“What?” she startles, a tremble going through her body. I want it to be because I’m so close and not because of what I just said, but I can’t be sure.
Mordecai stiffens. “What?”
“There’s an exit,” I repeat, looking at all three, one at a time. “My mother was helped by a woman in here. They both escaped together.”
“What are you saying?” Mordecai hisses, stepping up and fisting my shirt.
“She escaped and came to a village where she met my father, but she was in Foreen. She was an omega in this city for four weeks, and she got out. They moved to the tent city when I was two, hoping to hide me better.”
I grin at them.
“Are you sure?” she whispers, leaning towards me. She reaches out and grabs my wrist, and I look down at the point of contact, thinking I could die happy right now because my omega just touched me for the first time, and it’s everything I ever dreamed, no, so much more.
“Yes. My mother told me every day in secret how to get out of this city. Every day she whispered it to me and made sure I never forgot it.”
“Wow!” Mordecai says. “You need to come with me to the Resistance.”
I turn on the alpha with a glare. “No, I need to get our omega safe.”
“If we can save people—” Kaida says.
“I don’t care about people, I care about you!” I say to her. “Look, I know we’re strangers, but I’ve seen the kind of happiness we can have and the devastation when one of us dies. Now that I’ve found you, don’t ask me to give you up.”
She stares at me, pale and trembling, looking ethereal in the gathering darkness.
“We’re strangers.”
“We’re scent matches; we’ll never be strangers,” I correct with a growl. “You know it, I know it. These two would know it if they pulled their heads out of their asses.”
She shakes her head. “We have to help people if we can. How can we walk away and live if others die for us?”
I glare at the wall behind her, frustrated, but then I shrug it off, lightly bouncing towards the building and plucking a white flower that I then put behind her ear. She’s watching me like she’s not sure if I’m crazy.
“Fine. Let’s be heroes, and then we can get you out and be happy.”
“Sure,” she says, turning to keep me in sight.
Cadel turns, his head cocked to the side. “Someone’s coming.”
I whip around, watching for any sign. “We need to get off the street.”
“Why, aren’t they—”
“We don’t know who they are, Keres. There are a lot of desperate alphas who will do anything to live up the last few minutes of their lives or get something they can barter with. You would be an excellent bartering item, and you also are a beautiful, desirable omega.”
She whips her head towards me, her face full of fear. Those heavy and disgusting implications sit in the air between us. Her eyes shadow, and she tenses.
“So, let’s get out of here, shall we?”
Cadel grabs her wrist and drags her down the street and into an alley. I give Mordecai a smile that I hope he interprets as a truce and then follow.
We’re deep in Foreen, and the dangers are everywhere, but for the first time in my life…I have hope. Stupid, stupid hope.
Chapter 8
Have faith
Jarek leads us into a one-story building squeezed between dusty and shattered glass monoliths. I think it's strangely out of place until we get inside, and then I realise exactly what I’m standing in. Though I’ve never seen one before, it could have come straight from the whispered stories my mother told me from my childhood.
