Bite my Tongue

Arielle

Life has never been easy or good to me.

That's not me feeling sorry for myself. That's just the truth. Some people are born into warmth—into mothers who smell like vanilla and fathers who lift them onto their shoulders and houses where the floors don't creak and the windows let in sunlight. I was born into a world that wanted me dead before I took my first breath.

My mother died when I was eighteen months old. Heat complication. That's what the shelter records say. What they don't say is that she couldn't afford the safe suppressants. What they don't say is that the cheap ones she bought from some guy in an alley were cut with something that made her heart stop. What they don't say is that my father didn't cry at her funeral. He was already calculating. Already planning. Already looking at his infant daughter and wondering what she might be worth someday.

I never met her. My mother. I don't have a single memory of her face, her voice, her scent. All I have is a photograph—creased at the edges, faded from years of being folded and unfolded—that I keep tucked inside my notebook. She had dark hair like mine. Dark eyes like Emery's. A smile that looked tired but real.

I look at that photograph sometimes. Late at night, when Emery is asleep and the apartment is quiet and the weight of everything presses down on my chest until I can't breathe. I look at her and wonder if she knew. If she felt it coming. If she was scared.

I wonder if she'd be proud of me.

Probably not. I'm not proud of me either.

My father's name is Marek Vale. He's a gambler. An addict. A man who sells information about unregistered Omegas to wealthy Alpha families for cash, then spends it all on cards and bottles and needles before the sun comes up. He's the kind of man who looks at his daughters and sees assets instead of children. The kind of man who disappears for days and comes back smelling like whiskey and lies.

The kind of man who leaves a six-year-old and a twenty-two-year-old alone in a shelter district apartment with nothing but overdue rent notices and a hot plate balanced on a crate.

I hate him.

I hate him so much it scares me sometimes. The anger lives inside me like a second heartbeat. It keeps me warm when the heat shuts off. It keeps me moving when my legs want to give out. It keeps me alive when everything else tells me to lie down and stop fighting.

But I don't stop. I can't stop. Because I have Emery.

She's six years old. She has our mother's eyes and our father's stubbornness and a laugh that sounds like sunlight. She sleeps with a stuffed rabbit she's had since she was a baby—its fur matted, one ear missing, stuffing coming out of a tear in its side—and she believes, really believes, that the world is good. That people are kind. That her big sister can fix anything.

I don't want her to stop believing that. Not yet. The world will break her soon enough. Let her have a few more years of thinking she's safe.

So I work. I work part-time at a café that pays under the table because Omegas aren't supposed to have jobs without their Alpha guardian's permission, and I don't have an Alpha guardian, and the system would rather see me starve than break its own rules. I work night shifts at a diner where the fluorescent lights buzz and the customers don't look at my face. I run errands for people in the underground—packages delivered, messages passed, questions never asked—because it pays cash and cash keeps the lights on and the suppressants in my system.

The suppressants.

I hate them almost as much as I hate my father.

They're cheap. Black market. Bought from a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy. They burn when I apply them—a sting that radiates down my collarbone and into my chest—but burning is better than broadcasting. Burning means I smell like nothing. Burning means no Alpha on the street can catch my scent and decide I look like an opportunity.

I've been taking them since I was eighteen. Four years of chemical erasure. Four years of scrubbing myself into invisibility. Four years of wondering if my mother felt this same burn before her heart gave out.

Emery doesn't know. She's too young to understand what I am, what she might become. She doesn't know that the world will treat her like a commodity the moment she presents. She doesn't know that our father has already calculated her worth.

I haven't told her. I don't know how.

So I work, and I hide, and I take care of her the best I can. I put food on the table—macaroni and cheese from a box, the cheap kind where the powder clumps if you don't stir it fast enough. I read her bedtime stories from a battered picture book about a rabbit who finds his way home. I braid her hair in the mornings and kiss her forehead at night and try not to think about the fact that she deserves so much better than this.

She deserves preschool. Daycare. A place where she can learn and play and make friends while I work. But the fees are insane. Everything costs money, and money is something that slips through my fingers like water no matter how tightly I cup my hands.

So while I work, I leave her with Mrs. Delgado.

Mrs. Delgado is our neighbor. A Beta woman in her seventies who lives three doors down and has grandchildren she never gets to see. She doesn't ask for payment. She says watching Emery reminds her of when her own kids were small. I bring her groceries when I can—eggs, bread, the dented cans from the discount shelf—but it's never enough. It's never close to enough.

I think about this as I walk home from my shift at the café. The sun is already down. The streets in the shelter district are narrow and cracked, the streetlights flickering like they can't decide whether to stay on or give up. A group of teenagers loiter on the corner, their laughter too loud, their eyes tracking me as I pass. I keep my head down. I keep my blockers strong. I keep walking.

My feet ache. My back hurts from bending over the espresso machine for eight hours. There's a stain on my shirt—caramel syrup, I think—that I'll have to scrub out before my next shift. I'm tired. God, I'm so tired. The kind of tired that sleep doesn't fix. The kind of tired that lives in your bones and whispers that this is all there is, all there will ever be.

But Emery is waiting for me. Emery is always waiting for me. So I keep walking.