"Okay." A pause. "Max?"
"Yeah?"
"Are we going to get out?"
The honest answer is: probably not. The honest answer is that I'm zip-tied in a concrete cell in an omega trafficking facility, and no one is coming, and the blockers are failing, and soon my heat will return and I'll be exactly the product they want me to be.
And the prospect of trying to fight back and find my way out of here, get me and Wren to safety, makes my knees want to buckle.
"I'm working on it," I say instead. And it's not a lie—not exactly. Working on it might just mean learning the shape of the cage. But it's something. It's the only thing I can give her.
We're quiet for a while after that. Wren starts humming—not the lullaby this time, just a soft, aimless melody that drifts through the wall like smoke. I close my eyes and let it fill the cell. It's the closest thing to warmth I've felt since I got here that didn't come from a needle or from my own failing biology.
The humming fades. The silence comes back—the hum, the pipes, the distant crying.
But it's different now. The silence has a shape it didn't have before. There's someone on the other side of this wall who knows my name, and I know hers, and that's not nothing. In a place designed to turn people into numbers, it might be theonlything that matters.
I'm sitting against the wall, forehead resting on my drawn-up knees, when I hear it.
A guard change. The heavy boots stop outside my door. Two voices—low, clipped, the bored shorthand of men at the end of a shift.
"—Vasquez wants the bloodwork expedited on the new one."
"Which new one? 14 or 17?"
"17. The Graves one."
My body goes still. Every cell, every nerve, locked in place. Listening.
"What's the rush?"
"Graves meeting is tonight. Ellis wants the omega prepped."
Prepped.
The word drops through me like a stone through dark water.
The Graves meeting is tonight. The brothers. Kline is meeting with the brothers. Which means negotiations are happening, terms are being discussed, and I'm—
Ellis wants the omega prepped.
I don't know what prepped means. Don't know what they're preparing me for, or why a meeting between Kline and the Graves brothers requires me to be ready. But the cold certainty settling in my gut says it's nothing good.
You don't prep a person for a conversation.
You prep a person for a display.
The guard change finishes. New boots. New rhythm. The lock doesn't buzz. They're not coming in.
Not yet.
I press my back against the wall and try to breathe. The flicker in my belly—the pilot light the blockers couldn't kill—pulses once.
Warm. Insistent.
Prepped.
I sit in the fluorescent hum and I wait.
