by J. A. Huss
“I have to. But listen,” I say, pulling her up, so she’s sitting on the side of her bed. “Listen to me, OK?” She nods as I shove her boots on her feet and thrust a coat in her hands. “You have to run. And you have to do it alone.”
“No,” she whimpers as quietly as she can. She’s still afraid of being heard at night. She doesn’t realize we’ve already killed everyone but her.
There’s a loud bang from the floor below, and we both go still as the dead and look each other in the eyes.
The seriousness of the situation is written all over my face. She understands now.
I take her hand and pull her up so she’s standing, then hold her coat open. She slips her arms in automatically and pulls it tight around her chest.
“Run,” I say, leading her over to the window and lifting the sash up. It’s cold, windy, and it’s snowing. And if the other Alphas see her footprints, they will hunt her like a rabbit. But the wind is strong enough to cover up her tracks and I think she can get away. “You go that way,” I say, pointing into the woods. The opposite direction to where I know we will be going. “You go that way, Omega, and you never look back. You run until you find someone. And you never, ever tell them about this place. About me or the other Alphas. Or what we did here.”
She starts to cry again. And what did I expect? She’s eight years old.
“You can never talk about this place again or they will kill you.”
I wait for her to acknowledge my order. She should be the one ordering me, but she’s always looked to me for guidance. The administration would’ve figured it out soon. They’d have figured out she’d never be able to control me and had her eliminated.
That’s why I agreed to escape tonight. To save her.
She finally nods, giving in, or giving up, or both. So I lift her up until she can swing her legs over the side of the windowsill, and then I push her and she plops down into a snowdrift.
She looks up at me one more time, the tears on her cheeks already freezing. And she says, “I’ll find you, Alpha. I will. One day I’ll find you.”
Then she turns and instincts kick in. She runs and she never looks back.
I take a deep breath because her words mean more than she knows. They are the words of my killer. My death. My demise. Because that little girl is the only person left in the world who can hurt me.
And I just let her go.
Chapter Twenty-Three - Molly
I do as I’m told. I start running and I never look back. And every time my feet crunch into the deep snow, my long flannel nightgown gets pushed further up my legs. It gets wetter and wetter. And so heavy I feel like I’m dragging a dead weight.
I pump my arms, pleading with my legs to take me under the cover of the trees before someone from school sees me outlined against the stark whiteness of the valley.
I expect to be shot in the back with every passing moment. I expect a yell, telling me to, “Get your ass back here,” and then the sharp crack of a rifle and the scream of a bullet into my spine.
But I gather up all my strength and leap from the deep snow into the scant dusting under the pines. I slip, skid, and fall down on my knees.
The air is rushing in and out of my mouth in long heaves. My chest is burning, my throat is burning. I feel like I might die right here and now. Of fear, or exhaustion, or sadness.
I grab fistfuls of snow because there is nothing else to cling to, and the burning from exposure winds its way from the tips of my fingers to my palms. In a few minutes it will pass my wrists and run up my arms.
I shove my hands into my coat pockets, desperately wishing I had Alpha’s gloves and the heat of his hands to keep me warm.
But I don’t get either of those things from my pocket. My fingertips bump into a slender tube of plastic. A chill of fear runs through me, because I know what this is. Every time Alpha had to use it, he showed it to me first. He said, “I’m not the one hurting you, Omega. This”—he’d hold the syringe up—“this is what hurts you. Not me. They make me do this, Omega. I have to do it. But what happens after?” His face was always calm and his words were always soft. “Tell me,” he’d say.
And I’d say, “You take care of me.”
Every time I said those words he’d smile and say, “That’s right. I have to give you the drug, but I always take care of you after. I will never leave you, Omega. You’re mine and I’m yours. And we take care of each other.”
But he made me leave him, and that’s the same thing as leaving me.
I’d always nod. Because as soon as I was better, after he’d cared for me for days, and sometimes weeks, as I pushed the drug through my blood, I’d have to hurt him too. And they never let me take care of him. They only made me watch him writhe in pain, alone, on the other side of a glass window that he couldn’t see through.
The syringe in my pocket comes with a note. It’s wet from the snow and a little bit smeared. But I rub my wet hands on the inside of my coat, smooth out the piece of paper, and the words form in my head. I hear them in his voice.
My Omega, it says. This is the last time, I promise. It’s not what you think. It’s a new start and a way to forget the past.
I bend my head until my chin bumps up against my coat collar, and I cry.
My Alpha.
I cry for him. I cry because of him. I cry for the times he hurt me and I cry for the times he didn’t. I cry because I’m an Omega and the only reason I exist is to hurt him back. I cry because if I do what my Alpha says, if I leave this place and use that drug, I will never be his Omega again.
I will stop. Everything will stop. And even though each time he drugged me in school I begged God to make the pain go away, I never want it to stop.
Chapter Twenty-Four - Molly
I wake up surrounded by darkness, with his name on my tongue. Not Lincoln. Alpha.
