My father’s mustache twitched as he frowned at me.“I did not pay thousands of dollars to that damned speech therapist for you to be mute. Speak. Out loud.”
A sick feeling slithered through my stomach at his words.
Flashes of the uncountable afternoons spent with a grim-looking man with an old-school penchant for rapping me across the knuckles with a ruler whenever I failed to make my mouth shape the words correctly filled my mind.
Apparently, when the cochlear implants did little to give me my hearing, the doctor had suggested a speech therapist and told him that many deaf people could still speak with relative normalcy with enough practice.
I knew I could do it somewhat, but it never felt right and I was always much more comfortable signing.
But Alessandro Amante didn’t give a shit about what made me comfortable. He never had.
“No,” I repeated out loud, my throat feeling scratchy as it did something it wasn’t accustomed to. It had been a long time since I’d been forced to speak to anyone like this and I could tell by the displeasure on my father’s face that it hadn’t sounded right because I was so out of practice.
My face flushed with embarrassment as I tried to look anywhere but at the man who only looked at me as an object—and a broken one at that.
His shoulders lifted in a sigh as he shook his head once before continuing. “You will be getting married.”
I blinked. That was news to me. Me and the word marriage had never come out of his mouth before today.
I had always been too disabled to get married, but more than that I had been a beta. He could have overlooked my deafness and still sold me off for a high price had I been an omega. After all, I didn’t need to be able to hear in order to have babies which was all I was good for as a girl—at least in his eyes anyway.
Even now, I figured it would be the same seeing as the little science experiment that he’d consented to put me through hadn’t even been all that successful.
My instincts weren’t that of an omega… at least not completely.
Besides, there was no guarantee that I could produce at all let alone produce future alphas and omegas.
I cleared my throat. “Why?”
He didn’t answer me. Instead he just lifted a hand and I felt a rush of air as the big double-doors behind me opened. With it, I could smell the mixture of their sweet scents as they came to stand in a line with me.
Any and all emotion that I could see on their faces earlier was gone and now they stood with impassive, neutral expressions. They also didn’t even spare me a glance.
On the surface they looked like the perfect little foot soldiers my father had always wanted them to be when he hand-picked them to be Alesso’s pack.
But despite all of that I could feel Elio’s anxiety and anger through our shared thread and that soothed me a bit.
Before I had been changed, I could never really tell exactly how the man felt about me and it had filled me with so much confusion. Now all I needed to do was give the shaky connection a little tug and it was like peeling away layers into his inner thoughts and feelings.
Then someone nudged me and I realized I had been staring at Elio for too long, completely forgetting where we were and who we were in front of.
My father was staring at me with narrowed eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled, the words feeling garbled and wrong as I spoke them out loud. “Can you please repeat yourself?”
“I said: these men are who you will be marrying.” My father gestured to Elio and his pack.
A sharp sense of elation filled me so quickly that I was sure I was going to burst with it as I smiled and glanced over at them only to find their expressions filled with horror.
Nine
“These are the men you will be marrying,” Amante said as he gestured to us.
Cini swung around to look at us, her eyes wide, and she must not have seen the words her father finished with because there was an excitement that I would surely have been feeling too had the man not continued.
“And you will give birth to my heir within the year.”
Horror filled me and I knew that the rest of the guys must have been feeling the same way because I could almost feel Elio’s palpable rage as he took a step forward.
