"SWEET PEA"

KIVA POV. 

"Some people are handed a life. Others are handed a mop and told to be grateful for the floor."

I had learned a long time ago that the trick to surviving dinner in this house was to become invisible.

Not invisible in the way people mean when they say they just want to blend in, not that comfortable, chosen kind of invisible. The other kind

 You don't speak unless spoken to. You don't sit until everyone else has sat. You don't take food until everyone else has taken food, and even then you take the smallest portion, the piece closest to the edge of the dish, the one nobody else wanted, because taking more than that always somehow became a conversation about your character.

I had gotten very good at it over the years.

“Kiva,” my mother said without looking at me properly, “stop standing there like a ghost and pour the wine.”

“Okay.” I moved quickly around the table before she could get irritated again. The dining hall smelled like roasted meat and expensive perfume and the roses Paige insisted the servants replace every three days because she liked “fresh energy” around her while she ate. I reached Paige first, she held her glass out with one hand while still talking to Giovanni.

“I swear, if I see Celeste wearing the same dress as me next week, I’ll actually ruin her life.”

Giovanni laughed. “You say that every time.”

“Because I mean it every time.” I tried not to smile a little as I poured the wine. Then suddenly—

Paige’s elbow slammed hard into my arm, the tray slipped from my hands, red wine splashed directly down the front of Paige’s cream-colored dress. The room went completely silent, my stomach dropped, Paige stared down at herself for one second before letting out a sharp scream.

“Oh my God!”

I immediately bent down. “I’m sorry—I’m so sorry—”

“What is wrong with you?” Paige snapped, jumping to her feet. “Can’t you do one thing properly?!”

“I didn’t mean to—”

"Can you not even carry a plate without causing a disaster?" Giovanni, my older brother said.

"I didn't—"

"You didn't what?" He put his phone down flat on the table and turned to look at me fully, which was always worse than when he didn't bother. Giovanni's full attention was never a good thing. "You didn't spill wine all over the table? You didn't interrupt dinner? You didn't do the one single thing you're actually here to do, which is to serve a meal without making it into a whole production?"

“ She hit me, that's why it spilled on her, I didn’t mean too.” I said. "Im sorry."

He stood up.

I took a step back without meaning to.

He crossed the distance between us in three steps and the slap came fast, the back of his hand across my cheek, not the hardest he had ever hit me but hard enough that my head turned with it and my eyes watered immediately, that involuntary flooding that had nothing to do with crying and everything to do with impact.

The table went very quiet again.

"Useless," he said. He said it the way people say words they have said so many times they have stopped thinking about them. Flat. Automatic. "You are a completely useless omega. Do you understand that? This is the one thing you contribute to this house. This is it. You stand there and you serve food and you try not to destroy things and you can't even do that right."

“I said I’m sorry.” “Sorry?” he repeated harshly. “That’s all you ever say. Sorry, sorry, sorry.” I quickly started picking up the broken glass before anyone could yell again.

“I’ll clean it.”

“Of course you’ll clean it,” Paige snapped. “Look at my dress!” I looked up instinctively.

Big mistake. Her expression changed immediately when she saw my face. That smile I knew she did it on purpose, something twisted painfully in my chest, but I looked back down before anyone else noticed, Giovanni laughed coldly above me.

“I seriously don’t understand why we still keep her here.” Nobody answered him, He looked toward my father at the head of the table.

“Honestly, Father, why?” Giovanni asked. “She ruins everything she touches. What if she hurts Paige next? She already killed one sibling.”

Tamara.

Giovanni turned away from me and toward my father, who had set his tablet down and was watching the whole thing with the detached, faintly tired expression of a man watching a problem he had already made peace with not solving.

"Why is she still here?" Giovanni said. "Seriously. I'm asking you genuinely. Why are we still keeping a murderer in the house? What if she decides she doesn't like Paige one day? What if she—"

"Giovanni." My father's voice was even.

"No, I mean it. She's not stable. She's never been stable. She killed her own twin at five years old. That doesn't just go away because she's learned to carry a serving dish."

My father looked at him for a moment. Then he looked at me.

Not with warmth. Not with anything that lived near warmth. Just that same careful, evaluating look he gave to things he was trying to decide how to use.

"The girl handles the house," he said. "The cooking. The cleaning. The running of things. If she leaves tomorrow, who does that work?"

"We hire someone," Giovanni said.

“There are servants.” He added 

“And servants cost money,” my father replied calmly. “Kiva is already here. Might as well make her useful.”

Useful, That word always hurt more than the shouting, because at least shouting required emotion, like they actually cared but this was just complete and utter indifference, 

I stood there. I was still holding my cheek. The wine was still cold on my front. The serving dish was still steaming on the sideboard.

