Chapter Thirteen
Miles
I woke hugging Jethro’s arm, his hand still pressed to my stomach. The warmth from his skin was very pleasant and I let myself enjoy it a moment longer.
“The sun’s up and we need to be too,” Jethro said softly next to me. Embarrassed, I pulled my hands away and looked over at him. He was smiling and his hand on me flexed. “How’s the cold?”
“Better. Not gone, exactly, but less.”
“Good. We must be doing something right.”
He moved his hand and tugged down my T-shirt with a grin. “How about some breakfast?”
We ate quickly, just some crackers, cheese, and some tinned fruit.
“There’s trail mix, too,” Jethro said, holding it out. “But we can save it for later, as a snack.”
“How far are we from where we’re going?”
“About ten hours, give or take. Maybe closer to twelve. The last part of the journey will be the hardest but we need to do it in daylight, it’ll be too tricky otherwise.”
“Why?” I couldn’t imagine what would be so difficult we couldn’t traverse it with a full moon or the flashlights in our backpacks.
Jethro took me by the shoulders and turned me around, pointing at a mountain in the near distance. “Because we’re climbing that.”
We washed up at a nearby stream, the water cold. The day was warm though, the sun already heating the ground, so we dried off quickly as we got underway.
“So you don’t believe in one-Alpha, one-Omega?” Jethro asked as we walked.
“My father says it’s nonsense.”
“General Benson, right? He’s your father.”
“Right.”
“Nonsense, huh? Do you remember how old you were when you first heard him say that?”
It was an odd question, but I scoured my memory. “I was seven. A friend in my class at school, another Omega, loaned me a book, Stars and Crosses.”
“I know it. That’s the fairytale about the Omega locked away in a dungeon by the witch and all the Alphas try to rescue him.”
“Yes. Except the witch put a spell on the dungeon so only his true Alpha can free him. The other Alphas know they’re not his, so they try to break the rules to reach him but it doesn’t work. And they try to stop his own Alpha from coming to free him.”
“But his Alpha is brave and fearless. He frees him and they live happily ever after. It’s a good story. They made it into film a few years ago. I heard the South banned it. And the book too.”
“That was later. I took the book home and I read it. At the dinner table one evening I asked my mother something about it and Father overheard. He made me leave the table, go get the book, and bring it to his office. He tore it to pieces in front of me and threw them into the fire. He told me it was lies and trash and insisted I tell him who I’d got it from.”
I could still remember that fear inside me as he yelled and the awful sound of tearing pages. Then the hiss of the fire and the smell of burning paper as tears slid down my cheeks.
“What did you tell him?”
I hesitated. Would Jethro want to hear that I was a liar as well as a coward?
“I said I’d taken it from the free library beside the grocery store. I didn’t want to get my friend in trouble. Father wasn’t happy with my answer but he let it go.”
“Sounds like you got off lightly.”
“Not exactly. I got grounded for a week, and every Sunday after that my father would bring me into his office and have me kneel on the floor while I read and recited from the Omega Intake Center’s Handbook. He’d quiz me on what it meant until I could answer word perfect. Anytime something contentious came up, in school or in the media, he’d tell me how wrong it was and counsel me not to be foolish and fall for their lies.”
“He indoctrinated you.”
My head whipped around at his words. “What? No.”
“He brainwashed you, told you all the rhetoric about an Omega’s duty, never letting you hear anything but doctrine from the Intake Centers. You were seven, Miles.”
“Father says our first duty is to our country. And an Omega serves their country by submitting to their Alpha team.”
“Did he tell you that your Alpha team would lock you in a room and take turns forcing themselves on you?”
“They didn’t… they just put their hands on me.”
I tried not to think about the way that last Alpha had touched me.
Jethro slowed to a stop beside me, staring at me incredulously. “Didn’t you ever wonder why most Alpha-Omega stories are love stories?”
“I was never allowed read them after that first one. Father says people romanticize what is a functional bond.”
