“Why allow me to continue attending Fairhaven?” I ask in a low voice. “I’m sure my father would have withdrawn my enrollment if you’d asked.”
A slow, sickening smile lights his face. “Because being there brings you joy. You thrive there, and you’ve found love—” he sneers at the word “—there.”
“I don’t understand,” I admit, waiting for the inevitable blow.
“The greater your joy, beloved, the lower I can bring you. The harder I can break you. Make no mistake, Iwillmate you, and once I have, I’ll take suchpleasurein destroying you. I’ll make you a shell of the omega you are now. A ghost. The ways I’ll hurt you…”
Something inside me snaps, something that has festered this whole wretched summer. Pure rage whips through my body, washing away my fear, blotting out the horrific images Rad tormented me with. I know I’ll regret it later, even as I feel my magic buzzing in my fingertips, but for one shining moment under the Connecticut summer sun, the smell of cut grass in the air, I feel powerful and I want to show this alpha, who is so certain he can break me, my thorns. “You said you could hurt me, but you forget I can do the same to you, all without ever leaving a mark. You think I’ll have no recourse, that no one will believe you’ve hurt me—or that no one will care, and maybe they won’t. But no one will believe you either. No one has so far. My illegal magic? You can’t prove it. You can’t prove you’re any more than a madman, a lunatic spouting children’s stories. You can hurt me, but I can hurt you, too. In ways you can’t even fathom.”
I feel my affinity blooming inside me, my magic singing in my veins. Its warmth fills me like liquid sunshine rushing through me. It makes me bold. “Tell me about Project Halcyon. What won’t I be spared from?”
He doesn’t scoff. He doesn’t turn away. Ensnared in my affinity, he speaks, his voice a low, dangerous growl. “You’ll be the architects of your own eradication. You and everywitchlike you. We’ll bend you to our will, and you’ll beg me for mercy while I make you kill your own kind. Vile devil-sent temptress.”
My mind races. Witches like me? Omegas with affinities?
Images of unrest flash through his thoughts. Riots in the streets, smoke in the air. Me, my scribe raised as young women flee from me, blank resolve on my face. And omegas, rounded up, bound and beaten, loaded into trucks so we can be taken to?—
Rad lets out a sharp hiss and shakes off my control. “Do that again, witch, and I’ll fucking kill you.” He yanks his arm from mine, but my relief is temporary. His hand goes to my throat, and he forces me to look up into his eyes as he squeezes. Rage snaps in the pale brown depths. “I’ve changed my mind. Halcyonwillspare your pitiful life.”
My honeyed-vanilla scent turns bitter, shot through with fear and adrenaline. My breath wheezes in my throat when I draw in a desperate breath, trying to scream. I wave my arms, but we’re on a secluded part of the path, hidden between two of the golf course’s rolling hills. There’s no one around to stop him. To save me.
He doesn’t want to kill me—not yet. But his emotions verge on frenzy, his scent so thick it chokes me of what little air I manage to suck into my lungs.
I thrash in his hold, but that only drives him closer to letting his instincts take over. Instincts that could kill me where I stand.
“I’ll make you be the one to kill them,” he snarls. “Thousands of omegas, and you’ll be the one that exterminates them. And only then will I?—”
My vision goes dark at the edges, and I claw at the hands around my throat, trying to free myself.
“STOP!” Willow shouts, alpha command laced through the single word, as she comes racing around the bend, heels snapping against the pavement.
Rad drops his hand, but stares me down, his teeth bared. “Only then will I snuff the life from your body. That’s a fuckingpromise, beloved.”
CHAPTER3
Rad faces no repercussions for choking me.
When Willow tells my father what he did, my father asks her what I did to deserve his ire.
I didn’t just deserve his ire. Iearnedit.
Still, every night I lie alone in my nest at Rose Manor, I wake from nightmares of his hand at my throat. The memory doesn’t fade, but the black blotches of the bruises do, until the only evidence left are five sickly purple-green splotches marring the pale column of my neck.
I barely sleep the night before Marcus arrives to take me to Fairhaven, my relief so potent, my freedom so close, it makes me shake and shiver in my blankets. I don’t know how long my reprieve from Rad will be. It could be weeks or months. If he doesn’t advance his part of Project Halcyon, it could be forever.
I can’t stop thinking about what he said about the project.
When he spoke of witches like me, he had to be speaking of omegas with affinities—and that’s enough to frighten me to my very core. Omegas with affinities were long thought a myth, a fairytale. Even the brightest minds at Fairhaven scarcely believed the stories. But the alpha architects of the mysterious Project Halcyon knew we existed, and they’ll turn us into a weapon they can wield against other omegas.
They truly do intend to wipe us out.
The fertility trials must be promising. They have to be part of all this. The pieces fit together too cleanly. While it’s incomprehensible, verging on impossible, it makes a sick sort of sense: make omegas biddable, relegate us to nothing more than breeders until alpha fertility has been achieved, then exterminate us en masse.
I just don’t understandhowHalcyon will accomplish all of this. If anyone started openly rounding up omegas to kill them, surely there would be an outcry. A backlash. The governing powers of mage society would strike back, would fight to preserve the sanctity of omega lives.
There’s no way something like this would be allowed to happen.
At least, that’s what I tell myself as dawn filters through the gauzy curtains of my bedroom, as I pack up the last few of my things and drag my suitcases into the foyer of Rose Manor.
