“Rutting condition. Meant that a good eighty percent of the time when I finished a rut, my body would trigger the next instantly.” Sedatives were too expensive and hard to time right. Plus, I couldn’t be out forever.
“Did you have anyone to help?”
I shook my head. “Estranged family. Didn’t want anything to do with me when I was diagnosed, not that they were ever worth much.”
“And there was no treatment at all?”
“Not really. There’s a black market drug—an injection that keeps an alpha alert during a rut. With that I could still work just enough to get by.”
“Alert? Like you were awake?” She sounded shocked. And I realized that this sweet omega, more than anyone else I’d ever known, understood that pain. She had been awake for her heats.
Not many alphas would touch that injection, because it was a living nightmare to be conscious through a rut. “It meant I could work odd jobs. Sometimes I’d skip the drugs and go into the rut fights for pay—not that it was much, but I could do them all the time.”
Those drugs destroyed my mental health and made the cycles more vicious.
“For how long?”
“I presented when I was seventeen, so a good few years.”
It had been a blur, though, and I’d lost track of time. I’d lived in a small room with locks on the inside for the days I couldn’t dose myself, but it wasn’t enough.
“And you… were alone?” she asked, voice broken with sorrow. “All that time?”
“More or less. The place I lived was a cheap shelter for alphas like me. Used to talk with some of the guys when we were lucid.”
I didn’t mention that I stopped after a while.
Lost too many.
The suicide rate was off the charts, and if I’d kept watching them go like that, I knew I’d be next.
“Why did they put you in here?” she asked.
I swallowed. “Bought a bad injection and the rut hit me when I was out on the street. I ended up hurting a group of nineteen-year-old boys. They survived, but I was dragged into detention. Because of the publicity and my late-stage diagnosis, they didn’t send me to a hospital—they threw me straight into the Cimmerian Vaults.”
“And then… it got better down here?” she asked.
I grinned, shooting a look at Sin. “Your scent match is one crazy mother—” I cut off as she shot me a glare. “…Trucker,” I amended. “Bonding an omega is the only known cure but sometimes it doesn’t work. Then they’d have all been trapped in a bond with an insane alpha.”
Fucking nuts. But Sin hadn’t even blinked, taking the chance without question.
He’d decided he wanted us, and that was that.
“Well…” she said after a pause. “I can’t wait to be a part of your second chance.” She glanced from me, to the others.
“Please, Little Omega. Just three more days, and we’ll get you more keys than you’ll know what to do with.”
She wrinkled her nose all cute-like, side-eying Sin as though she needed confirmation that I was telling the truth, but he gave her a reassuring nod.
“Fine,” she sighed dramatically, her dainty arms wrapping around my waist. “IsupposeI can wait.”
39
Two days until appeal
PHANTOM
Theoneupside of Crescent stealing keys (and I would maintain to the death that there was onlyoneupside, and shehadto be banned from doing it again) was that robbing the contraband room was much easier now.