Good Girl by Sam Hall
Chapter 26
“Kai?”
She pushed herself off the bonnet of the much more rusted car, a small smile on her face, her well muscled arms flexing as she uncrossed them.
“What the actual fuck…?”
I looked around me, checking I was still in my forest, not one between worlds with, like, unicorns or some shit. Because if she were some kind of fae, hopefully I was in a paranormal romance story, not some shapeshifting, face stealing, ‘murder dickheads who went running into forests on their own’ kind. Preferably a reverse harem type of story where clusters of hot guys tried to…
Oh.
“That looked like a whole lot of internal dialogue going on there, kid,” she said with a grin, which swiftly faded. That same assessing eye that could tell when I was hiding an injury looked me up and down. “And not a lot of showering being done. You’re not OK.”
That was what attracted me so much to alphas, that flat, definite summation of reality that allowed my brain to just stop for a second.
“I’m not,” I replied finally, feeling tears prick, but I held them back. “But what the hell are you doing here? Extreme boot camp?”
She shook her head.
“McCallum, he pays me to come here every day and hang out for an hour or two, just in case you come by.”
“Why?”
She snorted, then clapped a hand on my shoulder.
“I thought we talked about alpha shit. Ignoring reasonable boundaries,” a finger flicked up, “controlling, obsessive, feels the need to show they care in excessive displays.” Another three fingers flicked up. “Need I continue? Gotta admit, it’s usually betas and omegas chasing me to get them in shape to find themselves an alpha, not an alpha using me to woo an omega. At first, it was refreshing, but he’s paid me an obscene amount of money to put myself at your disposal when and where you want me. No strings attached. I said I wasn’t prepared to be a two-legged bunch of flowers, nor to try and pressure you into anything, but he said, and I quote, ‘If she never speaks to me or my mates again, she’ll have your services, Kai, and anything else she needs.’ So here I am.”
I frowned at that, blinking wildly, trying to process, and she just smiled.
“It was cute at first, seeing an alpha like him lose his fucking shit over an omega, but I haven’t seen clients for over a week. You wanna go for a run or do some burpees? I’ll do them for you at this point. I’m getting bored.”
Her smile was bright, infectious, and made me wonder why the hell no omega had tied her down, so I asked her as we stretched.
“Oh, he’s out there somewhere.” She snorted when I paused, bent over double and touching my toes one foot at a time. “What, you thought I was sniffing after your fine arse? Your mother screened me pretty heavily before she’d let me loose on her only daughter. I mean, there was that one time at university…”
An explosive peal of laughter burst out of me, freezing me where I was, the feeling so alien.
“You’ll be all right, omega. They talk about alpha and omega instincts, but all of us live with an animal.” She straightened up, thumping her chest. “Our bodies. They were made to run and fight and fuck, and while we are definitely not doing the latter, doing the former will go a long way to healing whatever ails you. Omegas pump endorphins when hurt, perfume the air with them, so we should be able to go harder and further than before.” She jogged on the spot, loosening her body up, and I found myself doing the same thing. She nodded to me now, but it felt different, like I’d imagine she’d do the same to another alpha. “Take your power back. Get strong, get fast, get back to who you are, and then you’ll be able to sort out whatever shit is hurting. Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“And then a fucking shower, ’cos damn, omega, that ain’t perfume anymore coming off you. That’s the smell of despair.”
Stride, stride, stride.My feet and Kai’s made street music, a regular percussive beat.
It was days later, I’d had my shower and another every day since, the act of getting into the cubicle, the feel of water on my skin, no longer so painful. I had a new therapist now, one Rosemary had recommended right before asking Mum to never darken her door again. I was waking up in the morning, having something to eat, going for a run with Kai, taking a break, then doing some weights and sparring in the garage before having lunch and a nap.
