Chapter Twenty-Five - Lincoln
I have never let myself imagine this moment. I have never pretended that there was anything in my future but revenge and death. Warm summer days filled with planning. Cold winter nights filled with stalking. No matter what day it was, no matter what time it was, no matter how many times I wished things could be different, I have never let myself imagine this moment.
Molly starts trembling so I squeeze her tighter. She’s crying, but trying hard not to. And if I give in, if I stop being Lincoln for just one second, I might break too. “I missed you the second you turned your back to run.”
“You have no idea how that felt for me. How terrified I was.”
“I don’t know what it was like to be you. But I know what it was like to be me. I know what it felt like to inject you with those drugs at school and watch you go insane. Watch you try to scratch the skin off your body because you were hallucinating. I know what it was like to be the reason you banged your head against a wall until you were bloody. I know what it was like to hold you tight, have you spit in my face, call me evil, call me monster, call me devil. So maybe making a little girl run into the dark woods in the middle of the night wearing a nightgown was a pretty horrific thing to do, but it was a lot better than hurting you for the rest of your life.”
She turns around, reaching for my bare shoulders, gripping them tightly and shaking me as she stares into my eyes. “You’re not listening. You don’t get it. You ripped me in half, Alpha.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Why not?” she challenges. “That’s who you are.”
“That’s not who I am, it’s what I do. And I don’t want to hear it from you, Molly. I can’t even take it.”
She sighs, giving in on that point. “You were mine and I was yours and that’s the only thing I knew to be true back then. And then you threw me out like trash.”
“Thomas was gonna make me kill you, Molly. We had a discussion and this was the only answer. I’m sorry, but you have to believe me, I did my best. I swear, Molly, I did my best.”
She starts breathing hard, her chest rising and falling faster and faster as the seconds tick off. “So you chose them over me.”
“I chose you, Molly. I—”
“Stop calling me that!” She screams it and her words echo off the ceiling of my bedroom cave. “Molly is made up! Molly is the name they gave me when I was eight. Molly is that girl who grew up with them. I’m Omega.” She stares daggers into me. “I’m your Omega.”
The rage and pain inside her make me want to close my eyes and beg God for help. Help me make her understand.
“I’m…”
“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.
After we killed everyone at the school, Molly was the only person left who could control me. Because I can’t hurt her without experiencing pain. The sickness takes a hold of me immediately, just like when I try to point a gun at Thomas or Case.
But the inhibition conditioning with Thomas and Case is something that needs to be forged. We inject ourselves every six months as a show of faith. We’ve been using the cocktail to bind us together since we were kids and I found the formula at school.
I gave it to Molly last weekend. It wasn’t even planned, it was a syringe I had made up for Case. So right now she can’t hurt me either, but it won’t last long. I’m surprised it even worked at all since it was coded for Case’s DNA.
Molly’s control over me is different. It’s not optional and it never has to be renewed. She was made with some little part of me coded into her. Some little part that gives her total control. She is a weapon and the only target she will ever aim at is me.
Leaving separately that night was the only option if we both wanted to live, even if she doesn’t fully understand yet.
But I don’t want to think about that right now. I don’t to go back and I don’t want to go forward. I just want to be in the now.
And right now she’s in my bed.