“Then get the fuck out!” I point toward the foyer and the elevator. My heart hammers in my chest as I try to keep a calm .“Or I’ll call the cops and report your falsifying your designation papers.” It’s an empty threat. I doubt they would do anything. If I were to fake my designation I would get jail. But for an Alpha to do it is unheard of. They would just be considered weird.
Our world is one messed up place.
They look at each other and then leave my nesting room to go to the living room and grab their clothes. Getting dressed, Theo glances my way and his glassy eyes tear at my heart, but I turn my gaze away.
As soon as the elevator goes down, I collapse in a him. I undo the band on my wrist taking off the health monitor and throw it across the room with a scream as I let out a sob and hold myself. Turning my mates away feels like it might kill me. I don’t know how I’m going to get through this.
Westandaroundthecamming unit. I lean my head against the dark wood of the tall bookshelf and let my eyes close. My skin's sensitive from the week of Heat and my honey-blonde hair's a tangled mess that sticks to the back of my neck. I pulled the hair tie out minutes ago, but I haven't had the energy to fix the bun. The room feels small and cluttered with the furniture we used for the RAA.
Reid sits in the high-backed leather chair where he used to pretend to be Sunday. He's leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. He looks at his hands. The silence in the room's a physical pressure that makes my ears ring. We were finally with her. We spent seven days in that nest, and for a moment I thought the lies didn't matter because the biology was so loud. But then the fire went out, and she looked at us like we're monsters.
Dameon stands by the black backdrop and kicks a loose cable out of his way. He looks at his half-brother with an intensity that makes the atmosphere thicken. "I told you she wouldn't handle the reveal this way if we waited too long. I told you the transitionplan was a load of shit."
Reid doesn't look up from his hands, but I see his jaw tighten. He looks exhausted, and the lines around his eyes are deep. "The plan's designed to prevent a total collapse. I didn't account for Roman Vane showing up and ruining it all."
Micah adjusts his silver wire-frame glasses and sighs as he looks at me. My twin looks as miserable as I feel. He leans against the desk with his arms crossed over his chest, and his glasses reflect the blue light from the monitors. "You accounted for everything except the fact that she's a person with her own mind. We all followed your lead on this, and look where it got us. I lied to her and I feel like a piece of trash."
I run my fingers through the knots in my hair and wince at the pull against my scalp. My twin's eyes are glassy, and I know he's replaying every second of the last two weeks. "We all went along with it. I watched her through the 4K feed while I was sitting right next to you. We exploited the one thing that makes her world a blur."
Dameon takes a step toward the center of the room and points a finger at his half-brother. He looks like he wants to tear the whole room apart. "You didn't just exploit it. You used it to build a cage that she can't even see the bars of. You signed her checks andmanaged her sponsors while you watched her on a screen. It's disgusting when you say it out loud."
Reid jumps to his feet. He looks at our cousin with a flare of anger in his eyes. "I did it to keep her close. Everything I've done for the last fifteen years has been for her!"
I look at the dark monitor and see my reflection in the glass. I look older than I feel. "She isn't that little girl from the home anymore, Reid. She's a woman who just looked at us like we're the dirt under her shoes. And she just told us to get the hell out of her life."
The reality of the rejection hits me in the gut, and I feel a hollow ache in my chest. I can still feel the way she looked at me when I told her I'm Friday. The joy in her eyes died so fast it felt like a heavy blow. We're all she's got left, andwe used our history to lie to her. I walk over to the window and look out at the city. The lights look like distant stars, and they remind me of how far away she's even though she's only floors above us.
The city outside's waking up, but the apartment feels like it's stuck in the middle of the night. I watch a taxi crawl down the street and I wonder if she's already looking for a new place. She's got enough money from the sponsorships to disappear if she wants to. We gave her the tools to leave us, and we didn't even realize we were doing it. I press my forehead against the glass and the cold feels good against my skin. We were supposed to be her pack, but we ended up being her keepers.
Dameon stops pacing and stares at the empty high-backed chair. He looks like he's fighting the urge to smash the expensive leather. "We're supposed to be her pack. We're supposed to be the ones she trusts with her life. Instead, we're the reason she's currently crying in a penthouse that we own."
Reid looks at him and his hands tremor where they're gripped on his knees. "We'll fix it. We just need to give her time to process the shock. She's reacting to the trauma of the week."
Micah shakes his head and leans his back against the door, crossing his arms over his chest. "Time doesn't fix a lie this big, Reid. You can't just wait out a betrayal of this magnitude. You took away her choice, and you think a few days of silence'll make her forget that?"
I move away from the bookshelf and look at the display monitors, and I see the encrypted channel is still open. We built a world where she could exist without fear, but we forgot that the biggest fear an Omega has is a lack of autonomy. We stole that from her every time we logged onto this portal.
I look at the dark screen and feel the weight of my own choices pressing down on me. I remember the weight of the silence after we finished masturbating together. It feels like I killed the only part of her that actually liked me. I stayed behind the glass because I was a coward. I let her feel safe with a voice filter while we watched those people on the screen and I watched her touch herself.
Reid leans against the desk and rubs his temples. He looks like he's trying to calculate a way out of a disaster that has no solution. "The sponsorship was the only way to get her into the building. The RAA was the only way to get her through her transitions without a panic attack. I followed the logic of keeping her safe."
I huff a breath and lean my shoulder against the wall. "Your logic was a prison sentence, Reid. You focused on the walls and forgot the person. You managed her career like it was a side project for the Nest. You controlled her sponsors and you controlled her rent. You made her entire existence dependent on us without her knowing."
Micah looks like he's seeing us clearly for the first time in years. "We're the villains in her story. We can tell ourselves it was for protection, but the truth's that we wanted her so badly we didn't care if we broke her to keep her. We're lucky she didn't call the police on us the second the Heat broke."
Dameon looks at the floor and tenses his jaw. "She might as well've. I'd rather be in a cell than have her look at me with that kind of hate again. I saw her look at the tattoo and I knew it's over."
A vibration thrums against my thigh and makes me pull my phone from my pocket before the screen even lights up. A wave of cold washes over me as I read the latest update on the Roman Vane case file from the tag I put on it so that I'd get any updates on him on the backend. I look up and see the others watching mewith an intensity that makes the room feel even smaller. I move toward the desk to pull the data onto the larger monitors so they can see what I'm seeing. The warmth of their bodies presses against my back as I pull up the legal portal.
I tap a few commands to mirror my phone screen to the center display. "The secure server just pushed an update from the jail on Roman."
Dameon growls as he stares at the name on the screen. "I still can't believe that bastard faked his death for fifteen years."
Micah leans over the back of my chair and points toward the medical section of the report. "Is that the psychiatric observation order?"
I scroll through the digital file and I can feel my heart thudding a rhythm against my ribs. "Roman's currently under a seventy-two-hour psychiatric observation at Orson Psychiatric Hospital. They want to see if he's fit to stand trial for the attempted murder. It's a standard hold for someone who's shown this kind of instability."
Dameon grips the top of my chair so hard I can hear the frame groan under the pressure. "He tried to kill her in her own home. He shouldn't be in a hospital wing with nurses and soft beds. He should be in a cage that never opens."
