The taller man hovered just behind his shoulder, a hand tucked inside his brown leather jacket, and I had a sneaking suspicion that I wasn’t going to like whatever it was he was reaching for.
“Does the cancer make it so she can’t speak for herself?” Edison growled, his eyes still on my face.
Swallowing, I shook my head. “No,” I managed to croak, suddenly regretting leaving my room at all tonight.
There was a pause as the two men seemed to be sizing me up. “So tell me, little one, are you going to tell anyone what you saw here tonight?”
The strangest sensation of fear and something I couldn’t quite put my finger on filled me.
“No,” I said, shaking my head again, more fiercely this time. “I would have had to see something to say something.”
The golden-eyed man blinked with surprise before a rattling chuckle left him. “Smart girl.”
“All right, if you’re done bullying a teenage girl, I’ve got to get her back to bed before the charge nurse realizes she’s gone and kills us all.” Dr. Stedmeyer put a hand on my back and began to turn me away.
I blanched at his words. I’d forgotten Nurse Alcott was on shift tonight. She was the strictest person in the ward and wasn’t someone I wanted to piss off if I wanted anything other than porridge for breakfast this week.
The two men said nothing as Dr. Stedmeyer hurried us both away, and despite my brain telling me not to, I turned to look over my shoulder at them one more time.
They stood together in the dim hallway, the one who’d been shot pressing a hand to his chest while the other one continued to watch me until we turned a corner.
During my time at the hospital I only ever saw them once or twice more. Despite his protests, Dr. Stedmeyer always helped them with whatever wounds they came in with.
But never again did they speak to me, and then one day they stopped coming altogether and I never laid eyes on them again.
And then they crashed my wedding.
One
4 years later…
“Smile, Perrie, and at least pretend like you’re enjoying yourself today,” my mother hissed as she brushed a crisp curl away from my forehead. The hairdresser had just finished applying so much hairspray to my head that I was half-afraid that my hair was going to crack off and run away if I gave it the chance.
One look in the mirror told me that it was pretty enough, but also that not even a tornado could damage the perfectly coiffed updo with elegant, face-framing curls.
“I am trying, Mother,” I muttered, glaring at my gray-eyed twin who looked pretty but in all of the wrong ways. Every single bit of my appearance had been picked by someone other than me—just like everything else about this day. “But it’s not every day you get married to people you don’t even really like.”
Four years ago, if you’d told me that I would be sitting in a tiny little room on the second floor of the biggest cathedral in the city… in a wedding dress… then I would have laughed.
None of this was what I would have chosen to have on my wedding day. Not the venue, not the hair, and certainly not the dress. It was a poofy mass of itchy tulle that was definitely more to my mother’s taste than mine.
“And I didn’t really like your father, but look at us now,” my mother said as if her words were supposed to make me feel better as she fixed her cherry red lipstick in the mirror before turning to offer me an empty smile.
I scoffed inwardly at her words.
Look at her now? She could barely stand to be in the same room as him unless there were cameras present. No, as the youngest daughter of a very rich man she’d also been paired off to the highest bidder. Just like I was about to be.
I always wondered why she’d gone through with it. Some of my earliest memories were of her complaining about her marriage, and yet here she was doing the same to her only daughter.
As soon as Dr. Stedmeyer had given me a clean bill of health a year and a half ago, telling me my cancer was finally in full remission and that it looked like my omega biology was still ‘luckily’ intact, my parents started paying attention to me again.
And just as soon as my omega hormones started to spike six months ago, signaling the road to my first ever heat? My parents wasted no time planning my wedding to Pack Ricci.
They were the youngest pack in an old school Italian family, and while no one would outright say it, they were clearly mafia. My father had been involved with them for years and I was pretty sure that his place as the city mayor was thanks to them. Which effectively made him their bitch, and me their bitch’s daughter.
My father had been mumbling about a run for governor next year, which meant that he needed some serious financial power backing him. What better way to gain that than by selling me off? And he now had bonus points because all signs were pointing to me being a very healthy, very useful omega.
It didn’t seem to matter that every time I was in the room with my intended pack that I nearly gagged on the scent of rotten wood, curdled coffee, sour citrus, and overripe apples. Even the idea of allowing one of the four alphas into a nest I built made me want to scream.
But there was a half a million dollars in medical bills that my father threatened to make me pay back on my own if I didn’t do as he asked. I’d barely graduated high school and never worked a normal job in my life. I was pretty sure I was only qualified to work at one of the local fast food places… and minimum wage wasn’t paying those medical debts any time soon.
Before my leukemia, I’d been a star student and athlete on my way to the local omega university to study photography. But now? I was unemployed and at the mercy of parents who saw me as a bargaining chip rather than an actual human being.
“Well I think she looks hideous in that dress,” Romey piped up from where he was lounging on one of the benches that was pushed up against the far wall of the little room that the church gave all of its brides on their wedding day to get ready in.
At nineteen years old, Romey was a foot and a half taller than me now and twice as wide. The gangly teenager with a cracked voice had all but disappeared when he awakened as an alpha last year. His boredom and irritation with the entire situation we found ourselves in was obvious as he shot us a baleful stare.
“Hush,” our mother told him as she straightened and put her lipstick away in the tiny clutch she carried. “She looks bridal.”
“She looks like a cupcake,” Romey countered, finally sitting up. “And why does she even have to get married anyway? She hasn’t even been healthy for that long and you’re already kicking her out of the house.”
Romey didn’t yet understand the intricacies of my impending nuptials. He just thought the Amante family were a group of very powerful donors because everyone in the household protected him from the truth. He would have to learn it eventually—he was the perfect son that my parents had always wanted—but for now we all treated him with kid gloves.
He was the one attending his second year of university this fall and he was the one studying political science so he could follow in our father’s footsteps. He was the one getting to live life the way he wanted to simply because he had been born a boy… and I was the item to be traded and bartered.
It should have made me hate him, but truthfully, Romey was the only one in our family that I actually loved.