"You're right about one thing," my father said, not looking at me, looking at his screen. "She needs to be out of this house eventually. Sooner rather than later, I think. We should start looking at options."

"What kind of options," Giovanni said.

"Marriage," my father said, like it was as simple and as unremarkable as anything else he had said tonight. Like he was talking about selling off a piece of furniture that had been taking up space in the hall. "She's of age. She's not completely unpleasant to look at. Someone will take her if we frame it correctly."

"Who would want her?" Paige said, and she sounded genuinely curious, like this was an interesting puzzle and not a conversation about a person standing three feet away from her.

"Someone who needs an omega for a household," my father said. "Someone who doesn't ask too many questions. She's not worth much but she's worth something." He turned a page on his tablet. "I'll make some enquiries.” 

I put the serving dish down.

I didn't say anything. I didn't cry. I had learned, a very long time ago, that crying in front of them only ever made it worse, gave them something extra to comment on, gave Giovanni something extra to work with. 

I walked out of the dining room.

Down the corridor. Past the photographs on the walls, all the family portraits where I stood slightly apart from everyone else, slightly out of frame, slightly wrong in some way that the camera caught even when I was trying. Past the piano in the sitting room, covered with a cloth because no one in this family played and I was not supposed to, because apparently an omega spending time on music instead of useful work was something to be ashamed of.

I went upstairs. I took my dress off and rolled it into a ball,  I put on jeans and a jumper and my old boots and I picked up my bag from the end of my bed.

I sat on the edge of the mattress for a minute.

Today was my birthday.

I was twenty-three years old today and not one single person in this house had said anything about it. Not this morning at breakfast. Nothing. It had passed like any other Thursday, like any other forgettable day in a year of forgettable days. My father’s voice stiil played in my head,  he was going to marry me off…

Someone who doesn't ask too many questions.

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes.

I was not going to fall apart in this room. Not here. Not in these four walls that had watched too many things already and kept none of them.

I picked up my bag and I went back downstairs and out the front door. I didn't tell anyone I was leaving.I just went out into the cool evening air, down the front path, onto the street, moving before I had fully decided where I was going.

I knew where I was going.

I always ended up in the same place when things got bad enough. When the walls of that house started pressing in and the air in it started tasting like something I couldn't swallow anymore. There was only one place I had ever felt like something other than a problem to be managed.

The library on Greywell Street stayed open until ten on Thursdays. Most people didn't know about the practice room in the back, the small one with the upright piano that nobody ever booked because the keys were slightly uneven and the bench was wobbly and it didn't look like much. I had found it three years ago by accident and it had been mine ever since. Mine in the way that things are yours when nobody else wants them, which was the only way I had ever had anything.

I let myself in through the side door. The librarian on the late desk, Mr. Osei, looked up when I came through and clocked my face and didn't say anything, just nodded, which was the kindest thing anyone had done for me all day.

The practice room was empty. It was always empty.

I sat down on the wobbly bench and put my bag under the piano and I just sat there for a minute in the dark with my hands in my lap. The room smelled like old paper and wood polish and the faint ghost of someone's coffee from earlier in the day. The piano was slightly out of tune. The bench wobbled when I shifted my weight.

I loved it here more than I loved anywhere else in the world.

I turned the small lamp on. I put my hands on the keys.

And I played.

I didn't play anything in particular. Nothing with a name. I just played the way I played when I needed to stop being in my head and start being somewhere else, fingers finding notes that felt like what I was feeling, low and heavy at first, slow, then something that opened up a little in the middle, something that had a little more air in it. I played until my hands stopped shaking. I played until the handprint on my cheek stopped feeling like the most real thing about me. I played until the thing my father said started to feel like something that had happened to someone I knew rather than something that was happening to me.

I had been playing for maybe forty minutes when I felt the tears come.

I didn't fight them this time. There was no one here to see. No one to use it against me. I let them fall while I kept playing, which was something I had gotten quietly good at over the years, crying without stopping, feeling without breaking stride, keeping the music going even when everything else was falling apart.

Happy birthday, Kiva, but it was even a happy one, it was just a birthday

I was so deep in the music and the crying and the quiet small world of this room that I didn't hear the door.

I didn't hear the footsteps.

Then a voice behind me said softly—

“Who made my sweet pea cry?” I froze, my heart jumped painfully inside my chest– I turned around slowly. Fabian stood near the library doorway holding flowers in one hand his expression was gentle at first.

Then he saw my face properly.

Saw the red mark still burning against my cheek.

And something dangerous entered his eyes.

“Tell me their names,” he said quietly.