"The debt, yes. The whole outstanding balance from their business decisions. She's on record for it."
"While they start fresh with some rich Omega in Cambridge. The whole thing is apparently settled now—she's from money, the family absorbed the arrangement."
I don't move.
I am standing approximately four feet from this conversation with a Lucky Clover Sling in my hand and the professional expression of a woman who is not listening, because you give nothing away if you can help it and I can always help it.
"Diabolical," says an Alpha voice from the edge of the group—a deeper register, the kind of voice that's used to being heard without raising itself. "To leave her liable for decisions that weren't hers. That's not just opportunism, that's deliberate. Those men knew exactly what they were doing."
"Does anyone know where she is now?"
A small silence.
"You know how it goes with Omegas in that situation." The voice is not unkind, which makes it worse. Not cruel, just—resigned, the tone of someone stating a pattern they've seen before. "They either disappear into some small nowhere townand rebuild from zero, or—" The sentence ends without ending, which is the particular cowardice of people who know what they mean but won't say it.
"Or they go off a cliff," another voice fills in, flat and matter-of-fact. "The debt's that kind of weight."
I lift my glass and drink.
Slowly.
I take a slow, full sip of the Lucky Clover Sling and let the Irish whiskey do its small, useful work, while I keep my face arranged into the expression of a woman who is admiring the middle distance and thinking about nothing in particular.
The conversation continues around me, adding opinions, circling the story the way gossip circles things, building a portrait of a woman nobody in this group has met from details secondhand, on whatever cultural narrative they've already attached to the type.
They don't know her name.
That's the only good news.
She's a story. A cautionary tale.
The Omega that pack used up and left.
Gone to a small nowhere town, or off a cliff…or hell, she could have done both.
None of them know the real truth.
That she's standing four feet away in an emerald gown…
I move before I decide—a smooth continuation of the stroll, nothing that reads as retreat, just a woman continuing her circuit of the room. I move through two more groups and past the inner corridor and past a mirror that shows me a person I barely recognize, which tonight is the point.
The humiliation of it is—clean, actually. That's the word. Not chaotic or rageful.
Clean, the way cold water is clean when it hits a surface too fast. A sharp, clarifying sensation that cuts through theadjusted warmth of the drinks and the beautiful room and the compliments and lands somewhere honest.
They really did set me up.
Dante, Kieran, and Seb didn't just leave.
They designed the leaving.
They walked out of the structure they'd built, handed me the liability, and started over with someone whose family could absorb the math.
A clean transaction, from their side.
The kind of move that requires knowing, in advance, that the person you're leaving behind has no floor to land on.
They knew.
