Page 6

There is a hand over my mouth.

Without thinking, panic seizing my brain and my limbs, I let out a blood-curdling scream into the palm over my face, but the beefy man just clamps down harder, pushing my head down into the pillow, into the bed, so I can hear nothing but the blood pumping through my veins, against my ears.

There is a man in my house.

And he is—I think—attempting to suffocate me. His hand is over my nose and lips, and even though I kick and thrash, I can’t throw him off. This is how I am going to die. Laid out in one of my mother’s old nightgowns, cream on my face, terror clogging up my mouth like battery acid.

It must be the alpha from earlier, the one I thought was prowling around my house. Now that he’s closer, I try to breathe through my nose, to scent him, to get a better idea of whether or not he’s in a rut.

Trying to figure that out is a fruitless exercise—as though I can actually approximate how much he’s going to hurt me. An alpha that’s not in a rut can be just as cruel as one in the throes of his biology. In fact, I have heard many stories of them being even crueler.

Tears start to leak out of my eyes and trickle down the sides of my face. Despite how nonchalant I was trying to be earlier, with my little jokes over the nightgown, this is my actual nightmare. I scream again against the hand as dots swarm in my vision, grabbing at his meaty forearm, trying to pull him off me.

He smells like salami and sweat. Like garbage. Horrible, nasty stink—the same way that every alpha has smelled to me since I found my mate.

My mate.

Casting out for him, I scream again, wondering if anything my father said back then was true. If the connection between mates goes even further than simple chemicals, than lust and physicality. If it allows for a certain level of linking through the stars, through the soul.

But I should know better. After all this time of crying out for him as I suffered through my heats alone, I should know that he is not coming.

He does not care.

It’s clear that, somehow, he doesn’t feel the same way that I do. The connection must start and end with me, reaching out into the void and not landing on another living being.

If only, through all this, someone had mentioned that there was such a thing as a false fated mate. That one shifter could feel it when another did not. Even at the library, I only barely managed to find mention of it before the brief omega hours were done and a pissed-off beta librarian came to find me with her nose scrunched in my direction.

It’s not explicitly against the rules for me to be in the research area, but it’s definitely not encouraged. Betas and alphas alike hold the opinion that omegas just aren’t capable of retaining information. Even that learning something might be harmful to us. She’d stared me down as I walked out and made a big show of wiping down the books I had out.

The library has been something of a safe space for me. That, of course, means that the staff hates seeing me there. Even though I’m following all the rules and only coming unchaperoned during the day, and even though it’s during the specified omega hours, when they turn on the high-powered air purifiers and act like we’re actively contaminating the place.

Never mind the fact that even in the depths of an omega’s heat, a beta can hardly scent it. Never mind the fact that while an alpha could, it’s not like my everyday smell is driving them wild. But betas—and everyone who makes the rules at the library, for that matter—aren’t exactly operating on fact. They just decide what they want about us and move forward like it’s irrefutable truth.

My mind drifts through the library slowly, hazily, almost like having vertigo. I think about my mother taking me there when I was younger, her terrified face at the thought of having an omega daughter.

No. That’s not a real memory. My mother died in childbirth—I am imagining things. Maybe I’m dreaming.

“Oi, Bobby, ease the hell up on her, she’s turning blue!”

The hand lifts sharply. I suck in a breath, and oxygen rushes back into my brain, pushing away the thoughts of my “fated” mate and time at the library. It occurs to me again, slowly, that my life is in danger.

Ripping away from the man who’s just tried to completely suffocate me, I turn to the other side of the bed, rip open the bedside drawer, and pull out the pepper spray. I’ve never used it, but now I blast it up into the air at the man I assume is reaching for me.

“Ow, what the fuck?” The voice is loud and deep, and I feel hands grasping for me again as I turn and nearly fall out of the bed, my nightgown hitching up and twisting around my thighs. “What the fuck is that? Pepper spray?”

“Bitch.”

I’m trying to crawl away, but there are arms around me once more, hauling me up into the air upside down, like I’m a toddler. I swing and scream and try to thrash again as my nightgown bunches up around my waist.

“Fucking hell, man, yuck—”

Beefy drops me, and I only barely manage to keep from breaking my neck as I hit the floor. I blink up and around at the room, my vision only now fully clearing from being suffocated a moment before. There’s a man standing in front of me, already reaching back down to grab me, and another man on the other side of the bed, furiously wiping at his eyes. The one I pepper-sprayed.

For a fraction of a second, I think about telling him not to do that. That wiping at them like that is only going to make it worse.

And then I remember that I am being attacked.

Are they planning to assault me together? And, if they are, why did he say yuck and drop me on the ground?