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I look around, too, feeling his paranoia infect me a little bit. “You’re making me think that’s a bad thing.”

“Well, I wasn’t sure,” he says. “So, I got her to bring me along. They talk over us all the time, you know, talk over us like we aren’t even here. They expect us to do all the work when they make the decisions, because we’re the muscle, but they don’t ask us what we think. They just expect us to do whatever they ask.”

“Who does?” I say.

“Women,” he says, looking at me like I’m crazy.

“Right,” I say.

He laughs. “Yeah, it’s not like that out there, is it? I hear women serve men, not the other way around.”

“It’s… sometimes, maybe,” I say. “But it’s more equal than not, or people try to make it equal.” I square my shoulders. “I don’t know if it really can be equal. We’re not the same, you know?”

He nods. “I do know. And they need us to be their enforcers. They can’t beat their alphas into submission themselves. They need another alpha to do that.”

“Is there a lot of that out here?”

“What?”

“Beating people?” I don’t really care, I guess. A part of me is even intrigued, a little bit, like… if I hadn’t found this pack, and I wasn’t in love with them, maybe I’d have been interested in the idea of being able to beat people into submission. Of course, what do you do with them once they submit to you?

“More when you’re your age,” he says with a little laugh. “The blood’s hotter back then.”

“So, yeah,” I say. “This place is… why do you stay here? I don’t think this is a good place.”

He raises his eyebrows at me. “You’re here too.”

“Yeah, but we were on the run from people trying to kill us and they have law enforcement on their side, and they’ll at least arrest us, if not shoot us on sight, so we needed somewhere to hide out.”

“So, you’re telling me it’s better somewhere else?” He shrugs at me. “For people like us? For alphas?”

“It’s…” I hesitate. “I mean, better is maybe a relative term, because I’m thinking that there are things that balance everything. Like, you don’t get beaten into submission out there, but they don’t want you to ever touch an omega, and they encourage you to be sedated every time you go into a rut, and you’re sort of… suppressed all the time. So, I don’t know. This isn’t a good place, but out there isn’t good either.”

He nods. “Right.”

I sigh, shoving my hands into my pockets.

“I couldn’t leave my omega,” he says. “You get that, right?”

“Even if she orders your mates to beat you?”

“Well, Kyvelki’s never been that way,” he says with a shrug. He considers. “A little. Only in bed. Which can be exciting.”

“Okay, I don’t need to know about that,” I decide.

“Yes, we’re getting off topic.”

“You overheard what they said? Kyvelki and Penelope?”

“She’s bringing the omega who was Calix’s arranged mate here.”

“Wait, Calix had another omega?”

“He ran before he ever met her,” says Theodorus. “And honestly, I might have done the same in his position. She’s not like the omegas here, that one. She already has ten mates.”

“Ten,” I say.

“Some omegas get greedy, even though they don’t have the time or the energy to pay attention to nearly that many alphas,” he says. “They just want more. And this omega is that way. Penelope’s made some snap judgment about your omega, says she’s a weakling, unworthy of her alphas, unworthy of a scent match. Meanwhile, taking an intact scent-match group of alphas, it’d be quite a feather in Selene’s cap.”