Page 1 of Unhinged Omega

Chapter

One

COSIMA

The world slowly comes into focus, like a radio tuning between stations. Static. Glimpses of clarity. Then static again.

I blink, trying to orient myself. My head feels like it's been stuffed with cotton, my thoughts sluggish and disjointed.

Did those bastards drug me?

No… this haze is familiar. A special cocktail of fugue and delirium my own brain has cooked up plenty of times before. I forgot how much worse it is without the pills.

How long has it been now?

Days? Weeks?

I try to direct my thoughts through the blips of lucidity in the static. The bunker. The pack of assholes interrogating me about Azarel, even if they called him by a name I've never heard before. The brief glimpses of consciousness in the back of a vehicle with heavily tinted windows gliding jauntily down rough terrain.

And through it all, the same darkness—the samenightmare—that kept pulling me under.

Glowing blue eyes.

Grinning jaws full of sharp teeth.

A monstrous face straight from hell.

It's a struggle to put it all in order, let alone string it into any logical sequence of events, and my head throbs from trying. So I decide to just focus on the pressing issues that actually matter right now.

The monster is coming for me, but that's nothing new. He's been hunting me my entire fucking life.

What matters right now is figuring out how I'm going to escape. The other things I need to deal with can wait.

First, I need to wake up.

A small underground room materializes around me as my vision clears. Bare concrete walls. A single flickering light bulb dangling from exposed wires. The flimsy cot beneath me creaks as I try in vain to move a little, every bar of the metal frame pressing at my back through the thin mattress. The pillow, if you can even call it that, stinks too.

At least I have my own personal metal bucket for a toilet and don't have to share with anyone. Although there’s no wall or even a curtain around it.

Just a toilet. Awesome.

This isn't where the Ghosts brought me. It's so much…tackier. And that's saying something. This is like something out of those crime novels Monty is always pretending to read when guests come over.

Even the sheets beneath me are threadbare. Is it possible for the thread count to be a negative number? The scratchy yellow cloth isn't even thick enough to hide the bloodstain on the mattress beneath.

Gods, I hope that's a bloodstain.

I try to move away, but my limbs are still heavy and haven't quite remembered who they belong to yet. Better just wait it out. A bitter laugh escapes my lips, startling me with its harshness.

"Sold again," I mutter, the irony not lost on me.

History repeating itself as usual. My mother, bought and shipped off to my father like a prized breeding bitch. And now me, passed from my father to Monty, and now whatever fucker the Ghosts sold me off to.

One set of hands to another.

It’s par for the course in the life of an omega. The moment that identifying designation mark appeared on my right hip, an unusual place for one to appear but clearly an omega mark all the same, my fate was sealed the same as my mother’s.

I should care. I should be terrified.

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