Page 4 of Beautifully Scarred Omega

Griffin tilts his head, considering me. “What would you like to happen to them?”

The answer rises up from somewhere deep and dark, a place I didn’t know existed before all of this.

“I want them to die.”

The words are out before I can stop them.

I expect shock or horror, some lecture about due process or the value of human life.

Instead, the three alphas exchange a look and then Griffin nods, once, like my answer was the only answer that made sense.

“You’re going to get what you want, Sophie.”

CHAPTER 2

Sophie

Istay in Sentinel’s medical wing for another two weeks.

The nurses change my bandages and keep an eye on my healing wounds. Physical therapists come to help me rebuild muscles that wasted away during my captivity. A doctor explains that some of my scars will fade with time, but the deeper ones that they cut into me on purpose will be permanent.

I don’t cry. Somehow, since that basement in Detroit, I haven’t been able to.

When did everything start going wrong? The question keeps echoing in my head, over and over again, and the memories come flooding through, like water gushing through a weathered dam.

I had just turned twenty-one and my first heat was coming. I could feel it building under my skin, a pressure I couldn’t stop. Unfortunately, my stepfather noticed too.

That’s when he decided I was finally worth something. Good, he said, his lip curling as the first scent of me filled the house. Now someone will actually pay to take you off my hands.

They came for me on a Friday. I remember it clearly because I was ironing my stepfather’s favorite blue shirt, working slowly, careful not to leave a single wrinkle. The last time he found one, I’d made the mistake of telling him he could iron his own damn shirts. He held the hot iron against my thigh and told me to do better next time, or he’d give me something worse to cry about. The television was still on in the next room, some daytime program droning away, as though it were any ordinary afternoon.

There were three of them, and they filled the doorway, alpha scent rolling off them thick enough to close my throat.

I ran. I made it as far as the kitchen before one of them caught me around the waist and lifted me off my feet like I weighed nothing. I clawed at his arms and screamed until my voice cracked, and he only laughed, a low, delighted sound. She’s a hellcat, this one.

My stepfather laughed too, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, watching them carry me out of his house. You’ll have to train her, he said. Just like I did her mother.

Oh, you can bet we will. The one holding me tightened his grip until my ribs ached. This only makes it more fun for us.

They hauled me out into the daylight. I twisted around and swung at the alpha gripping my arm, putting everything I had behind it. He caught my wrist before the blow ever landed, almost lazily, and that was the moment I understood how powerless I really was.

For the first week, they were almost kind. They gave me a room of my own upstairs. Rourke smiled when he showed it to me and told me to make myself comfortable, that they wanted me to be happy here. As if I were a guest, and not someone who’d been dragged screaming from my stepfather’s kitchen days before.

I locked the bedroom door and refused the meals they left outside it, convinced that someone would notice I was gone.

But no one came.

When they realized I would never do anything willingly, they moved me to the basement.

This should teach you, Rourke had said, shoving me down the stairs. We paid good money for you. Your stepfather promised us an omega who knew her place. Instead we got a frigid bitch who can’t even produce slick.

They wanted their money’s worth. And they intended to get it.

The first time, I fought so hard Silas had to hold a knife to my throat to keep me still. The second time, I bit Rourke until I tasted the sharp tang of his blood and he broke two of my ribs in retaliation. The third time, the fourth, the fifth—I kept fighting.

And every single time, they took another piece of me with them.

Not just my body. My body I could have survived losing. They took my belief that fighting mattered. My hope that someone would save me. My belief that I was a person who deserved to be saved at all.