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She lets out a loud sob.

I roll my eyes. “Cry me a river, lady.” I sit down on the floor, facing her, crossing my legs.

She shakes her head at me. “Please.”

“Stop,” I say. “Stop trying to make me feel sorry for you.”

“Let me go,” she says. “I don’t know how to turn off whatever it is that triggers them, okay? I don’t know. If you let me go, I’ll never tell anyone where you are. I promise. I’ll—”

“Stop,” I say again.

She collapses in fresh sobs. “You’re going to k-kill me no matter what I do, aren’t you? There’s n-no way to save myself?”

“What were you thinking when you decided to train human beings with amnesia like animals?” I say.

She snorts, looking up at the ceiling. “Oh, please.”

“What were you thinking when you started using their sexual arousal to control them, when you started stimulating them sexually? Did that excite you or—”

“I was trying to make themuseful,” she says. “After the reaction to the injections would affect certain alphas a certain way, there was nothing to do with them. They were worthless. I made them useful.”

“Useful to kill omegas?” I say. “Who even needs omegas killed?”

“That was never the intent,” she says. “I thought they’d eventually be able to find kidnapping victims or runaway children, that sort of thing. I started with omegas because it was easier for them to track them.”

“Kidnapping victims?” Does this women believe that or is she blowing smoke up my ass? “What if they killed the kidnapping victims?”

“I would have trained them not to do that,” says Acker. “I was getting closer and closer. It wouldn’t have been long until I would have been ready to move to the next level. Digger was going to take some convincing, because he worried about the fallout from anyone discovering the way we’d been experimenting on human beings. But I knew that—” She grimaces, cutting herself off quickly.

“What did you know?” I say. “What were you about to say? That alphas weren’t really human?”

“No,” she says.

I should kill this woman now.

“I don’t think that,” she says. “But I don’t think it would be hard to convince people that our hounds weren’t really human anymore. Their capacity for thought had been diminished so much—”

“You’re disgusting,” I say to her.

“Maybe,” she says. “But sometimes you have to cross moral lines in the pursuit of knowledge. I needed to know what would happen. I had to discover it. If there were sacrifices made in the discovery, it was worth it.”

I gape at her, horrified.

“Sometimes, that has to be done,” she says. “It’s for science. It’s for knowledge, and that knowledge helps the whole of the human race.”

I stand up, glaring down at her. “You better think of some way you can help my mates,” I say to her. “Because if you don’t,I am going to kill you, and it will be slow and painful. I will cut things off you, you bitch.” I pick up the duct tape and brandish it.

“So vicious,” she says to me. “I was always surprised how much the omegas fought, how willing they were to hurt us. Maybe the truth is that youaren’thuman, omegas and alphas. Maybe you really are just wild animals.”

I tape her mouth shut again, grim.

When I get back to the nest, Calix is sitting up in bed. “Where were you?”

“Nowhere,” I say. “I was nowhere, doing nothing. I feel like that’s all that keeps happening. I feel like, whatever I do, even if it seems like I’m going to get somewhere, I’m stuck getting absolutely nowhere.”

He pulls me into his arms. “We’ll figure this out. We will.”

I want to believe he’s right.