23. Chloe
CHAPTER 23
CHLOE
“Crap.” Sabien sat upright from where he had been sprawled comfortably, leaning on the picnic table, and lazily stealing fries from my lunch tray.
“What?” I eyed my tray to see if he had polished off all my fries. But there were still some there. That wasn’t the problem.
“Birth control. We never talked about it.” He stared at me seriously, like he had literally just thought about it. As if I hadn’t had an entire series of lectures dedicated to the subject and was only now considering my reproductive health.
“Oh. That. Yeah, I got an implant.”
Sabien must have noticed something about the way I said it. He heard the undertone of scorn, that I hadn’t voiced out loud. Like obviously I was on birth control. Did he think I was going to put my secretarial dreams at risk?
“You don’t want kids?”
Kids? I might want them. In seven years. Which was a nice number that was more than five (which was too close) and not as far off into the future as ten. Ten years was just too weird to think about.
“It’s not that,” I sighed. “No, I have like fifteen siblings. And both my moms are pregnant again. The two of them are on a mission to repopulate the next generation of alphas like all on their own.”
“Why?” Sabien asked, popping another fry into his mouth.
Here we go. We had barely had a couple of dates and already I was dragging Sabien into my families’ weirdness.
“Well, they have this theory.” I didn’t know if this theory was the real reason why they kept having kids.
Unbidden, my conversation with Zane popped back into my head. How my moms just had a breeding kink. I did not want to think about that.
Wait…
Were kinks genetic? Did that mean that at some point… I might…
Nope. Nope, nope, nope.
I was not going to have my thoughts go there. I’d just tell the polished and sanitized story that my moms told me. “Like all the high-profile packs out there, they have the same combination. There’s always one alpha who is a multi-millionaire. One of them is a psycho. Throw in a couple of pretty boys. Mix them all together and they will inevitably end up with a gold-pack omega and swear off children.”
“That can’t be true. People would start to notice if that was happening.” Sabien shook his head.
“No, it is totally true. Take the Kingsmen pack. Three alphas: a pretty boy, an alpha a few sandwiches short of a picnic, and a millionaire.” They ended up with Shatter—who was undoubtedly gorgeous and undoubtedly a gold-pack omega. I’d read it all in ‘Spill the Tea,’ a New Oxford gossip magazine that tracked rich alphas.
“That’s just one pack. That doesn’t prove anything.” Sabien grabbed another fry. I was getting into the conversation now and stopped keeping track of how many he’d stolen from me. Whatever. Some things were more important than French fries.
“There’s the Crimson Fury pack.” They were super high-profile and had shocked all the tabloids when their sweetheart beta, Vex, ended up being another gold-pack omega.
“Aren’t they actors? So they’re all rich. Doesn’t feel like it should count.”
“Yeah, but you got that same formula. Millionaires with a gold-pack.”
“But it’s not like one of them is a psychopath or something. They are all in the public eye. Someone would have noticed that.” Sabien said, waving a French fry emphatically to help prove his point.
“Okay, so maybe that one doesn’t count. But then there’s the Saint pack. They are a bunch of rich pretty-boys who got with a gold-pack.” I reached into my tray for a fry. After making that excellent point, I felt like I deserved a salty little reward. My hand came up empty.
Damn.
“Nope. Not the Saint pack. There is definitely no psycho there.”
“Not true.” I lowered my voice, really getting into the conspiracies now. “I heard that the original lead in that pack was a psycho.”
“Oh, that’s why Havoc killed her alpha?”
“Exactly.”