The word nice comes out like a bruise.
"She drove me to what she said was an intake center. For the program. I went inside and they..." She stops. Swallows. "They took my phone. My bag. They put me in a room and locked the door. And then the doctor came."
Classic pipeline. I've read about it—in sociology courses, in news articles, in the margins of my own research when I was trying to understand what omegas were and why the world treated us like currency. The recruitment is always the same.
Find someone vulnerable.
Offer something they need.
Close the door behind them.
"The doctor," I say carefully. "A woman? Dark hair?"
"Yeah. She takes blood. Gives me shots. She said the shots would help with the fevers." Wren's voice drops. "I used to get fevers. Bad ones. Every few weeks. My body would get really hot and I'd feel... weird. Sick. The group home didn't know what to do with me. They thought I was faking it."
Heat cycles. She's been having heat cycles and no one ever explained what they were. No one ever told her she was an omega. She's been navigating her own biology blind—terrified, ashamed, convinced something is broken inside her.
I know exactly what that feels like. Eleven years. Eleven years of suppressants and secrecy and shame, of hiding what I am because the world made it clear that what I am is a commodity. A thing to be owned.
The only difference was Linda knew exactly what I was. And hated me for it.
And now Wren is learning it the hardest way possible.
"Wren, listen to me." I press my palm flat against the wall. Wishing I could push through it. Wishing concrete could dissolve under wanting. "Those fevers—there's nothing wrong with you. It's biological. It's something you were born with. And these people—they know what it is. That's why they took you."
"I don't understand."
"I know. And I'm going to explain it to you. But not right now. Right now I just need you to know that you're not sick. You're not broken. And you're not alone. Okay?"
Silence. Then, so quiet I almost miss it: "Okay."
We talk. Carefully, in voiced whispers, ears pressed to concrete. She tells me about the group home—the overcrowding, the staff who didn't care, the older boys who scared her. She tells me about the street—sleeping in a church doorway, panhandling for food, the terror of being nineteen and invisible. She tells me about the woman who recruited her—mid-thirties, kind smile, drove a clean car. She had a clipboard. It looked official.
I tell her my name. That I'm twenty. That I was taken from a parking lot. I don't tell her about the Graves brothers or that I might know more about this place than I’m leading on—partly because I don't trust the walls, and partly because none of it matters. The brothers aren't coming. I've made my peace with that.
Whatever the Graves response was, it wasn't enough, because I'm still here.
And so is Wren.
"Do you know anyone else?" I ask. "The others. The ones in the other cells."
"There's a guy," she says. "A couple walls over from me. He talks sometimes. His name is Darren. He's been here longer than me—like three weeks."
"Can you get a message to him?"
A pause. "Maybe. There's a vent that connects our cells. If I talk into it loud enough, he can hear me. It's how he told me about the schedule."
"What schedule?"
"The deliveries. He's been here long enough to learn the patterns. He says there's a fire exit somewhere near the—" She hesitates. "He calls it the display wing. I don't know what that means. But there's a stairwell that goes down to a loading dock. And every other day, around five in the morning, a truck comes.Darren says the rolling door stays open for about ten or fifteen minutes."
A fire exit. A loading dock. A twelve-minute window every other day at 5 AM.
I file it. Store it in the same place I store everything—the mental notebook, the catalog of details that might mean nothing or might mean everything. I don't let myself feel hope. Hope is a luxury I've already spent.
But I file it.
"Wren, ask Darren something for me. Ask him if he's seen the layout. How many guards on this level. Where the cameras are. Anything he knows."
