“You do?” He asks, letting out a sharp exhale.
“Yeah! Do you—do you like me?”
“Of fucking course I do,” he growls, propping himself up on an elbow. “But I’m a beta. A pathetic one at that?—“
“Don’t talk about yourself like that,” I snap.
“I am pathetic,” he bites back. There’s a tightness around his eyes that serves as the physical manifestation of the deep shame that’s coming to the surface for him. His hazel eyes are dark.
“What’s wrong?” I guess it’s my turn to ask him now.
He just shakes his head before he reaches up and grips the long, curly strands of his hair so hard I worry he’s going to tear some of it out.
“Stop that!” I reach for his wrist and try to tug it away, but he just shakes me off. “Rowan, you’re scaring me. What’s wrong?”
“I thought I’d be able to ignore it, to keep you in the dark and not tell you. To just buy you presents, now that I finally have access to some money, and pretend to live as normal of a life as we can here,” he says, his voice a strained whisper.
I have to lean in to hear him properly.
“But I have to tell you,” he continues.
“Tell me what?”
“How much do you remember about what happened to you at the facility?”
“What—what do you mean?” I ask, my brows drawing down in confusion. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“It haseverythingto do with this. With you. With us,” he says, waving a frantic hand between us. “Did they ever take your blood?”
My throat closes and my heart pounds, right along with my head. I cradle my temples between my palms as I curl forward, a sharp pain shooting through my head.
Heat. Restraints. Needles.
Flashes and images of bright lights, restraints, and an unending, all-consuming pain hammer away at the walls of my skull.
“O—oh,” I gasp.
“Fuck, Sugar,” Rowan says, reaching out and brushing a thumb against my cheeks. His fingers come away wet.
Oh. I’m crying.
“We’re not allowed to talk about it,” I whisper. “I—I guess I kind of forgot about it.”
“You forgot about them torturing you during your heats?” He growls.
I flinch backwards at his words, the headache only growing worse.
“I didn’t—I didn’t remember until you said anything.”
He takes a slow and steadying breath. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be snapping at you. You’re the last person I should take my anger out on.”
“It’s—it’s fine,” I say, shaking my head, trying to clear the fog that’s settling in my brain.
“Maybe the memory thing is a side-effect of whatever they do to you. I don’t know a lot about omega biology, but I think everyone knows an omega getting denied during her heat is one of the worst things you can do to her.”
“Oh,” is all I manage to say as I press my head between my knees, struggling to breathe. “They—they called it the procedure. All the girls had to do it. But they—they said it was for a good cause.”
He stiffens beside me, and that’s when Iknow. I was lied to.
