He saysmaintainedthe way you'd say it about a car. Oil changes. Tire rotations.
"You will eat what is provided. You will drink what is provided. You will comply with medical examinations, grooming protocols, and any preparatory procedures deemed necessary by my team." He stops pacing. Faces me. "You will follow orders. Promptly. Without resistance."
My hands are shaking again. I press them harder between my knees.
"If you do not—" He tilts his head. Almost sympathetic. "Max, I want you to understand something. The men who brought you your medical exam today? They are the gentler option. They respond to minor infractions—hesitation, slowness, a raised voice. There is a second tier of response for more serious disobedience, and I promise you, you do not want to meet it."
He lets that sit. Watches it land on me. I feel the blood draining from my face, feel the throb at the back of my skull where it cracked against concrete—minor infraction—and try not to imagine what serious looks like.
"Those guards will take up residence in this room if necessary," Ellis continues. "They will eat here, sleep here, breathe down your neck until compliance becomes reflex. That is not an arrangement anyone enjoys."
He crouches in front of me. Eye level now. Close enough that I can see the flecks of gold, the perfect grooming of his eyebrows, the faint lines around his mouth from years of smiling at people he intends to destroy.
"I understand this is frightening. I do. But I'm going to share something with you that might help." His voice drops. Confidential. Like he's letting me in on a secret. "Omegas are built for this. Your biology—your purpose—is submission. Bond. Service. It's written into every cell of your body, every hormone in your blood. What feels like captivity now is simply adjustment. The omegas who accept that truth early? They do well. They find good matches. They live comfortable lives."
My stomach turns. The words crawl over my skin like something with legs.
"The ones who fight it..." He straightens up. Brushes his knees. "Well. Fighting biology is exhausting, Max. And thisfacility doesn't deliver poor product. One way or another, you will be ready when your buyer comes. The only variable is how unpleasant the process is for you."
Buyer.
The word detonates in my chest. Not match. Not connection. Buyer. The polite language is gone now—stripped back to the bone underneath, and the bone is commerce. Transaction. A price tag on my body and a stranger at the other end of the sale.
The fragile hope I'd been clutching—maybe the brothers will come, maybe Kline means something, maybe I'm a problem worth solving—collapses like wet paper. Because this isn't a negotiation. This isn't leverage. This is a pipeline. I am being processed, and at the end of the processing is an auction, and at the end of the auction is an owner, and none of that has anything to do with three alpha stepbrothers who couldn't even decide if they wanted me when I was free.
And now Ellis is telling me what I've always known. What Linda screamed at me at thirteen, what every failed foster home confirmed, what Atlas's gentlenocarved into my bones: omegas don't get to choose. Omegas don't get to want. Omegas are inventory—to be assessed and prepared and sold to whoever meets the price.
Ellis watches me. That flicker again—something behind the warmth. He's reading me. Measuring my response the way the nurse measured my blood pressure. Clinical. Appraising.
"Is there anything you need before I leave you to rest?" he asks. "Water? A blanket?"
The absurdity of it—a blanket, like I'm a guest at a hotel, like he didn't just explain in precise, pleasant detail that I'm going to be sold to a stranger—almost breaks me. Almost makes me laugh, or scream, or both.
"No."
"All right." He studies me for one more moment. Then nods, satisfied. "You're handling this well, Max. Better than most. That's noted."
He leaves. The lock buzzes. The wasp in the jar.
I lie back. Let the tears come. They pool in the hollows of my temples, run into my hair, soak the thin mattress that smells like bleach and ghosts.
Eleven years of suppressants. Four years of Margot's love. Twenty years of hiding what I am.
And here I am anyway. Exactly where the world always intended to put me.
Chapter 2
Atlas
4AM. I haven't slept.
My office looks like the inside of my head—maps spread across the desk, three phones charging in a row, laptop open to property records I've been cross-referencing for hours. Two monitors casting blue-white light across the walls. Six browser tabs. An ashtray I haven't touched in three years, now holding the remains of five cigarettes I smoked back to back standing at the window, watching the dark grounds for movement that wasn't coming. The bourbon sits untouched. I poured a glass two hours ago, brought it to my lips, and set it down because my hands were shaking too hard to drink without spilling.
My hands don't shake. They never shake. I've sat across from men who wanted me dead and held a glass of scotch steady as stone.
They're shaking now.
Bane's downstairs running property databases through his legitimate-world contacts. Zero is somewhere in the city doing things I've authorized but don't want details on. Not yet. Not until they produce results. When Zero works at night, he doesn't leave receipts. He leaves messages.
