“We’ve already established she’s not contagious, gentlemen,” he said to the men, though he was still facing me fully so I could understand him. “Hello, Ms. Amante, my name is Eli Stedmeyer and I work in…”
His lips moved to form a word I had never seen before and I frowned, looking over at Elio for help.
The alpha’s hand squeezed my shoulder comfortably. “He works with cancer patients, Cin.”
My hands, though they were stiff and swollen from whatever had been done to me back in my prison, lifted to form my question.‘Why is he here then? Do I have cancer now?’
All four of the alphas surrounding me began to shake their heads so hard that I was half-afraid they would pop right off of their necks if they weren’t careful.
Dr. Stedmeyer’s unfamiliar hand slipped into my gaze, waving up and down in order to get my attention.
“You don’t have cancer,” he told me firmly, his lips moving almost too fast for me to keep up like most normal hearing people did when they were speaking to me for the first time. “But whatever you were injected withisattacking you at a cellular level and causing changes.”
‘Changes?’I asked, hoping that Elio would translate for my signing.‘What kinds of changes?’
Dr. Stedmeyer’s gaze shifted from me to Elio and when I turned I found him shaking his head.
Irritation filled me, rising up in my throat until it almost vibrated with the feeling.‘This happened to me. So I deserve to know if something is wrong with me.’
Elio shifted from one foot to the other and I could almostfeelhow upset he was—the sensation tingling down what felt like an invisible thread.
Nico nudged his cousin with his shoulder.
‘Tell her. She’s an adult, Elio,’he said, his tattooed fingers flying.
When we were younger, Alesso used to call our ability to sign a secret language the six of us shared. As an adult I knew he was trying to protect my feelings as the rest of the adults in my life hadn’t bothered to learn even though I’d been deaf since birth.
I could count on one hand the number of staff members outside of Elio and his pack that knew any of my signs.
But as Alesso’s friends they had all learned—and Nico was almost better at it than me at this point. The rest could at least sign at the most basic level, though I knew Ranieri sometimes struggled with it. Not that he spoke to me much these days anyway.
I was pretty sure he felt guilty about things that were out of his control. But he would never admit to those things out loud.
Elio’s shoulders lifted in a heavy sigh before he finally gestured to Dr. Stedmeyer to go on.
The doctor had already whipped out a pad of paper from his jacket and was drawing something on it before he showed it to me.
“Let me know if I’m going too fast, Ms. Amante,” Dr. Stedmeyer told me before launching into his explanation. “This is a human body—it has different kinds of cells and when cancer affects the body it attacks healthy cells and reproduces ‘sick’ cells or it disrupts the typical healthy cell growth cycles completely.”
He drew what looked like angry blobs in the body before scribbling out the entire thing. “Sometimes it causes patient death if we can’t stop the growth of sick cells soon enough.”
My stomach dropped as I watched the man flip to a new page and draw another body. “While I can’t say for sure what was done to you, your body was introduced to a kind of ‘sick’ cell when the man who took you introduced you to all of that new genetic material from an omega and an alpha. Frankly, sucha thing should have killed you because your body should have rejected the new cells immediately. Instead, your body’s cells, somehow, seem to be accepting the new cells and even merging with them to create something we’ve never seen before. So, anything you can tell us about your time in captivity would be incredibly helpful.”
Truthfully, I didn’t remember much about the days I spent in that hellhole. They had been spent in fear and pain.
Icould, however, remember Peregrine and the last moments before the doctor put whatever he’d pulled from her into that machine—but all I could remember before that was pain and discomfort, like my body was burning from the inside out.
Pulling my knees up to my chest, I just shook my head.
Dr. Stedmeyer, who had been looking at me hopefully, frowned and his shoulders drooped as if he had been hoping I had the answers to all of his questions.
‘What does all of this mean?’I asked, looking from the doctor to the men who were still surrounding me protectively.
“It means,” Dr. Stedmeyer began slowly. “That you, my dear, are the first of your kind. A hybrid of alpha, omega, and beta.”
His words hit me like a brick and I shook my head again, more fiercely this time.
‘That’s not possible,’I insisted, my insides twisting with the sheer level of ridiculousness of it all.
