I'd argued. Protested. Refused.
Mason had simply said, "It's on the schedule," and that had been the end of it.
My hour with Mason was always in the living room. He talked—about books, about music, about his work with the family business. I listened, or pretended not to listen, my arms crossed, my gaze fixed on the window. Sometimes he asked me questions. About my job before they took me. About my apartment. About the life I'd built without them.
I never answered. Not at first.
Then, one afternoon, three weeks in, he asked about my mother.
"Do you ever regret it?" Mason asked, his honey-brown eyes soft with genuine curiosity, his voice gentle. "Not going to her funeral?"
My chest tightened. I hadn't talked about my mother since that phone call from David—the one that had shattered my world and sent me spiraling into paranoid isolation for months afterward.
"How do you know about that?" I asked, my voice harsh, defensive.
"David told us," Mason replied simply, his honey-brown eyes holding mine. "He said you hung up on him. Changed your number the next day."
I laughed bitterly, the sound scraping my throat. "I thought that would keep me safe, that if I just cut all ties, disappeared completely, you wouldn't be able to find me." I shook my head. "Stupid. You were watching me the whole time, weren't you?"
"Yes," Mason admitted, no apology in his tone. "We never lost track of you. Not for a single day." The confirmation should have horrified me. Instead, it just felt like another weight added to the pile.
"She stayed behind so I could escape," I heard myself say, the words escaping before I could stop them. My voice came out rough, hollow. "That was the deal. She helped me run, gave memoney, fake documents, a head start. But she had to stay. If she disappeared too, you would have known something was wrong."
Mason was quiet for a moment, processing. Through the bond, I felt his complex tangle of emotions, understanding, something that might have been respect.
"She sacrificed herself for you," Mason said softly. "That's real love."
"She died thinking it worked," I continued, my throat tight, tears burning at the corners of my eyes. "She died believing I was free. That all her sacrifice meant something." I looked up at him, letting him see the fury and grief burning in my gaze. "And I didn't even go to her funeral. I was too scared. Too paranoid that it was a trap, that David was trying to lure me back."
"It wasn't a trap," Mason said quietly.
"I know that now," I replied bitterly. "But I didn't know it then. My mother died alone, was buried alone, and I wasn't there. Because of you. Because of what you made me."
"You made a choice," Mason said, his voice gentle but not letting me off the hook. "To stay away. To protect yourself."
"A choice you forced me into," I shot back, anger flaring hot and familiar. "If you hadn't been hunting me, I could have gone to her when she got sick. Could have held her hand at the end. Could have said goodbye."
"Yes," Mason agreed, no defensiveness in his tone. "That's true. We took that from you." I stared at him, thrown by the admission. I'd expected excuses, justifications, the usual twisted logic they used to explain away their cruelty. Not this. Not simple acknowledgment.
"She died thinking she saved me," I whispered, staring at my hands in my lap. "Three years. She bought me three years of freedom, and then she died believing it was worth it."
"It was worth it," Mason replied softly, something almost like sorrow in his honey-brown eyes. "Those years mattered. You'renot the same person you would have been if we'd taken you at eighteen. She gave you that."
"And then you took it away," I said flatly.
"Yes," Mason said. "We did." I didn't have an answer for that. So I just sat there, crying silently, hating him for being honest when I needed him to lie.
My hour with Ethan was different. Clinical. Educational.
We met in his study, surrounded by books and screens. He used the time to explain things—the bond, the biology, the history of Omega rights and the legal protections that existed on paper but rarely in practice. He answered my questions honestly, treating me like an intelligent adult rather than a pet to be managed. I hated how much I appreciated it.
"Why are there so few Omegas?" I asked one afternoon, curled in the leather chair, a cup of tea warming my hands.
"Several theories," Ethan replied, his green eyes sharp with interest behind his glasses. "The most accepted one involves environmental factors—pollutants, endocrine disruptors. Omega births have dropped sixty percent in the last fifty years."
"So we're dying out," I said flatly, something cold settling in my stomach.
"Possibly," Ethan acknowledged, his voice neutral. "Or adapting. Evolution doesn't move in straight lines."
