His voice has gone completely flat.
“Sera’s car has been found.”
He stops.
“It was abandoned.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Espie
The man reads from the clipboard without looking at me.
His voice never changes pitch when he says my number. No pause. No hesitation.
“Confirmed allocation for Wallace. Transit code seven-seven-nine. Departure at oh-two-hundred.”
Like he’s reading freight inventory instead of a person.
Two other alphas who smell strange are behind him, half in and half out of the light. I can't hold my head up. It keeps dropping and I have to push it back up and it drops again. Whatever they gave me is working through me in slow, heavy waves, turning my bones to wet concrete. My fingers are too distant to feel. The corridor smells of old stone and something electrical underneath.
How long do you think she'll last?
Three months. Maybe four.
Younger than his usual intake. He'll want to run more trials.
She’s small. I'll give her six weeks. An extra fifty says she's screaming inside a week.
That’s not even a bet. She’ll be screaming before the day is out.
They keep talking. I stop hearing the words. I stare at the wall. The wall is the only thing I can hold onto. Letters on tile. Worn black on chipped white ceramic. The ghost of a name that means nothing. There and then gone. Tunnels curve and the air gets colder and another name slides past.
I'm grabbed and hauled upright, my feet dragging on the tile, down an elevator, and then through a door and down a short corridor and into a room that smells of antiseptic and metal. A gurney in the center, under a white light. They shove me down onto it. The back of my head hits the vinyl. Someone pulls my arms above my head and the straps go on my wrists and ankles so tight I can’t move.
The light above me is very bright and everything beyond its edge is shadow. I can't tell how large the room is, can't tell how many people are in it. Only the sounds reach me. The soft tap of shoes on tile. The thin metallic sound of instruments being set down on a tray.
A male steps into the light. Blond hair, not a strand out of place, and he's tall and broad. His face is — it's a normal face.The kind of face you'd forget in a crowd if his eyes weren't so pale. Ice-pale. He looks over me like I'm not a person at all and picks up a syringe from the tray.
“Trial one,” he says. His voice is calm. That's the thing I keep coming back to, even through the drugs. How calm it is. “I’ll induce her heat and we’ll test the variables, but first we need to establish a baseline.” His gaze lands on me. His eyes don't change. Not curious, not cruel. Just — present. Noting. “You may find the initial onset uncomfortable, omega.”
The needle goes into the crook of my elbow and the drug hits my bloodstream. The burn starts in my gut and spreads outward in concentric rings. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Not hunger, not want. I don't have a word for it. My body arches against the straps. A sound tears out of my throat that I've never heard myself make before. The ache has no floor. It just drops, and drops, and drops, and my body keeps reaching for something I didn't choose to want.
He stands beside the gurney and watches and his face doesn't change. I am screaming my throat raw as he writes on his file.
Please stop. Please. I'll do anything. Please.
I'm sitting up. My heart slams against my ribs. The air tastes wrong — stone and antiseptic, the cold of the gurney still in my shoulder blades, his pen still scratching, and—
Cedar. Linen. Oakwood.
The nest. The nest,our nest. Cedar at my nose. Aubrey's heartbeat under my cheek. Kev's weight at my back, his arm heavy over my waist. Lex has his hand around my ankle. Ezra is at the edge, his palm settling against my shoulder blade.
I run my fingertips over Aubrey’s bite. Real. Present. Aubrey gave me that. The nest is real. The pack is real.I’m not there any more.
“Espie.” Aubrey's voice, close at my ear. “Hey. Come back.”
“I'm okay.” My voice comes out steady.
