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“I think you should stay home,” he says. “Well, actually, I think we need to run.”

“Run?” I’m still working on the new pot of coffee. “What are you talking about?”

“Apparently, Selene isn’t giving up on you easily.”

I stiffen, and I can’t breathe for a second. Finally, I can talk, but my voice is all strangled. “What do you know about that?”

“Theodorus says he overheard Kyvelki and Penelope talking and that Penelope called in Selene to challenge Lotus, because Penelope doesn’t think Lotus deserves us. Theodorus says all of us would be given to this Selene person. Which… not happening, obviously, but—”

“Challenge?” I interrupt. “They don’t do that anymore. The last time they did that, it brought a lot of negative attention to the Polloi, and people went to goddess-damned jail. No one does those omega challenges anymore.”

“You know what it is?”

I bring my coffee over and sit down opposite him. “It’s barbaric and stupid.”

“Theodorus says that if she doesn’t win, they kill her,” he says. “Because that’s the only way to sever a life bond.”

I take a gulp of coffee. “Yeah, could happen. But seriously, the last time anyone did challenges like this was probably in the 1950s. It’s been a long time. It’s bad press for the Polloi.”

“Well,” he says, eyeing me. “Maybe they’ve been doing it all along, but just quietly.”

I lean back in my chair, contemplating my coffee. “You could be right.”

“This is why you ran?” he says. “This Selene person? She was supposed to be your omega?”

“It was arranged,” I say. “She already had a bunch of mates, way too many. I was visiting my sister, who was a beta but got knocked up by some alpha in a Texas pack. Shit like that happens, in packs like that, where omegas have too many men to keep track of? They’ll mate to like twelve or sixteen men, and they fuck them for a while and then just get bored of them, and those guys will end up with sidepieces, which their omegas will tolerate, because it’s easier than admitting they can’t satisfy twenty alphas, right? So, anyway, I just went to see my baby niece. And Selene—she’s the heir apparent Vasilissa at that pack—saw me, and I guess she wanted me, I don’t know. Two weeks later, it’s all set up. I have to go down there and join that pack and I…” I set down my coffee. “I was never happy in the Polloi, not once in my whole life, you get that? But the prospect of that being the rest of my life, being the plaything of some woman who would eventually get bored with me and who never had enough toys?”

“I would have left, too,” says Knight. “I would have left way before that.”

“No, you don’t get it,” I say. “Leave how? This is all I ever knew. When I left, I left my entire family and I had nothing. I went out into the world with the clothes on my back, no money, no food, no marketable fucking skills…” I scoot down in the chair and gaze up at the ceiling. “It still kind of amazes me I did that.”

“I do get it,” says Knight. “I just have never felt any real connection to people like that, not until…” He eyes me. “It still kind of amazes me that I care about all of you as much as I do.”

I’m a little disturbed by that, but the funny thing is that it doesn’t change anything. He’s my mate. He kind of scares me, but I trust him. I pick the coffee up again. “We can’t leave. What are we going to do with Acker? She’s going to wake up here in…” I check my phone. “Half hour, maybe. I was going to dose her again with another sedative, but we want her to wake up and have water or she’s just going to die.”

He shrugs. “Fuck Acker. Just fuck her. She doesn’t matter. Lotus’s safety matters. Lotus’s life matters.”

“Yeah, but if we just leave her here, she either dies—which is better, I guess—or she gets free somehow, and that’s not good for us.”

“No, true,” he mutters.

“Where are we going to go?” I say. “We have nowhere to go. That’s why we came here.”

“Yeah, but we weren’t going to stay here forever, were we?”

“No,” I say immediately, even though I suppose, when I first conceived of this idea, I didn’t think it through. My first thought was that this would be a place to hide Lotus, who—at the time—was so damaged she could not speak. I thought she might be taken care of here, because she was an omega, and all omegas are given a sense of reverence in the Polloi. So, I figured she’d be safe here.

But then the situation changed, and I don’t know what I thought. It was like I had forgotten what it’s like to be here,where being an alpha means you’re a second-class citizen. We can’t stay here. We have to leave.

“I guess,” I say, “I wanted us to have the bites first, before we go.”

“Well, we’ll just do that now,” he says. “And then me and Striker sit in the back seat with her and tend while you drive.”

“Drive us where, though?” I say. “And what the fuck about Acker?” I get up, taking my coffee with me.

“Where are you going?”

“To wake Lotus up,” I say. “It’s her call.”