“Come on, baby,” Max murmurs, taking a step closer. “You can do this.”
My breathing comes a little faster as I watch her panic, her eyes darting from side to side.
Bastien takes a step forward before he hesitates. None of us wanted to diminish her story in the eyes of the public by standing next to her, and Ava explicitly told us that she wanted to film on her own. But I can see the panic in her posture, the fierce expression melting away. She looks petrified.
It’s Nikolai who makes the call for us, striding out into the light and taking Ava’s other hand in his.
“Together, little bird,” he reminds her, and she blinks up at him, gratitude in her face. Steeling her shoulders, she takes a deep breath.
And then she tells them everything.
ChapterSixty-Two
Ava
Itake a deep breath.
“My name is 864. I am an omega, and I have no rights.
“When I first awakened, I was sent to the Omega Compound. I stayed there for two years, and just like Harper, I experienced the degradation and humiliation that passes for omega training.
“Once, I tried to stand up but couldn’t, and I realized that I hadn’t stood on two feet for more than a week. I still experience pain in my legs to this day.
“The omega creed dictates every movement that an omega can make. We’re not allowed to look alphas in the eye, or to choose our own food. At the compound, food was used as a punishment by the guards. If you didn’t do as you were told, or if they didn’t like you, you didn’t eat. If you passed out, you received a whipping.
“Instead of a bed, I slept on a stone floor in a cell that wasn’t big enough for me to walk in. We were kept weak, malnourished, and tortured physically and mentally.
“I would often wonder why this was happening to me. What had I done? What had omegas done, to be judged so harshly? It must be something horrendous, right? Must be something awful. You wouldn’t treat a dog the way that we were treated.
“The night that I left the compound, a guard came to my cell. He pinned me down while others watched and raped me. He recorded himself doing it, and used the biology that we are born with to force my body to receive him. I did not consent. I did not want it, and he didn’t care. He took something from me that night. The last bit of innocence I had left.
“After my rape, I was immediately taken to the heat nests, and kept there for more than six months.
“During that six-month period, I was kept sedated and injected more than twenty times with a heat serum. Over and over again, sometimes twice within the same week. Every time, I was given to alphas to rut on.
“Heat serum is unbearable, for omegas. It is an artificial stimulant that pushes our bodies into readying for pregnancy, stimulating a natural heat. Omegas only have a natural heat every year or so, because of the toll it takes on us. To go through so many… I nearly died.
“Heat nests are breeding factories. Those of you who have adopted a child… this is how their life began. With a woman tied to a bench, forcibly injected and raped over and over again. When we give birth, we’re put back in within weeks or even days. There is no sense of time, no care, no privacy. You lose track of everything. I’d wake up knowing that my body had been used, covered in scents and fluids that weren’t mine. I don’t know how many times that happened to me.
“You have seen my face on the news over the past few weeks. It’s been reported that I escaped from a hospital with the help of an alpha, Max Grey.
“Max saved my life. He found me in a coma, five months pregnant and on the edge of death because of the treatment I received in the heat nests. At this very moment, dozens of omegas are being forcibly impregnated and their children taken from them. Whilst I was in hospital, I was restrained with a metal collar around my neck and leather restraints on my wrists and ankles. Because I was apparently such athreatto society.
“Is this the kind of world we want to live in? Is this the kind of world you want your children to live in? Those of you who have adopted children, are you comfortable looking into their faces and knowing what their biological mother went through, and what she may still be going through?”
I drop a hand to my stomach.
“I didn’t choose to become pregnant. But now that I am, I don’t want my children to be ripped away from me,” I say, my voice breaking. “I don’t want my daughter to wake up one day and be dragged to the compound, locked away and forced to breed in another hopeless cycle. But that’s what’s going to happen if nothing changes.”
“The omega creed is wrong, and it needs to end. I am sorry – I am so sorry that betas aren’t able to have children. But to persecute another race the way that omegas have been iswrong.”
“I am not saying this to incite hysteria, or to drag people into another Omega War. We are trying to save the ones we love from going through what we have gone through for the last two decades. What I have gone through. What Harper has gone through.”
“We have been locked away with no voice for too long.” My throat closes.
“I have found my voice, and I am speaking out.”
“I am asking you to look around. Look in the mirror. Look at your wives, your daughters, your sisters, your mothers. Ask yourself what you would do if someone took them away and forced them to give up their bodies, their lives for something that wasn’t their fault.”
