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I glare at her.

She glares back, looking at me with a kind of hatred and superiority that makes me livid.

I slap another strip of duct tape over her mouth.

She makes a noise through it.

We stare each other down for several moments.

“Go back up,” I say to Striker. “I’ll be right behind you.”

striker

I WAIT FORLotus upstairs, wondering what happens next.

I already gave Knight a piece of my mind for going and bringing this woman here.

He didn’t fight with me about it, either, just bowed his head and rubbed the back of his neck and said he didn’t think it through.

Yesterday, we came here.

I don’t know what this place is, not exactly. It’s one of the Polloi compounds, and the woman who runs the place, the Vasilissa, I guess they’re called, she’s Calix’s great-grandmother or something? Great aunt? I don’t know.

The Polloi are all of our ancestors, I suppose. Everyone with a designation can trace themselves back to the Polloi in some way or the other. But the Polloi have been treated badly over the past several hundred years. Chased out of their homelands, forced to always be on the run, persecuted and feared, all that sort of thing. I guess it’s a typical story if you look at human history. We humans, we have as vast a capacity for cruelty as we do for altruism.

Anyway, yesterday, we came here, and we were given this house, and Dr. Acker was tied up in the basement.

Lotus went and talked to the Vasilissa woman, and right after that, she was gung-ho to get bites.

We’ve all gone back and forth on the bites, whether they’re a good idea or not. At one point, I wanted us to do them yesterday, and at another, I started to get worried that the inherent, uh, bloodiness off them—we have to break her skin with our teeth—would trigger us.

We don’t really know what triggers us, but the triggering does happen.

And when we get triggered, we’re out of control.

Thus far, after being triggered, we haven’t done any permanent damage to Lotus, but last night…

Well, it was Dr. Acker’s fault.

We were all gathered up here, in what is meant to be a nest, I suppose, whatever a nest even is. It’s a room with a bunch of mattresses and pillows, and Lotus has been talking about a nest since we first found her. Hell, it was practically one of her first words.

That sounds fucked, like we had the brain capacity of toddlers or something. But we were all like that, when we got out of the facility, all of us barely able to think or form words, and we needed each other. We healed each other. And the sex was part of it, as weird as that sounds.

I don’t think we took advantage of her, not in that way. We were all on the same level when that happened.

Maybe we took advantage of her by being violent and out of control, though. Maybe I did. I remember the first time I had sex with her, that I was holding her face down, against the rug, and later, she had an abrasion on her face, and I…

Anyway, I say that guilt is a message, and you take the message and change, and I want to do that.

But if I can’t stop myself, if I’m triggered by Dr. Acker, then how can I get the message from guilt or my shame?

Acker’s voice floated up the stairs, while we were all half-naked, all of us getting ready to stick our very hard cocks into Lotus and each other. And then I whited out.

Next thing I knew, I was on my knees, whining, because Lotus was ordering me to do that, and I was obeying her.

We obey our omega, apparently, all of us.

But we hurt her, because of whatever Dr. Acker said.