“A routine is good. Finding one that works and not beating yourself up too much if you can’t always follow it is helpful,” the new therapist had said. She was short, very mumsy, and had an omega vibe, even if she was a beta. “And so is making time for pain. You must process what has happened to you.”
That was my least favourite part, but I did so from the safety of my nest. I’d been pushed to start accepting my omega nature, and while I didn’t need to build something like I did when in heat, I had an innate need for enclosed comforting spaces. A massive pile of washed and neatly folded fabrics had arrived on the doorstep one day, the scents on them muted. Whoever had washed them had used de-scenter, had tried to eradicate any trace of themselves from the gift. But in this state, a heightened awareness brought on by being apart from my mate, I caught traces of it. Just a hint of brown sugar and rum. Orion. My jaw had flexed as I considered the pile, Mum coming out to see why I was hovering around on the doorstep, fading away when I scooped the fabric up and deposited it in my room.
We hadn’t really talked yet. We didn’t often, so there was that, but the constant reminders about eating and sleeping and whatever she got from her books about the care and feeding of feral omegas had stopped. My new therapist had sat her down and had some private sessions with her. What they talked about, I wasn’t privy to, but the changes were obvious.
Unfortunately, that didn’t leave a lot for us. Our relationship had been one of her caring for me, her daughter, still a child of sorts, despite being in my twenties. Adult Mum and adult Cyn just met each other’s eyes for a few seconds at a time, hurt flashing there, and then went about their business.
Until now.
“The Omega Ball.” Mum sighed, putting down the knife on the chopping board. She was in the kitchen behind the prep bench, starting the makings of a salad. “I’m having difficulties getting dispensation. It would be…” I watched her knuckles whiten. “It would be easier if I could provide evidence of your mating. I know that would register the both of you officially with the—”
“No.”
“We’re still exploring what it takes to break the bond—”
“No.” My reply was less certain there. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was rejecting.
“Then it’s a matter of attending the ball. I’ve spoken to George, discussed the ways we can minimise the time you spend there, the minimum dress standard. You don’t have to wear the dress Madam—”
“No.”
She let out a long breath through her nose, then dared to look me straight in the eyes, frustration, anger, pain all warring with something I didn’t think I’d ever seen before—fear. I’d read in a self-help book that you truly become an adult when you start to see your parents as fallible adults, not as monolithic power figures. I frowned, searching her face, not sure how to respond to what I saw. She was Miranda fucking Rhodes, she strode through executive suites and boardrooms like a bitch on wheels, laying waste to anyone who fucked with her. What the hell was she scared of?
Me, always me. I knew that, her success in business rooted in that, but… Surely at some point, there needed to be more.
“Mum, you never wanted to have an omega daughter.”
“Cyn, I—”
“Mum?”
My tone was bald, frank, no omega timidity sneaking in here, and I wouldn’t let it. That seemed to be the right approach to take, some tension easing in her spine.
“No,” she said, with a slow nod, “I didn’t. Everything omega is…messy. All those instincts, all those emotions.” Her lips pursed, her teeth sinking into it. “I had an inkling of your designation, with your moods and preoccupations as a child, but I’d talked myself into thinking you were an alpha.” Her eyes met mine, unwavering now. “This doesn’t mean I don’t love you. You… If you have a child one day, you might experience the exquisite contradictory state of loving the entire being of the person you brought into the world, while wishing that some of the circumstances could change.”
Her smile was small, stiff. It always was.
“The new therapist, Melanie, has been very helpful. I think she’s far superior to Rosemary. She helped me to understand the unique strength of omegas. Does she talk to you about that? Does Kai? You are strong, so strong.”
“I am, which means I need to start taking responsibility for my own life, my own self-care.” I traced the nubby weave of the cushion I was hugging, then put it back on the couch. “I’ll work with Madam to sort my dress and with George about my attendance at the ball. And at some point, I’ll talk it through with Rhys…”
Yeah, I wasn’t feeling that strong right now, but I didn’t need to all the time. Blustering and putting on a front the whole time was alpha bullshit and why they were statistically more likely to die of a heart attack.
