"This weekend alone, I’ve already found two True Mates for my clients," he says calmly. "And just now, I found the True Mate for a third one."
I lift my eyes.
Wait. What did he just say?
SALT
Sitting in this damn booth for the second day in a row is just humiliating. Locked inside a ten-by-ten-foot glass box, like an exhibit.
People staring. Pitying. Despising.
How the hell do others stand it?
Some betas are already here for their second or even third fair. You can tell. Their faces look beaten down, worn out, or completely blank.
Mr. Gessler, my case handler, barely has anything to do. If someone shows interest in one of the betas from my section, he takes them to a back room. There’s this specially prepared office where he connects online with a psychologist from Second Chance, and they run an initial interview.
It’s a barrage of questions, many of them intrusive, way too personal. Then, once the potential buyer disconnects, they talk it over and decide. So far, after all of Saturday and half of Sunday, not one client has been approved to buy a single contract.
The mood among betas is gloomy.
You can look at it two ways, I guess. Either they’re insanely picky with ridiculous standards, or maybe this whole circus actually protects people from having their contract snapped up by some unhinged freak.
For the past two days, I’ve been assigned a case guardian from Fate’s Choice agency, Storm Nolan.
He’s an infuriating purple alpha, radiating arrogance and smug self-satisfaction. I’m tempted to slap him all the time, but his freakish height stops me. I wouldn’t even reach his face.
And yet, he’s the reason I’m still here on the second day.
After the first day, I was so pissed off and frustrated by sitting in that glass cage, by the whole dehumanizing spectacle, that I was ready to tell everyone to go to hell and head straight back to prison.
Storm dragged me to his office and, shockingly, let me rant, putting up with my swearing and my protests. Then he tried to sell me just enough hope to keep me hanging on for one more day.
We ended up talking about my case. He pushed me to open up about my past so he’d have more ammo when pitching me to potential clients. He said people like ‘sob stories’, so I should give him something to work with. That wording pissed me off a bit, but whatever. I figured, why not. So I unloaded the whole story on him. About Senu, the shit we went through. All the ugly parts.
Storm listened and said he’d put his heart into finding someone for me, someone Second Chance wouldn’t reject.
And somehow, against my better judgment, he convinced me to stay. Kicking and screaming, but still.
Storm handles three other cases besides mine. I’ve seen those guys. Two of them got husbands on Saturday. Storm claims they are their True Mates, but I don’t buy it. Sounds like marketing bullshit meant to make us trust his picks.
The agency gets a fat bonus for every contract sold, after all.
Day two rolls around, and of his clients, it’s just me and one escort sitting in the omega section. I’ve seen him up close. He’sgenuinely hot. Which honestly makes things worse. If even he can’t land a husband, what chance do I have?
My looks do not exactly help either. Tattoos, piercings, and colored hair tend to make conservative types think of rebellious activists or emotionally problematic madcaps. The hell with them. It barely matters anyway. Our section gets almost no traffic, so not many people even stop long enough to inspect my ‘disqualifying’ ink.
Most of the visitors are betas and omegas. Every time one of them wanders closer, I shrink in on myself. I’ve heard the rumors. Old omegas coming here to buy young betas as sexual ‘helpers’.
The thought of ending up as some ancient creep’s personal sex toy makes my stomach twist. But betas aren’t much better. Most of them are also old folks who are essentially looking for a contract-based caregiver to take care of them in their later, ailing years.
Thankfully, there are only a few alphas roaming between the booths.
And good. Senu drilled the ‘alphas are trouble’ rule into me so deep that I started telling him I wasn’t into alphas at all, just to stop him from worrying about me crushing on some jerk. But it was a blatant lie; I regularly jerked off to alpha-on-beta porn.
Every time Senu nudged me toward one of our friends, beta or omega, I had to invent some dumb excuse. I felt nothing for them. But I needed my attraction to alphas to stay buried, because if he knew about my fantasies, he would probably have a panic attack.
Now my brother is gone. And the version of myself I kept reinforcing doesn’t hold anymore.
