact second he understands. He must see the similarity in our features and feel the pain radiating down the bond, and just know that this is the man who sold me.
His end of the bond goes cold with fury.
"That’s him?" he asks.
My mouth is dry. "That’s my father."
Viper crosses his arms, his broad body planted at my back.
A second later, the bond flares.
Knox reaches the courtyard first, coat half-fastened and murder written across every line of his face. Blaze is right behind him, wild-eyed and breathing as if he sprinted from the far side of the fortress. Shade arrives with quieter steps, but his focus finds me with the same terrifying precision.
They all stop when they see where I’m looking.
The realization cuts through the bond, and I know Viper is filling in the pieces I can’t force out through my own mouth.
This is him.
He's the one who inflicted a wound so deep that I know I'll carry the scar for the rest of my life.
My Pack closes ranks behind me, and lets their scents loose, turning the cold courtyard air into Pack territory.
My Alphas want blood.
I feel it in Viper’s silence, in the hard line of Knox’s posture, in Blaze’s barely leashed rage as he stares at my father like he is already imagining every way to cut him to make him scream.
Shade’s anger is quieter.
Colder.
He isn’t ruled by Alpha instinct, and somehow that makes him scarier. The damage he would do would be calculated.
But none of them move.
They stay behind me, letting their presence speak without stealing my right to confront him as I need to, and I love them for that restraint.
My father watches them gather behind me before his attention drops to my neck.
My shirt's collar has shifted beneath my winter jacket, and the raised edges of my mating bites peek above the fabric. He stares at them, and any fool in the courtyard with a basic understanding of Omegas can understand what those marks say.
I am claimed, loved, and protected by a Pack of soldiers notorious for their viciousness.
He spent my whole life looking at me and seeing me as a valuable burden and a sale price. Now he looks at me and finally sees his consequences.