The Rusty Nail

 

I wait.

The hours crawl past. Mrs. Delgado brings Emery home. I tell her I'm tired from work. I make dinner—macaroni and cheese, the powder clumping because I forgot to stir it. Emery eats hers with enthusiasm. I push mine around the bowl and pretend to take bites when she looks at me.

"Riri?" She tilts her head, her dark eyes curious. "How come you're not eating?"

"I'm not very hungry, baby."

"Are you sick?"

"No. Just tired."

She accepts this the way children accept things—without question, without suspicion. She tells me about her day. About the game Mrs. Delgado taught her. About the bird she saw on the windowsill. Her voice is bright and bubbly, and I let it wash over me like water, like medicine.

When she's finished eating, I carry her to the mattress on the floor and tuck the blankets around her small body. She clutches her stuffed rabbit against her chest. The missing ear flops against her cheek.

"Riri?" Her voice is sleepy now, her eyes already half-closed.

"Yeah, baby?"

"I love you. You're the best sister in the whole world."

Something cracks inside me. A fault line I've been papering over for years.

"I love you too," I whisper. "More than anything. More than the whole world."

She falls asleep with a smile on her face. I sit beside her mattress for a long time, watching her breathe, counting the steady rise and fall of her chest.

My father doesn't come home.

I wait until midnight. I wait until one in the morning. I wait until the silence of the apartment becomes unbearable, pressing against my ears like water pressure at depth.

He doesn't come home.

I don't know where he is. I don't know if he's alive. I don't know if he knew about the men in suits, if he ran because he knew, if he left us here to face his consequences while he disappeared into whatever hole swallows men like him.

In the twenty-two years I've known my father, this has got to be one of the shittiest things he's ever done. And that's a high bar. That's a bar set in the earth's core.

I mean, how could he? How could he look at his daughters—his own flesh and blood—and see nothing but collateral? How could he sign papers that put our bodies on the line for his mistakes? How could he disappear without a word, without a warning, without even a goodbye?

I feel all the emotions at once. Frustration. Anger. Sadness. They pile on top of each other, layer after layer, until I can't tell where one ends and another begins. It's suffocating. It's a weight on my chest, a hand around my throat, a scream trapped in my lungs that can't find its way out.

I can't stay here. I can't sit in this apartment one more minute with my father's ghost and my sister's sleeping face and the documents on the table gleaming like a death sentence.

I grab my jacket and go.

The bar is called The Rusty Nail. It's a dive three blocks from the apartment, a place where the lighting is dim and the bartender doesn't ask questions. I've been here twice before—once after my mother's death anniversary, once after a night shift that left me so hollow I couldn't face the silence of my own room.

It's not a place for Omegas. Omegas don't drink alone in bars in this district. It's not safe. It's not smart. It's asking for trouble.

But tonight, I don't care. Tonight, trouble feels like a destination.

I slide onto a stool at the far end of the bar, away from the other patrons. The bartender is a Beta woman with gray-streaked hair and tattooed arms. She looks at me, looks at my neck—checking for a claiming bite, checking for signs of designation—and then looks away.

"What'll it be?"

"Whiskey. Whatever's cheapest."

She pours. The glass slides across the bar. I catch it, lift it to my lips, and let the liquid burn its way down my throat.

It's cheap and sharp and tastes like regret. I drink the first glass fast, letting the heat settle in my stomach, letting the numbness start its slow crawl through my veins. The second glass goes down slower. By the third, my hands have stopped shaking.

The emotions don't subside.

That's the thing about drinking to forget. It doesn't work. The alcohol doesn't erase anything. It just makes the feelings fuzzier around the edges, like a photograph going out of focus. The anger is still there. The sadness is still there. The fear is still there, coiling in my stomach like a snake.

I think about my father. The man who was supposed to protect me. The man who sold Omegas' information for pocket money, who gambled away our rent, who looked at his daughters and saw not people but potential collateral. I remember the day my mother's funeral ended, how he didn't cry, how he spent the whole service checking his phone. I remember the first time I came home and found him gone, the first time I realized that "going out for milk" meant "don't expect me back for three days."

I think about Emery. Her small hands. Her sleepy voice. The way she said I love you like it was the most obvious thing in the world. She trusts me. She trusts me to protect her, to keep her safe, to fix everything the way I've always fixed everything.

But I can't fix this. I can't fix a sixty-thousand-dollar debt. I can't fix a father who sold us out. I can't fix a world that wants to grind Omegas into dust and call it protection.

I should take this as a sign to stop drinking and go home. I know I should. The thought is there, clear and rational, somewhere in the back of my mind. Go home. Sleep it off. Figure something out in the morning.

But I don't. I keep drinking. The glasses keep coming, one after another, until I'm sure I can't feel my legs anymore. The room blurs at the edges. The other patrons fade into background noise. I am alone in the center of my own storm, the whiskey turning my blood to warm syrup, my thoughts to static.

But the emotions don't subside.

I need an outlet. I need to scream or hit something or fall into a sleep so deep I don't dream. I need someone to hold me up. I need someone to tell me it will be okay, even if it's a lie.

I think of my sister. I think of her small face, her trusting eyes. I think of what those men will do to her if I can't find the money. I think of her on an auction block, surrounded by hungry Alphas, sold to the highest bidder like cattle.

Anyone. Please. I need—

That's when I feel his presence.

It's not a sound. It's not a sight. It's a shift in the air, a change in pressure, the way the atmosphere tenses before a thunderstorm. The bar doesn't go silent, but something inside me goes very, very still.

The hair on my arms stands up. The bite mark that isn't there yet—that won't be there for hours, that I don't know is coming—tingles like a premonition. My Omega instincts, buried under four years of suppressants, stir weakly somewhere deep inside me.

Someone is watching me.

I turn on my stool, and he is there.

He stands near the door, scanning the room with the slow, deliberate gaze of a predator who knows he has already cornered his prey. Tall. Dark hair. A face cut from stone. His suit is expensive—charcoal gray, perfectly fitted, the kind of clothing that costs more than I make in six months. His presence fills the doorway, fills the room, fills every corner of my awareness until there is nothing else.

He is an Alpha. I don't need my sense of smell to know. It's in the way he stands, the way the space around him seems to bend, the way my body reacts before my brain has a chance to intervene. My heart accelerates. My skin prickles. The base of my spine floods with heat, sudden and unwelcome, a physical response I can't control.

His eyes find mine across the dim room.

And I know—with a certainty that terrifies me more than the debt, more than my father's betrayal, more than everything—that this man is not here by accident.

He is here for me.

I just don't know it yet.