Page 88 of The Beta: Part Three
"Early," he says quietly. "Before sunrise."
She nods and picks her fork back up to silently finish her dinner. Everyone at the table is quiet after that. And it stays quiet when Talia and Reid start cleaning up after everyone eats. She leans on Reid most when she's upset. It used to hurt my feelings, but over time I started to kind of understand why she leans on him. He's quiet. He doesn't ask anything of her, outside of the odd request to eat some fucking food when she's being decimated by three adorable leeches. He just seems to know what needs to be done and does it. I have tried to be more like him, but the best I can do is to be more observant so I can try to anticipate what she might need; and then I usually end up getting in her way and on her nerves. I also can't be quiet. It's impossible. It goes against everything inside me.
"So…. are we going to just not talk until they get back? That might be a couple days. I can try, but I don't know."
Reid rolls his eyes at me, but Talia turns to face me and I regret making the joke. She's terrified. I couldn't feel it before, sometimes she's incredibly good at tamping that kind of thing down, but now that she's giving me her eyes, I can see and feel it. "They'll probably be home by tomorrow night. They're going to fly over, so it won't take long to get there, and then they'll go in and walk the omegas out the door and be right back home. They might even be home by dinner, especially if we have a late dinner."
"You don't have to do that," Talia says. "I'm scared and sad, but I'm not stupid. I know they need to go, and I understand why it's so important to Nathan. I can't help that I'm afraid. But Trent promised me that they wouldn't go in until the COTs clear out the rogues. It's going to be okay."
Chapter thirty-seven
Nathan
I have never been so torn in my life. Not when I abandoned the idea of Trent and me forming a pack with my cousin, Becker. Not when I had to watch my sister force a pack made up of my trainers and superiors make her submit to them. Not even when I traded a future of sleeping with females for a future with Jasper. I don't regret a single one of those things, but I might regret walking out the front door this morning. I feel gutted. Nothing has ever felt as shitty as Talia taking the hair tie off my wrist and putting it on hers when I bent to kiss her goodbye. Nothing.
"It's not that bad, is it?" Marcus yells. Trent and I are sitting across from him and Thaddeus in the astronomically loud little plane that's flying us to the extraction locale. "She'll be there when you get back to her."
I smile at him, but I don't have a productive answer. I know she'll be there; I just hate leaving her. Jasper's used to us going on missions. He has never been as distraught over it as Talia. Corso tried to make me feel better about it, telling me that it's because of the babies; but I know that's not it. Talia is going to burn everything to the ground if another, single, bad thing happens to our pack. She might be more inclined to be okay with us going on missions eventually, after things have been quiet and calm for a good, long time. Not now, though. Right now, she's on a precipice that requires complete and utter safety from every angle. And this trip is testing it.
True to his word, Trent holds us back until the last of the rogues have been escorted from the warehouse. A fucking warehouse. Cold. Empty. Unsecure. What the fuck. After all the shit at the compound we were held, they put all these omegas in a fucking warehouse. It doesn't make sense. It isn’t even the facility we were thinking it would be. No older omegas, children or babies, no rogues in training.
There are thirty-seven omegas sitting in small, huddled groups. There is one male omega among them, in the center of the largest group. He can't be older than eighteen or nineteen, at the most. The girl with the purple hair isn't here, and I'm a little nauseous about it. I haven't been able to talk to any of them yet, the COT units wanted me to wait until they got all the omegas' names so they could work on getting them home. Some of the omegas look well enough, some look pretty shell-shocked, and a few of them look absolutely haunted. The male omega is an even mixture of haunted and livid, and he keeps making eye contact with me. He's the one I want to talk to when I'm given the go ahead, which should be any minute.
"You ready for this?" Trent asks. I nod just as Marcus gives me the signal to start asking questions.
The male omega doesn't wait for me to come to him. He must have been waiting too. He stalks over to me, and I feel his rage before I catch his scent. "You're the one who found us, aren't you?"
"I am. Where is the girl with purple hair?"
He glares at Trent, then snarls at me. "They had it worse than the rest of us, you know. Because they were different."
"They who?"
"Maddie and Ashe. Maddie had the purple in her hair."
My stomach drops. "What do you mean, had?"
"A few days ago, some new alphas came in here in gear just like that," he points at one of the COT units, "and took Maddie and Ashe away. I overheard them say Milos… no. Minos. And I heard them talking about some asshole by the name of Mister Owens, and how they were pissed that they had to use their own money to buy the girls coats. Why didn't you come sooner? You could have saved them."
"They are alive, though? The last time you saw them, they were alive, right?"
He nods, still glaring and snarling. I'd be angry, too. "Ashe tried to save me from them that day the compound was raided. She paid for it, too. That was you, wasn't it? In that cell? The computer guy."
All I can do is tell him I'm sorry, and it isn't good enough.
"Fuck your sorry. I know you're here now, and you're probably the only reason anybody found us in the first place. Don't think I'm not grateful, because I am really fucking grateful. But I'm so angry. None of this should have happened. And for what? So some douche can figure out what makes an omega and omega? So he can take a personal interest in the one set of twins he found? Everything that happened to us,to me, was unnecessary."
"I'm sorry."
He sighs. "Yeah, sure. We didn't mention it to those guys," he motions at the COTs again, all of them, "because they look too much like the ones who came to take Ashe and Maddie; but half of us are about to go into heat in the next week. Our diets are all fucked up, so we're, thankfully, not producing the right amounts of pheromones to make it obvious. We all kind of synced up and it's been a real party with the rogues. I'd appreciate it if you'd get us the fuck away from all these unfamiliar alphas before the collective bomb drops. It would also be a good idea to get us away from each other, as shitty as that sounds right now." Then he walks back to rejoin the group he was with.
"So fucking awful." Trent says one of the things I've been thinking. "That poor kid. If he can pull himself through this, he's going to be a force. Jasper would really like him."
My bottom drops out of my stomach again, and I get an intense urge to call home. "Remember me telling you about the squeaking? The male omega I thought was Jasper?" Trent nods. "That's him. I heard him being…" I rake my hands through my hair. "I'm calling home. I need to hear Jasper and check on Talia." I pull out my phone and call Jasper.
"What's wrong?" he answers.
I'm so glad to hear his voice that I forget to tell him nothing's wrong and he has to repeat himself. "Nothing, Jasper. I just needed to hear you for a minute. I'm glad I came, but I want to get the fuck out of here now. How's Talia?"