“Shhh,” he whispers into my neck. His hush is a wave of warmth that floats across my skin and then pools in my belly. His arms are wrapped tightly around me and we are lying on a bed, somewhere in the dark.
“Where did you go?” he asks.
“Back to that day in the snow.”
“No. Where did you go when you left me?”
“I didn’t leave you. You made me go.”
“It was let you go or kill you dead, Molly.”
“Omega,” I say, a sob coming out with my name. “And I died anyway.”
I see it in my head. I feel the cold freezing my body from the tips of my toes on up. It burned so bad. And maybe I wasn’t old enough to understand what frostbite was, but I knew if I did not get somewhere warm soon, I would fall down and stop existing.
“I found a town.” It wasn’t really a town, but the modern-day version of gypsies. “Of circus people. They had a collection of trailers and one was unlocked. It had all these dirty blankets. Thick, quilted cotton blankets. And they smelled like engine oil and transmission fluid. But once I stacked half a dozen over top of me, they were warm.”
“Did anyone see you use it?”
He doesn’t say what he’s talking about, but I know. “No. I was all alone when I pricked the needle into my neck, the same way you pricked me dozens of times before. And when I woke up, I was nobody.”
Chapter Twenty-Five - Lincoln
I have never let myself imagine this moment. I have never pretended that there was anything in my future but revenge and death. Warm summer days filled with planning. Cold winter nights filled with stalking. No matter what day it was, no matter what time it was, no matter how many times I wished things could be different, I have never let myself imagine this moment.
Molly starts trembling so I squeeze her tighter. She’s crying, but trying hard not to. And if I give in, if I stop being Lincoln for just one second, I might break too. “I missed you the second you turned your back to run.”
“You have no idea how that felt for me. How terrified I was.”
“I don’t know what it was like to be you. But I know what it was lik
e to be me. I know what it felt like to inject you with those drugs at school and watch you go insane. Watch you try to scratch the skin off your body because you were hallucinating. I know what it was like to be the reason you banged your head against a wall until you were bloody. I know what it was like to hold you tight, have you spit in my face, call me evil, call me monster, call me devil. So maybe making a little girl run into the dark woods in the middle of the night wearing a nightgown was a pretty horrific thing to do, but it was a lot better than hurting you for the rest of your life.”
She turns around, reaching for my bare shoulders, gripping them tightly and shaking me as she stares into my eyes. “You’re not listening. You don’t get it. You ripped me in half, Alpha.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Why not?” she challenges. “That’s who you are.”
“That’s not who I am, it’s what I do. And I don’t want to hear it from you, Molly. I can’t even take it.”
She sighs, giving in on that point. “You were mine and I was yours and that’s the only thing I knew to be true back then. And then you threw me out like trash.”
“Thomas was gonna make me kill you, Molly. We had a discussion and this was the only answer. I’m sorry, but you have to believe me, I did my best. I swear, Molly, I did my best.”
She starts breathing hard, her chest rising and falling faster and faster as the seconds tick off. “So you chose them over me.”
“I chose you, Molly. I—”
“Stop calling me that!” She screams it and her words echo off the ceiling of my bedroom cave. “Molly is made up! Molly is the name they gave me when I was eight. Molly is that girl who grew up with them. I’m Omega.” She stares daggers into me. “I’m your Omega.”
The rage and pain inside her make me want to close my eyes and beg God for help. Help me make her understand.
“I’m…”
“Don’t even say it,” she growls. “Don’t even start with the sorrys. You were the only thing I had.”
She flips her body around so she’s not facing me anymore, like she’s ending the conversation. And even though I know she wants me to give her space, she doesn’t need space. She needs close. She needs love. She needs me. Not Alpha… me.
“Molly—”
“Omega,” she says again. But this time it comes out small and sounds like defeat.
I let out a breath of frustration. “Omega. Fine. But I don’t want to be called Alpha. I’ve spent a lot of years coming to terms with Lincoln and that’s who I am now. Whether I like him or not, that’s who I am.”
“What’s that even mean?”
I lie there, silent.
“You have an anarchy patch on your leather and those murders I’m investigating—”
“It’s not what you think.”
“Then explain it to me.”
But I don’t want to explain it to her. Not yet, anyway. “Just… just let me be here with you, OK? Just let me enjoy this.” She takes a deep breath, her back pressing against my chest as I try to hold her closer. “I never forgot about you. There has not been one night that I didn’t put my head on this pillow and wish to see your face in my dreams at night.”
“You don’t want me to feel betrayed, so what am I supposed to feel? What, Lincoln?” She turns to face me again and there’s just enough light from a computer screen on the far side of the room to make out the shine of tears on her cheeks. She wipes them away and sniffles.
“Your life was… bad?” I ask her, so afraid of that answer.
“Some,” she admits. “But most of it was good. Will, Wild Will, he was my brother after they found me in the trailer. I don’t know how long I slept, but they told me no one had checked that trailer in days.”
“Did they call the police?”
