CHAPTER1
“Ishould have been present during Miss Rose’s summer heat,” Andrew Radcliffe tells my older sister in a tight voice, alpha fury just barely restrained by the facade of his privileged upbringing. I know how much it stings him to be denied; his rage steals all the oxygen in the expansive dining room of his father’s Connecticut country club, leaving only his anise-and-orange scent behind, soured and sharpened by his rage. His thoughts bombard me, dark, devious. Insidious. They’re particularly poisonous today, a refrain I’m all too familiar with.
Dominate, degrade, defile.
All the evil things he wants to do to me. All the evil things hewilldo to me when his bite is on my neck, and I’m his mate.
The ink is dry on my mating contract, a sinister accord forged between my father and Pack Radcliffe. I don’t know how much money changed hands, how much richer my father has made himself by signing my life away. I only know what is required of me.
For this lonesome, loathsome summer, I’m required to let Rad court me.
Our courtship is a sham, an act.
It’s a chance for me to be seen on his arm, photographed at his side, his demure mate-to-be, at the prestigious country club frequented by our fathers. But it’s more than that: it’s a chance for me to come to heel, to behave as I was always meant to. It’s my chance to redeem myself in my father’s eyes, to wipe the ledger clean of all those times I was less than a perfect daughter. To be the proper, chaste Rose omega my father molded me to be. The omega who smiles as she’s trodden upon, who simpers and bares her neck to her betters. Not an omega who associates with the wrong kind of alphas. Not an omega who speaks up when she is wronged. Not a troublemaker. Not a person.
I have no desire to redeem myself or make my father proud of me.
Not anymore.
I want to destroy him—him and Rad both—just like he destroyed me. I know too much now to want anything else.
I played the perfect omega daughter for years, fighting myself and making myself small. I made myself brittle, fragile. Biddable. And then I found out about my father’s crimes. How he tortured me, how he strapped me down in a clandestine medical facility to pump poison into my veins and lock away my magic.
It’s a punishment reserved for the “worst, most dangerous criminals in the world,” Luca told me, looking into my eyes, my grief mirrored in his own pale gaze.
My father did it because I knew too much, because, even then, my affinity was whispering to me, telling me my family’s most damning secrets. He stole my memories along with my magic, tortured me into meek, magicless submission. Because I was too powerful.
I know that if he was willing to torture me, his youngest daughter, his own flesh and blood, and lock my magic away, that he’s willing to do much worse to other omegas.
That he already has.
I was but the first of Rose Pharmaceuticals’ human trials.
Dozens of omega test subjects were shipped from China to the Rose Pharmaceuticals research and development facility in San Francisco… only for none of them to make it there alive when the cargo container was lost at sea for weeks.
It was a secret known by few outside my father, my eldest brother Aspen and my sister Willow. A secret that could have destroyed the family business, reducing Rose Pharmaceuticals to little more than a footnote in history books, a sensation in the news for a few weeks. A secret I uncovered using the affinity he suspects I have.
My affinity, the very magic that makes me unique, makes me dangerous. A target. The head healer at Fairhaven Academy calls it extra cognition. It’s more than just simple precognition, though I’ve caught glimpses of the future. More than just empathetic magic and mind reading. A magic that should have been nothing more than a fairy story, a myth.
A power so great I’ve sent alphas to their knees with it.
Including the alpha sitting across from me, spreading a linen napkin across his lap.
Rad cuts a sneering look at my older sister, Willow, who sits beside me, working away on her laptop as I pick at the salmon and spinach salad he ordered for me. My sister is here for the sake of propriety, because pretenses must always be maintained. I have to appear pure. Never mind that Rad has already tried to defile me, that I’ve worn his fingerprints as bruises on my pale skin. I must be chaperoned around alphas, mated or otherwise.
I should chafe under her watchful eye, but my sister’s presence is all that protects me from Rad’s brutality. She’s my only shield against an alpha who would do—and has done—heinous things to possess me.
My alpha sister will never know the depths of his rage—or his depravity. He hides it behind the polished mask that made him Fairhaven Academy’s golden alpha prior to his graduation at the end of spring: the handsome captain of our championship-winning lacrosse team, beloved by all the professors and classmates he fooled. How he smiled when he shook the headmaster’s hand as he walked across the stage to accept his diploma during graduation. How, finally, in that moment, I let my pinched shoulders relax and allowed myself to breathe, thinking I’d finally be safe from the alpha who terrorized me my entire freshman year.
The alpha who tried to rape me under the autumn-golden canopy of the little copse of trees beside the academy’s ancient library. Who stalked me and destroyed my most sacred, safe space: my nest. The alpha who hexed my honor guard twice to get to me. The alpha who tortured the beta I love, nearly to death, with dark magic. The alpha who held a silver scribe to my pulse point and told me he’d destroy me and all of my kind.
The alpha who likes his omegas spirited so he can break them. The alpha who swore to me that he always gets what he wants.
The very alpha my father has betrothed me to. The alpha who will be my mate.
Andrew “Rad” Radcliffe wanted me, and he got me.
“There’s no reason we have to wait until she graduates to mate.”
