She tried to take them from me, but I moved quickly. “Please. Those are mine.”
“I’ll give them to you. But you know how dangerous black-market suppressants are for you, right? My name is Rowan. I’m a nurse practitioner at an omega clinic. These pills are bad news.”
She sneered, trying to look mean, but it didn’t work. “It’s none of your damned business. Alphas, I swear.”
That told me a lot.
“Here.” I took out one of my business cards and slid it into her hand along with her poisonous pills. “This is the number for my clinic. We can get you the medicine you need for free, and not black-market garbage that might hurt you.”
Her face paled. Damn, it was a beautiful face too. Her pink hair was piled up on top of her head in a bun. She wore a bit of lip gloss, and that was it for makeup. She didn’t need any. “I can’t,” she whispered. “This is my only choice.”
“There is another way. We don’t register any of our patients into the Omega Registry. Everything is kept confidential. You can even use a pseudonym if you want to. But this crap is going to hurt you.”
“Look, I can take care of myself but thanks.”
She didn’t give my card back. Instead, she slipped it into her pocket along with the medicine, if you could call that stuff medicine at all. She left me there with a nod.
Acknowledgement? Maybe.
One thing was clear; she didn’t trust alphas. Most omegas who came into my clinic didn’t. It was the reason I didn’t do so well with it at first. But one by one, the omegas started to come in from all walks of life, needing care for one reason or another and not wanting anyone to know.
We worked off donations from those who had more and who cared about omegas. Sometimes, omegas would offer to pay, but we received so much support that we denied them every time. It was a good feeling to help others.
I wrapped up my breakfast and brought the other two pastries with me. I was almost late for work. The entire day, I worried about the gorgeous pink-haired omega, hoping she wouldn’t pop another one of those pills.
My wolf howled for her. He hadn’t howled for anyone in ages.
Chapter Seven
Harper
School and work could be overwhelming. I had to work full-time to survive, but I had chosen to take a full course load as well so that it didn’t take me an eternity to finish my degree. With the not-great education I’d had up until this time, I already started out way behind my classmates, but I made up for it with determination.
The bakery was going better with Amanda giving me more responsibilities in the back where I felt much more comfortable, and I did my best to make her feel her confidence was well placed. Not that I didn’t make mistakes… I burned a full sheet pan of cookies, added too much yeast and created balloon bread, but I was learning. Amanda pointed that out. Frequently. If I ever got really wealthy, I was going to buy her a castle or whatever she wanted most because she deserved it.
It was still a lot, doing full-time for both, and college classes took some getting used to as well. But I thought I had it under control on the morning that everything started to spin. Darkness edged my vision, and I dropped the tray of pastry I was carrying out to one of the cases. Conscious enough to curse the loss before my knees buckled, the blackness closed in the rest of the way, and I landed on the floor on top of the gooey treats.
Then nothing.
Voices leaked into my mind, and I pulled my pillow over my face to shut them out. I was so relaxed and my bed more comfortable than I remembered. Sheets smelled like soap and lavender, urging me to fall back asleep and rest until I was no longer tired. But as I hovered there between waking and sleeping, some part of me recognized the incongruence with mylife. My regular lumpy bed, thin sheets, and the cheapest pillow I could find. This was not that.
And alarms went off in my head. My eyes snapped open, feet feeling for the edge of the bed. Wherever I was, I had to get out of there. An omega could never be safe enough, and especially one on the run like me.
“Whoa.” A big hand closed on my shoulder from behind. “Settle down and lie back or you’ll end up on the floor again, like back at the bakery.”
“On the floor? I didn’t—” I did. The memory trickled back in. “Did I pass out? Oh, how embarrassing. I didn’t eat breakfast, but I’d better be on my way now. I need to get back to work.”
Pressure increased, and a second hand joined the first, easing me to lie back again. “You should always eat breakfast, but I don’t think that’s what happened.” The man came around in front of me and studied me.
I started to object when it sank in that he wore a white coat and a stethoscope hung around his neck. “You’re that man who came into the bakery and gave me his card. The healer.”
“Yes. And it was lucky you held onto the card because that was how your boss found me.”
“I need to sit up.” This time, he had a nurse help me into a comfortable chair near the bed. He adjusted the IV in the back of my hand that I hadn’t noticed in my confusion. “Okay, maybe fill me in on what happened. Last thing I remember, I was in the kitchen loading a tray with pastry.”
“It’s not odd to forget the moments immediately before a fainting spell. From what I was told, you were in the process of bringing that tray out to the cases when you went down.”
“Oh, wait, I remember a little more. I think I fell on the danishes. I ruined them. Amanda is going to kill me.”
