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“Come on,” Madden says, practically dragging the man by the collar of his shirt.

“Now. Your turn, Carol,” Archer says, turning. “Bring her to a seat, Chase.”

Chase drags her over to one of the rickety-looking wooden kitchen chairs, setting her down. “No reaching for any more knives,” he says, reaching down and picking up the knife she tried to stab him with earlier and sliding it back into its place in the knife block.

“Fine,” Carol says, rolling her eyes.

“You said Luna’s not your daughter. Whose daughter is she, then?”

“I dunno exactly who, all I know is she was brought here to usby a man who promised us a bit of money if we took care of her when she was a baby.”

“Did you want to take her in?”

“Fuck no,” She spits. “I ain’t never wanted a kid. Roger was the one who agreed before I could say anything.”

“When did the drugs start coming into play?” Chase asks, leaning against the kitchen counter with his arms crossed.

She shrugs. “I’ve always used.”

“When did it start getting bad?”

She narrows her eyes at him. “You don’t know me, I don’t have a fuckin’ problem.”

“Lady, you just tried to stab me with a kitchen knife. If that’s not you tweaking out, I don’t know what is.”

She rolls her eyes. “Roger started getting me harder pills after we took her in. It was great, ‘cause I dunno how else I would’ve survived raising a fucking kid I never wanted. It got better when we figured out she’d become an omega.”

The three of us freeze. My muscles are so tense, I feel like I’m going to explode. The last thing I would’ve expected would’ve been for her to volunteer this sort of information without any more pressure. Especially considering the fact that she didn’t even flinch when I nearly shot her husband.

“What did you do when you found out she was going to be an omega?” Archer asks, his voice low and controlled as if he’s barely keeping himself in check.

“We hid her away the moment Roger smelled a hint of pre-awakening. Took her out of school, didn’t let her outside,” she shrugs. “Didn’t want anyone else hearing or smelling that she was going to be an omega and ruining things for us.”

Fuck. She wasn’t allowed to go outside ever since she went into pre-awakening? Pre-awakening happens around the time puberty really kicks in, so she could’ve been as young as thirteen when she was basically locked away. No wonder she just didn’t know a lot about how the world worked.

“Ruining what?” Archer pushes.

The fierce scowl on Carol’s face that was there when she first appeared returns.

“Ruining everything!” She eyes all of us up and down. “I bet you guys are here ‘cause you met her. She’s got all of you wrapped around her little omega pinky, and you justhadto come in here guns blazing.”

I’ve met beta women like her before. There’s a sort of prejudice they have against omegas where they feel like omegas have everything easier.

There’s some sort of truth to it. Biologically, alphas and omegas are hardwired to be attracted to each other. Omegas physically cannot be without alphas during their heats or else things go wrong. The societal structure we have here mimics that sort of pattern.

But still, Carol’s opinion and the opinions of people like her leave a bad taste in my mouth. It reminds me of how people tend to view omegas, especially omegas without status, as objects. Worst of all, it reminds me of how people thought of omegas like my mom: like property that could be stolen back.

“The whole reason why that ungrateful girl was given to us was so we could keep her from other alphas.”

“Is that why you sold her to betas instead?” I growl, my knuckles going white around my gun.

Carol’s laugh is almost like a maniacal cackle.

“Getting on her back and earning us some more money was the least she could do for us after all we did for her. Plus, we got permission to do that.”

“Permission from who?” Archer growls.

“The alpha who gave the girl to us. He wanted to be the only alpha that’d ever use her, but he didn’t really think much of betas, so he didn’t mind. I think he saw it as training her.”