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They say I’m the lead alpha, that I’m in charge, but I feel like I’m just the alpha left out most of the time.

“I don’t like this,” I decide to tell them. “I don’t have any defense of Dr. Acker here, but I don’t know if I can participate in murder.”

“Is it because of God?” says Lotus.

When I think about the man I was in my past life as a priest, it feels like remembering someone else’s existence. Killing is wrong, though, and I know that. It’s only that I’ve already got so much blood on my hands that I can’t rightly distance myselffrom the activity anymore. “No, not because of God,” I say. “But I don’t know what’s left of me if I do this.”

Knight speaks up. He has his arm around Arrow and Arrow is leaning his head on his shoulder. Knight says, “This was never supposed to be you, Striker. This was supposed to be me. I never expected she’d have that kind of power over me still.”

I’m a little annoyed. “Look, it’s not that I can’t handle it—”

“I wanted to get rid of her,” says Knight. “I wanted to make things better for you.” He says this directly to me.

And I remember when I broke down, remembering what it was we all did when we were brainwashed by Dr. Acker, the women we killed, the way we were trained to behave that way. I remember how he held me and he soothed me. I was grateful, even though Knight is frankly dangerous and unhinged. He loves me, though, and that… well, it’s good to have someone like Knight on our side.

“I wanted to make it better for all of us,” says Knight, turning to include everyone in this statement. “But the truth is, I only made it worse. If she wasn’t here, everything would be different.”

“She’ll cooperate now,” says Lotus. “If she does, maybe we don’t have to kill her.”

Calix stops tending her bite for a minute. “Come on, sweetheart, how do you figure that?”

Lotus turns to look at him. “Well… I don’t know.”

“We can’t let her go,” says Arrow darkly.

She sighs, her shoulders slumping. “Yeah, I guess I know that. If she gets free, we’re in danger.”

Everyone’s quiet, and the silence stretches on and on.

“So, Calix bit you,” I say finally.

Calix pulls off from tending again. “Yeah, we have so many things to talk about, like, what’s going on with our teeth?”

“Oh, is that abnormal?” I say.

“And what’s with Knight and Arrow?” says Calix. “Now that I’m scenting that, it’s… what the fuck?”

“That’s abnormal, too?” I say.

Calix groans and goes back to licking Lotus’s neck.

I look at Knight. “You couldn’t stop Arrow from attacking our omega, I noticed. You couldn’t stop yourself either.”

Knight sighs. He shoves the hand that’s not wrapped around Arrow into his pocket.

“But you said that biting him meant that you’d be able to—”

“I know what I said,” mutters Knight.

I throw up my hands. “You know what? I’m hungry. Anyone else hungry?”

“Starving,” says Calix.

I go into the kitchen and open up the refrigerator. It’s basically empty except some condiments on the shelf. I open the freezer. Well, then. This is more like it. There’s meat up there, frozen meat. I sort through it, but it’s not exactly labeled. I don’t really know what it is.

I take out some ground something-or-other. Might be beef. It’s probably beef, but it’s sort of freezer burned and it’s hard to tell what the actual color is. “I think there was Hamburger Helper.” I open up a cabinet, and yup, sure enough, two boxes. I take those out and start looking for a skillet to cook this in.

Knight wanders into the kitchen and picks up one of the boxes. “They eat this kind of stuff in the Polloi?”