They being Elio, Ranieri, Dante, and Nicolo. My brother’s pack.
After his death six years ago, they had stepped in to protect me once their own prison sentences had ended, shielding me from the brunt of my father’s general distaste for me.
Because of that I thought, maybe, just maybe, that they could be my pack for real.
The fleeting memory of a soft kiss on my eighteenth birthday made me believe that such things could be true. That the princess in the tower could be saved by handsome princes who wanted to do nothing but love her.
That idyllic dream had been shattered the day I watched a different woman—an omega no less—walk down the aisle to them.
‘I’m doing this for you, Cini,’Elio had told me, his hands flying to form the words as his cufflinks glittered in the shining morning light. The same cufflinks my brother, Alesso, used to wear before he was gunned down on a job gone wrong.
I didn’t have the words at the time to truly tell him how I felt. After they were all released from prison, Elio never brought upthat day in my solarium where he’d kissed me and set my soul on fire, and neither had I.
‘You’re doing this so you can run the Amante family—not for me,’I had told him stubbornly, pushing against his jacket and crushing the baby’s breath lapel pin he was wearing in the process.
‘Cini,’he’d started to say but I turned away, not wanting to see his hands or read his lips.
I had hated the pretty omega that had walked up the aisle to them, to my protectors. I shouldn’t have felt as territorial over them as I did, seeing as I was just a beta. Omegas were the ones who were supposed to be possessive over what they viewed as theirs, not us.
My only consolation that day was seeing how miserable she’d looked walking toward them, as if she also wanted to be anywhere but at her own wedding.
At that moment I’d closed my eyes and sent a prayer up to whatever gods were listening that they wouldn’t get married.
Then, as if they had been listening to me, Edison Keane burst in through the doors and derailed the entire ceremony, absconding with the frothily dressed Peregrine Chandler like he was the romantic lead in a movie.
My father had been so angry that day, barking orders at the men still at the wedding and threatening to string Ethan Chandler, Peregrine’s father, up by his toes if he didn’t fix things.
After everything had died down, Elio tried to come up and talk to me, but I’d ignored him.
In fact, I had ignored all of them in the following months, my soul in tatters from the realization that there was no way they would, or could, ever be mine. Soon, there would be another blushing omega ready to take Peregrine’s place—a place I could never fill.
After Alesso’s death, my father began to treat his pack as if they were his heirs. Logically, it would have made the most sense for him to marry me off to their pack to keep the power of the Amante family in the family.
But I was just a beta, and a deaf one at that. The deafness he could handle, but it was my designation that truly bothered him.
I was forever his biggest disappointment and he couldn’t risk any potential grandchildren turning out not to be an alpha or an omega. Apparently, a beta hadn’t ever led the Amante family and he wasn’t going to allow it now.
When Alesso was still alive I was treated better, my brother’s love for me keeping me from the worst of our father’s punishments. But after he died and Elio, Dante, and Ranieri were sent to prison, the Amante mansion became a prison of its own for me.
Not that I wouldn’t have much rather been in that prison right now than the one I was currently in. At least the estate had snacks andNetflix.
Rolling over to get away from the dripping water, I groaned as my sore muscles tensed up.
It felt as if I had been running for days, my legs and arms screaming with the effort it took to move. The only problem with that was that I hadn’t run, much less walked, anywhere in two days.
The plastic cell around me vibrated, telling me that someone was coming in. Lifting my head with some difficulty, I found him standing there.
I didn’t know his name, but just the sight of his white lab coat sent shivers through my body. The man was thin and balding, the weathered skin on his face wrinkling as he offered me what I was sure he thought was a friendly smile.
Bright blue eyes met mine and I glanced around to find that, in the cells surrounding me, the people had pulled their blankets over their heads in order to escape his notice.
Lost in my own thoughts, I had forgotten to do so—not that it would have done me any good.
“Hello, Ms. Amante,” the man said slowly so I could read his lips. “Are you ready to go to work today?”
His words sent a shiver down my spine. He had said them the first day when I was brought in here and yesterday.
I could have resisted, just like I had the first time he’d ‘taken me to work,’ but I knew if I did so there were several armed men waiting in the wings to drag me to the wheelchair he had pushed into my cell.
