Page 34 of Defiant Beta

She blanches. “Oh God. The parents. They’ve already started pulling students out. This will ruin us.” Fumbling with the doorknob in one hand and a cell phone in the other, she slips out.

I refocus on the girl. She doesn’t look familiar, but I haven’t been here long enough to have taught all the students or recognize them all by sight. “This other girl. Do you know her name?”

“She was telling me when…” Her eyes fill with tears.

I grab the box of tissues from the nurse's desk and walk over to her. I don’t give the nurse any choice but to move out of my way before I drop into a crouch, offering her the box. “What’s your name?”

She takes a tissue and dabs her eyes. “Mercy.”

I lower the box to the floor in front of me. “And what were you doing outside Haven Academy this late, Mercy?”

Her sweet almond scent marked her out as an omega the second I walked into the room. She doesn’t look like she came from wealth with her ripped jeans, ragged haircut, and dirt crusting her nails.

The nurse clears her throat. “Professor Vincent, shouldn’t we?—”

“I understand you’re concerned,” I interrupt the nurse without turning around. “But clearly Mercy wants to talk about this. I’m just giving her an outlet.”

Control the narrative or lose control of the situation.

“Mercy?” I prompt.

Mercy sniffs and scrubs a hand over her eyes, wincing slightly as she lowers it back to her lap. “I want to talk.” Her eyes dart to the nurse, and she sits up taller in her seat as she focuses on me. “I wasn’t sure about Haven. My dad said I belong with other omegas because we kept hearing stuff in the news about… well, you know?”

Wealthy alphas taking advantage of omegas in free heat clinics. It’s been the front page of every newspaper for days, if not weeks.

“I do know,” I say.

“I just wanted to check the place out before I decided for myself.”

“And your father?”

She chews her lip, her gaze evasive. “Uh, he doesn’t know I’m here. I said I was going to a sleepover with a friend, but I came to check this place out instead.”

“So, you walk up to the front gate…” I prompt, surprising her from her slow blink. Maybe she expected me to offer to call her father or something.

“And a girl fell over the top.”

“Fellover the top…” The nurse echoes. “What on earth?”

Mercy doesn’t take her eyes off me. Her fingers tighten around the soggy tissue in her lap. “She’s from here. Had a uniform and everything. And she was saying something about the place being haunted.”

I’d known who it must be. There was only one person it could be outside those gates this late.

The germ of guilt that something terrible has happened to Delilah because I chased her from this school forms into a ball, heavy in my gut.

“Then what happened?” I ask.

“We were walking back to my car. I mean, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be going to a haunted school, and if she was running away, then that just proved this isn’t where I wanted to be. Then this other car starts up. A BMW. I hadn’t seen it before, but they must have parked up as I was walking to the gate, or maybe they were waiting for a girl to come out of the school.”

The ball in my gut develops spikes.

“Then?”

“The girl. Del… whatever her name is, she didn’t actually say. She shoved me toward the gate. Said I should press the button and yell, scream that someone was attacking me. She said I should climb it if I could, and I did. That’s how I cut up my hands. Then I ran.”

“And the girl?” I ask quietly.

Do not let this story end the way I think it will. I have more than enough blood on my hands. I don’t need more.

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