“The reason Alpha-Omega stories are romances is because the bond is inherently sexual. For an Alpha to get the benefits that come with bonding, they have to-”
I held both my hands up to stop him. I couldn’t hear this, I couldn’t.
“No. No. Father said people confused the bond, perverted it with emotions like love, with sexual ideas, he…”
But then I thought back again to that Alpha who’d straddled me, who’d pressed his mark to mine. I knew the truth. I’d known it from the moment the first Alpha had stepped into my cell.
“He lied to me. He… he was happy to let them…”
Those butterflies in my stomach were back, beating their wings hard. I felt myself go pale, felt my body sway, and then Jethro was diving toward me.
I threw up and fainted. Or fainted and threw up. The order didn’t seem important, not now. I came to, a low voice humming next to my ear, a wet cloth pressed to my forehead.
“Don’t try to move just yet,” Jethro cautioned me when I shifted in his arms. I let myself relax against him.
We were sitting at the base of a tree, our packs lying on the ground next to us.
“There are some things you need to know, things you should have been told long ago and things that you’ve been lied to about. The only trouble is, I’m not sure if you’re ready to hear them. Do you remember how Stars and Crosses ended, did you ever get that far?”
Nodding my head, I tried to make myself more comfortable. For being on the run, we seemed to spend a lot of time sitting around.
“I read to the end. That’s why I had questions.”
“Then I guess the easiest way to explain it is, witches and dungeons aside, the basic story there is true. There are Alphas and Omegas in this world, alongside normal everyday humans. Both Alphas and Omegas bear marks that lie dormant on their skin until one day they light up in a special pattern. The pattern is mirrored on an Alpha and Omega pair, just like ours. It’s there to help us find each other. When we see each other, the emotions between us are like a supernova, loud and bright.”
“Like lust.”
“Lust is definitely part of it, and there’s no shame in that. It’s part and parcel of what cements our connection to each other. It’s what’s under the lust that counts, that grows stronger after you’re bound to each other.”
“What’s that?”
“Love. An Alpha and Omega fall in love, they bond, create a family, and live happily ever after. I might be simplifying the happily ever after bit but I’ve never met an unhappy Alpha-Omega couple.”
“The Omega recruits the Intake Center showed, in their videos and brochures, they always looked happy. But it was all fake. They made me do a photo shoot just like that before they shaved my hair.”
I ran my hand over it, feeling lost again as my fingers felt my shorn scalp.
Jethro’s arms around me tightened. “They were stripping you of your identity, of the things that make you who you are.”
“How much of it was lies? All the things they told me, all the things my father taught me.”
“I don’t know exactly. We’ll have to check each piece of information as we go along, try to work it out.”
The ‘we’ surprised me.
“You’ll help me?”
“I’ve broken some pretty important laws to free you. Put in context, correcting some misinformation is no big deal.”
Maybe not to him, but to me it was. The foundation of who I was, of my purpose in the world, has been torn out from under me.
“We need to get moving again, Miles. Are you okay to walk?”
“I think so.” I got gingerly to my feet, happy when my legs held my weight.
A thought occurred to me, a worrying one. “How come the lust and stuff didn’t happen when we met? Am I… broken?”
His hand cupped my cheek. “You’re not broken. I think everything they did to you has confused your body, and mine too. It’ll be put right, I’m sure of it.”
“What if it isn’t?”
For the first time since I’d met him, Jethro looked uncertain. “It will be, I have faith in that.”
I didn’t know enough to have faith in anything. My beliefs were being turned on their head. But I suspected I already knew the answer to my next question. If things weren’t put right, and he and I didn’t or couldn’t bond, when the authorities caught up with us, I’d be sent back, sent south.
There was still a part of me that felt that was only right. I’d done a terrible thing, one that didn’t just affect me and my Alpha team, but also the next generation of Omegas. If they learned I’d escaped, after everything I’d said and done, it would expose the Center and my father as liars. Who knew how bad an impact that would have on the Omega who came online after me? None of them would voluntarily walk into an Intake Center ever again. But there was a part of me that wondered if maybe that was a good thing.