CHAPTER ONE
Lobby, Omega Hotel
Grace
“I betthat we’ll each match with a guest Alpha and their elite pack at the Christmas Ball, sis.” My brother’s playful voice vibrates with a hopeful purr. “I know that staff are forbidden to take part, but we’ll find a way. Mom may have branded us as Reject Omegas but she can’t deny that we’re part of the Frost pack forever.”
I tighten my hand around his. My heart aches.
I’m optimistic. But my college aged brother, Bird, is delusional if he thinks that my stepmom will treat either of us as anything but two Omega workers again.
We were raised together in our pack but we have different parents.
In this vast, luxury 1920s hotel, staff don’t mix with guests or the billionaire owners, the Frosts.
Bird knows what it is like to be rejected from one pack. But I have been rejected fromtwo. I can’t risk believing in pack bonds anymore.
They won’t save either of us.
I may as well believe in a Christmas miracle.
Or Santa.
And I stopped believing in that knotless Alpha fraud when Maya, my stepmom, sat me down aged five and explained that magic, fairies, and Alphas with Omega naughty lists didn’t exist but something better did —money.
Of course, she married my widowed Omega dad, Cooper, for his money, as well as control over his franchise of Omega Hotels.
This Omega Hotel is the original, flagship branch in Haven, a small town in Virginia.
I didn’t understand it then. But I did as I grew older and witnessed the luxury that half the people in the hotel wallowed in, while the Beta staff toiled in poverty, and the Hotel Omegas were owned like property.
Fucking greed.
I don’t wish to Santa or on a shooting star to change our fortunes.
I’m going to battle to change this system myself.
Can I tell Bird that stark truth?
Bird stands in the shadows of the narrow staff corridor with its peeling beige wallpaper and concrete floor, as well as fusty smell that makes my nose wrinkle, with wide, excited gray eyes.
Lively 1920s jazz music with trumpets, trombone, double bass, and banjo playing “White Christmas” bleeds through the archway behind me.
The archway leads into the back of the grand hotel lobby like the wardrobe into Narnia.
Bird and I are not meant to be here.
Yet we’re both drawn to this secret passageway as often as we can to catch a glimpse of the bustling outside world.
Staff are wards of the hotels. It’s part of the strictdiscretion,which the hotel offers the celebrities and billionaires who stay here as guests, that the staff don’t have access to phones or electronics.And that none of us can leave the hotel.
Perhaps, “Hotel California” was written about us?
Bird is handsome with warm brown skin and sharp cheekbones. Black curls fall to his waist. He is willowy but about a head taller than I am.
But then, everybody is.
I smooth my hand down the front of my housekeeper uniform, which is an elegant violet dress with a white apron wrapped around the middle.