Molly shakes her head. “No. They are not the kind of people who call the police for help. They saw a girl with needle tracks on her arms and her neck. She had cuts and bruises all over her body. She lost her memory for good reason, they said.”
I let out a sigh. “So they took you in. Taught you the business?”
“I trained for a while. But I’m smart, you know.”
I let out a soft laugh at that. “I know.” It was not called the Prodigy School for no reason. We were all smart, but they made us smarter.
“And the next season I was part of the show. No one ever said a word. I guess if you have to run away in the night, inject yourself with mind-altering drugs, and forge a new life when you’re eight, you can do a lot worse than landing in the Masters family.”
“So what happened?” I’m afraid to hear her version of the details, but I need to know them.
“Dead.” This makes her turn her whole body away from me again. “My father was first. Accident during a show. And then my brother six months ago. Same thing, but that time it was a race.”
“And your mother?”
“Insane. She went crazy and tried to kill me and my brother after my father died and she’s been locked up ever since. So you see, it can start out great but there’s no guarantees. Things happen. Time changes things. There’s no guarantee that walking away was the right choice. And you could’ve taken me with you. We could’ve stayed together.”
She has to know that’s not true. Even if Case’s parents wanted to take in two kids, there was the whole dynamic between us. The Prodigy School does nothing by accident. “You know what you are to me?” I ask.
She sighs but says nothing.
“They made me into Alpha, but there is no Alpha without an Omega. You’re my killer, Molly. That’s the purpose they designed for you.”
“Who says?” she asks. “Why do they get to create my purpose? It doesn’t have to be that way, Lincoln.”
But she’s wrong. We are what they made us. They made me a killer and they made her to kill me if I didn’t cooperate.
I don’t know her whole story. I doubt she does either. She was too young when they got a hold of her. Five years old? Four? Younger? But I do know that they changed us. Both individually and as a pair. They did it with drugs. They did it with conditioning. They did it through punishments and rewards that were so cruel, but so sweet at the same time.
They set us up to fall in love and if we had stayed at school, they’d have set us up to die in hate. Because one day I’d stop being a compliant teenager and start being a man they could not control. And my Omega would be there on that day to take me out.
And if Thomas hadn’t come up with the plan, I’d have gone off the rails and been dead months before we escaped.
After we killed everyone at the school, Molly was the only person left who could control me. Because I can’t hurt her without experiencing pain. The sickness takes a hold of me immediately, just like when I try to point a gun at Thomas or Case.
But the inhibition conditioning with Thomas and Case is something that needs to be forged. We inject ourselves every six months as a show of faith. We’ve been using the cocktail to bind us together since we were kids and I found the formula at school.
I gave it to Molly last weekend. It wasn’t even planned, it was a syringe I had made up for Case. So right now she can’t hurt me either, but it won’t last long. I’m surprised it even worked at all since it was coded for Case’s DNA.
Molly’s control over me is different. It’s not optional and it never has to be renewed. She was made with some little part of me coded into her. Some little part that gives her total control. She is a weapon and the only target she will ever aim at is me.
Leaving separately that night was the only option if we both wanted to live, even if she doesn’t fully understand yet.
But I don’t want to think about that right now. I don’t to go back and I don’t want to go forward. I just want to be in the now.
And right now she’s in my bed.
Chapter Twenty-Six - Molly
One hand slips under my shirt. I draw in a breath and his other arm under my body squeezes me tighter into his chest. He
still has those gloves on. But even though the leather is soft, I wish he’d take them off and touch me with his fingers.
“Molly,” he says, his lips finding my ear. He kisses me so softly my head spins and my eyes close, wishing the darkness away. “I’m sorry. I did what I thought was best for you. And I don’t want to talk about that night again.”
“They why am I here?”
“Because you made me realize something.”
“What?” I whisper.
He kisses me again, his lips trailing down my neck. And then he repositions himself. The one arm hugging me slips out from under me and I lie flat on his bed, looking up into the shape of his face. He’s a shadow hovering over me, backlit by the green hazy computer light.
His mouth finds mine and our lips come together.
I grab his bare shoulders with both hands and pull. I want everything. I want Lincoln. I want my Alpha. I want him to lie on top of me, skin to skin. I want him to take back all the years he stole from me. I want all those moments we missed. I want all that love, all that pain, all that fucked-upness. I want all the possibilities they stole.
He cups my face with his hands, and again, I want more. I need more. “Take off those gloves,” I say. “Take them off so I can feel your touch.”
“Shhh,” he says, kissing me again and stealing my plea. “We need more time, Molly. We need more time, and more of this.” He kisses me again and then positions his body over mine, just the way I wanted. Both forearms resting on either side of my head, propping himself up just enough to make me want to beg him to let go. Smother me with the weight of his body.
His tongue slips inside my mouth and we play with each other like that. Twisting and turning. My thoughts are a jumble of nothingness. His legs part and his knees come up next to my ribs so he’s straddling me, pressing his hard cock into my pussy.
“More,” I say. “More is the only thing that will make it right.”