“When I’m ready,” I said, finally ending the sentence.
“Very well, you’ll have a security detail at the ball.”
“Mum…”
“Not from me, and he was adamant. Just rang my office, dropped the details, and hung up on me. I’ve tried calling back and discussing the matter, but he doesn’t pick up his phone nor answer my emails.”
“Sounds like Marcus,” I said with a snort.
“Not Marcus, it was the Ratcliffe boy, Orion.” She watched me closely as she delivered the news. “He said he feared you would be a target at the ball and that, if you were forced to attend, you’d have a security team.”
“Orion?” I frowned, then remembered the conversation with his father. “We can’t use them. They must be agents of his father.”
Mum shrugged, then went back to chopping carrots.
“I’ve done my due diligence, looked into the company and its structure. They come incredibly well-recommended, used by royalty when they visit our country, but I agree—having our own team would be wise.”
“Oh, well played, Mother,” I said, lifting my bottle of water in her direction, then watched her as she continued to prepare the food. “So, are you ever going to tell me about the…thing with Orion’s dad?”
She didn’t answer until all the carrots were sliced and slid into the salad bowl, the contents mixed together with tongs, a rainbow of Kai approved food showing through the glass.
“Come with me,” she said.
“Is this when I find out you’re some kind of international spy-slash-thief and this is your secret lair?” I asked as we walked through the house. “Oh, it’s just the garage.”
“Not just the garage,” she said, pointing to the slim grey boxes wired to the wall.
“OK, disappointing,” I said, peering at them. “Unless they’re really cool super computers used to hack the government mainframe.”
“What? No. Where the hell do you get these ideas from? I swear, I left you alone too much as a child. They’re batteries.”
“Batteries for what? Because if I plugged them into my vibes, I think I’d jackhammer my vag off.”
“Jesus, Cyn! Is this the way you talk to alphas, because…” She caught herself, smiled, and then shook her head. “They are batteries big enough to power our whole house. You might have remembered some renovations I did on the house when my company started picking up? Well, this was part of it. It took a considerable amount of under the table money to find an electrician willing to do it, but we rewired the house to run off the batteries.”
“But the house runs off solar panels.”
“Most that do can only power the house while the sun is out. On an overcast day or at night, the house is forced to draw power from the grid, maintaining the hold the power companies have on the market. Panels are prohibitively expensive for most and don’t last especially well, and the government has a lot of power plants that are beginning to age, needing to invest in more. We’re at a turning point in the power industry.”
It was right then I could see Miranda Rhodes, CEO, standing before me. Her quietly confident manner coupled with the shine in her eyes had me sitting up and paying attention.
“My degree was in industrial design, and the assumption we always operated under was find a human need and provide an elegant solution to it. Our newspapers have been full of complaints about the rising cost of power. Climate change and increased affluence mean more and more demand is being put on the market. But our government doesn’t want to invest further in more power plants, being the one holding the bag whenever there’s a brown out. So in comes Benson Ratcliffe.”
Her smile twisted into something hard and fierce.
“In return for tax breaks and fuel excises and a million other little government supports, the massive mining company of Ratcliffe Industries will build new power plants, coal powered, of course, all over the country, guaranteeing a reliance on coal for generations to come.” She let out a long breath. “He’s future proofing his business.”
“And what are you doing?” I asked quietly, a little afraid to ask.
“Battery technology solves all the problems—it’s clean energy, the consumer purchases small batteries rather than massive government investment in more coal powered plants, and it empowers the individual. We can create linked battery networks, where the householder can sell off their excess power to others, upping the price during demand times, or not. Rather than have their power prices dictated to them by power companies or the government, they are producers, consumers, and sellers in a massive power generating market.”
She shook her head, visibly deflating.
