Page 4 of Bliss & Her Idols

Sometimes, one of them even joins Chase and Piper on their nightly walk through Haven.

Piper passes out hot drinks and food to anyone who is homeless or simply looks hungry and wants something. He’s a well known sight now. Some people wait for him outside the coffee shop.

Piper is adamant about never missing an evening because he knows what it’s like to cry with hunger pains.

We all do.

After my dads were executed, when Piper was still in kindergarten and I was only fifteen, we lost everything.

Our pack had been wealthy and ran a business. It was devastating to lose my parents, the house, everything we owned…and my elite Omega status in a single day.

To be labeled as criminals.

Sobbing, I tried to hide my little brother behind me, but Alpha officials grabbed us both and pulled out our wrists to lock the steel Rej bracelets around them, which would mark us forever as Reject Omegas.

It didn’t matter that we were kids.

Our Omega dad had been executed as ‘rebellious’. The sin was passed on through the generations to his Omega children.

Because there are only two ways to be marked as a Reject:

Be rebellious

Be defective

The Traditional governmentchose to throw us away like trash before we’d even become adults. So, Piper and I chose to take it as a challenge to be asrebelliousas we could.

Suck on that, Traditionals.

I refused to allow Piper to take that bracelet as the sign of shame that it was intended to be.

As the kids who bullied him every day at school sneered that it was.

For the Wolf Siblings, it would be a badge of honor.

Chase was only seventeen, when he suddenly had custody of two Omega kids. He dropped out of school and scrambled to work as many jobs as he could to get us off the streets.

Yet for a couple of years we either lived in roach infested motels, damp flats, or if we couldn’t pay the rent, the streets.

Then Chase trained as an illegal cage fighter, and we began to experience the first stability and hope that we had a future.

Chase thinks that I didn’t know back then how he earned his money. He was missing for days and nights on end, however, before coming back limping and bruised, trying to hide it behind smart, white suits.

I guessed.

I’m not sure that I’m over the guilt of still being relieved that he was earning enough for us to eat.

Chase asked Piper and me what we wanted to do with the extra money. All he’s ever wanted is for us to achieve our dreams.

This coffee shop is important because it represents the blood, bruises, and broken bones that Chase suffered to help Piper and I become something rare:independent Omegas.

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