Chapter 3

ELIRA POV

"That's her. The one who tried to steal the Alpha."

I heard it the second I stepped into the omega house, before I'd even set my bag down. Two women by the stairs, not bothering to whisper.

The omega house was one room split into six with curtains for walls. Someone had already taken the good corner by the window. I got the space nearest the door, where the draught came in every time someone left.

I didn't argue. I didn't have the strength left to argue.

By the second day, the whispers had names attached.

"Slept with her own sister's mate." A woman folding linen didn't even look at me as she said it. "Bold, for a bastard."

"Bet she planned it. Beta blood, no rank, no future. Had to try something."

I kept my head down and my hands busy, because the alternative was answering them, and answering them never went anywhere good.

On the third night, my bag went missing from under my cot.

I found it in the yard, ripped open, my things scattered across the mud. My mother's photo was face down in a puddle. The only piece of her I had left, and someone had thrown it in the dirt like rubbish.

"Give it back." My voice came out steadier than I felt.

The girl holding my hairbrush just laughed. "Or what?"

I lunged for it. I got two fingers on the handle before someone shoved me from behind and my knees hit gravel, hard, and then it was fists and elbows and someone's boot catching my ribs, and I curled around my stomach without even thinking about why.

Nobody stopped it.

The housekeeper found me the next morning still bruised and told me, flatly, that fighting among omegas reflected poorly on the house, and that if I couldn't control myself I could find somewhere else to sleep.

I didn't bother explaining. Nobody here wanted the truth. They wanted a villain, and I'd been handed to them fully formed.

Two days after that, I was crossing the training yard when three of them cornered me by the fence. I don't remember most of what happened. I remember the ground. I remember looking up and seeing my father and Marisol walking past on the far path, close enough to see, close enough to hear.

They didn't stop.

"Doesn't have this daughter," I heard my father say to someone beside him, not even bothering to lower his voice. "Wouldn't care if she dropped dead in that yard."

I lay there until the pain let me move, then I dragged myself to the healer's hut alone.

The healer was an older woman, gentle in a way nobody had been gentle with me in weeks. She checked my ribs, checked the cut over my eye, and then she paused with her hand still on my stomach and looked at me differently.

"When was your last moon cycle, love?"

I opened my mouth to answer and realised I couldn't remember. I counted backward. Once. Twice. My stomach dropped through the floor.

"I don't know," I whispered.

She didn't need to say it. I already knew.

I sat in that hut for a long time after she left, one hand pressed flat against my stomach, and something strange happened. Under all the fear, under the shame that wasn't even mine to carry, there was a small fierce heat starting to burn.

A child. Mine. Not Priya's, not Marisol's, not anybody's to slap or shame or throw scraps at.

That night I heard the news from two omegas gossiping outside my curtain wall. The engagement announcement had been moved up. Kian and Priya, official within the month.

I lay very still and listened to my own heartbeat and made a decision that had nothing left of hope in it and everything to do with survival.

I could not raise a child in a house that had thrown me into the mud and walked past without stopping. I would not let my son or daughter grow up learning their worth from people who had never once looked at me and seen a person instead of a mistake.

I was leaving. Not sent away this time. Leaving on my own two feet, while I still had them.

I packed what little I had left in the dark, three hours before dawn, and slipped out past the sleeping guard at the omega gate, and I did not look back at the pack that had never once been my home.

What I didn't know yet, walking away with nothing but a bag and a secret growing inside me, was that the truth waiting for me in the human world was going to be so much worse, and so much bigger, than anyth

ing that had happened to me here.