“It won’t happen. All these young alpha entrepreneurs talk about disrupting innovation, but most just want to erode worker’s rights and the roles of unions. They come from the very class that benefits from the status quo, and they’re not afraid to do what it takes to maintain it.”
It felt like someone slid a cold knife blade up my spine, just a warning of what was to come if I wasn’t a good little girl. I grit my teeth, feeling my body shake, even though there was no immediate danger.
“I didn’t want to tell you,” Mum said, her cool expression faltering, the mask well and truly cracked now. Someone human, vulnerable, and unsure emerged. “What if you hit it off with the Ratcliffe boy? I was told that omegas are instinctively drawn to the alpha they need, and I didn’t want to colour your decisions with this. I underestimated Benson, I acknowledge that. I never thought he’d… Then Marcus McCallum came to see me. We talked, and we planned…”
She had to see the way her words affected me, freezing me still, pinning me to the spot, a helpless omega again.
Breathe, I told myself. Just keep breathing.
Like I had a choice, but by focusing on that, it drew my attention back to the here and now, didn’t let my mind go racing ahead, my omega vigilance triggered. I breathed in the slightly petrol smelling garage, heard the tick, tick, tick of sprinklers outside, the rising hum of cicadas.
“He had a fair idea what Benson would do, made me see the potential moves coming. Apart from putting an outright hit on me, a risky move for someone high-profile, Marcus knew that you were my point of weakness. You’d already been attacked, something Marcus knew about.” She frowned. “I’ve never been able to work out how. I had my best people deep dive into his network, even used some hackers through some agents.”
“Mum!”
“What? Some boy comes into my office, describing exactly what had happened to my daughter, pointed out my security weaknesses, and then described my opponent’s Baroque plans, complete with documentation to support his assertions. I needed to work out how he came by this information.”
“And did you?” I tried to keep my voice even and calm, but failed.
She smiled, a twist of a thing, and shook her head. “We found his IQ tests, done in both primary and high school, and that’s all we could glean. It was a little slap on the face, a reminder of what he is. He’s terribly smart, so very, very smart. I knew a few people like that at university. They seemed to operate on a rarefied plane, like they weren’t quite human. And lonely.” Her head shook. “But he appeared to have your best interests at heart, so I trusted him stupidly.”
“And what was the plan?” I asked, my voice sounding hollow and distorted in my ears.
“As Orion’s mate, he’d stop you from forming an alliance with the Ratcliffe boy, foiling Benson’s plan and forcing him to consider more desperate measures, eventually declaring his hand when that didn’t work.”
Much had been made of Mum’s determination to stay in our house. It was a nice sized suburban home, certainly more than enough room for the two of us, but it was old, dated, and didn’t really reflect Mum’s newfound social status. I considered it now, seeing it with what I hoped were the eyes of a security expert. In my mind, the large windows, the open plan interior, the lack of a fence, and the fact our block backed out onto the forest turned what I’d always liked about this place into a laundry list of mortal risks.
“Mum…” I stared at her, wide-eyed, trying to store every damn thing about her in my mind, unsure how much longer I’d be able to. “Mum?”
I didn’t want to be an adult, wanted to shove that genie right back into its bottle, return to Strict Mother and Compliant but Miserable Omega Daughter right now. She could lecture me about fibre intake and filtering my water and—
Knock, knock, knock.
We both jumped at the sound coming from the door, each looking at the other.
“Are we expecting anyone?” I asked, the fear turning my voice into a whine.
“Stay here,” Mum said, moving over to one of the shelves and unlocking a box with a goddamn gun in it. I watched her load the bullets with a growing sense of unreality, like all of a sudden, Mummy had transmuted into Linda Hamilton in Terminator, the ultimate alpha babe.
She moved like her too, slinking up to the garage door, looking around it, gun held aloft, then finally disappeared into the house.
Leaving me alone, wondering what in The Twilight Zone this shit was.
Knock, knock, knock.