“Don’t even say it,” she growls. “Don’t even start with the sorrys. You were the only thing I had.”
She flips her body around so she’s not facing me anymore, like she’s ending the conversation. And even though I know she wants me to give her space, she doesn’t need space. She needs close. She needs love. She needs me. Not Alpha… me.
“Molly—”
“Omega,” she says again. But this time it comes out small and sounds like defeat.
I let out a breath of frustration. “Omega. Fine. But I don’t want to be called Alpha. I’ve spent a lot of years coming to terms with Lincoln and that’s who I am now. Whether I like him or not, that’s who I am.”
“What’s that even mean?”
I lie there, silent.
“You have an anarchy patch on your leather and those murders I’m investigating—”
“It’s not what you think.”
“Then explain it to me.”
But I don’t want to explain it to her. Not yet, anyway. “Just… just let me be here with you, OK? Just let me enjoy this.” She takes a deep breath, her back pressing against my chest as I try to hold her closer. “I never forgot about you. There has not been one night that I didn’t put my head on this pillow and wish to see your face in my dreams at night.”
“You don’t want me to feel betrayed, so what am I supposed to feel? What, Lincoln?” She turns to face me again and there’s just enough light from a computer screen on the far side of the room to make out the shine of tears on her cheeks. She wipes them away and sniffles.
“Your life was… bad?” I ask her, so afraid of that answer.
“Some,” she admits. “But most of it was good. Will, Wild Will, he was my brother after they found me in the trailer. I don’t know how long I slept, but they told me no one had checked that trailer in days.”
“Did they call the police?”
Molly shakes her head. “No. They are not the kind of people who call the police for help. They saw a girl with needle tracks on her arms and her neck. She had cuts and bruises all over her body. She lost her memory for good reason, they said.”
I let out a sigh. “So they took you in. Taught you the business?”
“I trained for a while. But I’m smart, you know.”
I let out a soft laugh at that. “I know.” It was not called the Prodigy School for no reason. We were all smart, but they made us smarter.
“And the next season I was part of the show. No one ever said a word. I guess if you have to run away in the night, inject yourself with mind-altering drugs, and forge a new life when you’re eight, you can do a lot worse than landing in the Masters family.”
“So what happened?” I’m afraid to hear her version of the details, but I need to know them.
“Dead.” This makes her turn her whole body away from me again. “My father was first. Accident during a show. And then my brother six months ago. Same thing, but that time it was a race.”
“And your mother?”
“Insane. She went crazy and tried to kill me and my brother after my father died and she’s been locked up ever since. So you see, it can start out great but there’s no guarantees. Things happen. Time changes things. There’s no guarantee that walking away was the right choice. And you could’ve taken me with you. We could’ve stayed together.”
She has to know that’s not true. Even if Case’s parents wanted to take in two kids, there was the whole dynamic between us. The Prodigy School does nothing by accident. “You know what you are to me?” I ask.
She sighs but says nothing.
“They made me into Alpha, but there is no Alpha without an Omega. You’re my killer, Molly. That’s the purpose they designed for you.”
“Who says?” she asks. “Why do they get to create my purpose? It doesn’t have to be that way, Lincoln.”
But she’s wrong. We are what they made us. They made me a killer and they made her to kill me if I didn’t cooperate.
I don’t know her whole story. I doubt she does either. She was too young when they got a hold of her. Five years old? Four? Younger? But I do know that they changed us. Both individually and as a pair. They did it with drugs. They did it with conditioning. They did it through punishments and rewards that were so cruel, but so sweet at the same time.
They set us up to fall in love and if we had stayed at school, they’d have set us up to die in hate. Because one day I’d stop being a compliant teenager and start being a man they could not control. And my Omega would be there on that day to take me out.
And if Thomas hadn’t come up with the plan, I’d have gone off the rails and been dead months before we escaped.