She's humming. It's the sound she makes when my father isn't home, this tuneless, wandering melody that has no beginning or end. I don't know what it is. I don't think she knows either. It's just the sound of her being comfortable enough to make noise.
The apple is green. She cuts it into slices, thin and even, and arranges them on a plate in a fan shape. She does this every time. It doesn't matter that I'm going to eat them in thirty seconds and the arrangement is pointless. She does it because she wants to.
"Mom," I say. "Can we go to the park?"
She looks at me and the humming stops. Not immediately. It fades out, the way a radio dies when the battery's going.
"Not today," she says.
"Why?"
"Your dad might come home early."
This is the answer to everything. We can't go to the park because dad might come home. We can't visit the lady downstairs because dad doesn't like her. We can't go to the stores because dad will want to know what we spent. The radius of our life is the apartment and the apartment only, and even inside it, there are rooms that feel smaller when he's been in them.
I don't argue. I know that she’s right. Everything we do has dad in the background of it.
She brings me the apple slices and sits down across from me and watches me eat them. Her hands are on the table, the way mine were in the security room. Flat. Still. Braced.
I eat the apple slices. She watches. After a while, her shoulders drop a fraction and she starts humming again, quietly, as if she's checking whether it's safe.
That's the image I carry. Not the hospital. Not the foster homes or the alley behind the laundromat. My mother, humming in a kitchen, checking whether it's safe to make a sound in her own home.
That's what a bond did to her. I am never going to let that happen to me. I know this with every cell I have. Whatever deal I make, whatever compromises I accept to stay alive, I am never, ever going to belong to someone.
Somewhere in this building, Dominic Novikov is in his office making decisions about my life, and I'm lying on a bed I can't leave. That’s what it is to be an omega.
I roll onto my side and run the odds. He’s not going to let me go. I could see it in his eyes. The only question is whether he keeps me alive. That means I need to be useful.
That means I need to actually deliver on what I offered. I need to find his cheating ring, which means I need access todata: table records, dealer schedules, loss reports, surveillance footage. I might need time on the floor. I'll need to watch the play without being watched myself, which is going to be difficult in a building with a camera every fifteen feet.
I can do this. I've spent eight years reading casinos. I know what normal looks like. I'll know what abnormal looks like when I see it.
The question is what happens after. When I've found his ring and he doesn't need me anymore. He could let me go. He could kill me anyway.
Or he could try to keep me. I’m sure that he will. That’s what alphas do.
Theyown.
My best chance is to get him to trust me enough until there is an opening and I can run.
I don't sleep. At some point the window begins to lighten, a gray wash that turns the room from black to charcoal then to a pale blue.
At eight fifteen, there's a knock on the door. It beeps and opens before I have a chance to answer. It’s a woman in a hotel uniform with a tray. She brings scrambled eggs, toast, orange juice, coffee. She sets it on the desk, then leaves without speaking. The electronic lock engages behind her.
At nine forty, the guard opens the door. He's a different one from last night. Younger, polite. "Mr. Novikov will see you now."
The elevator takes me up one floor. The corridor is wider here, quieter with a better-quality carpet. The guard walks me to a door at the end and opens it and steps aside.
Novikov's office is large and the first thing I notice is that the room smells like him. My body responds to it before I've taken two steps inside.
I breathe through my mouth.
He's standing behind the desk. He looks like he hasn't slept either. He’s wearing the same suit as last night or one identical to it. The brick shithouse that is Viktor is in the chair by the window, watching me come in with a blank expression.
"Sit," Novikov says.
I sit. The chair is leather and deep and positioned slightly lower than his, which I'm sure is deliberate.
