Page 62 of Royal Omega

It might be time for me to build a nest.

Planning out how I might swipe some of Pack Five’s clothes to make my nest more comforting, I neglect to notice my mother waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs. The other omegas are crowded around her, gushing, which is exhausting, and I would rather avoid all of it, but of course, my mother’s sharp eyes find me in the crowd, and she beckons me forward.

“There’s my daughter! Friends, I take it all of you have noticed how very special Carissa is by now. She’s told me so much about all of you. I’m so glad my Carissa has such close friends and allies here.” Her shrewd gaze moves from one of the omegas to the next, clearly trying to suss out which of them is my friend, and which my enemy.

She’s wasting her time, of course. They’re all my enemies.

“Mom, can we talk alone for a few minutes?” I ask.

“Of course, love bug, though the producers say I’m not allowed upstairs. Some kind of insurance bullshit, I imagine. Let’s go sit over here.” She bids farewell to the others, who all wander up the stairs looking far more stricken than they should by the loss of my mother’s company. She’s always been so good at making people feel comfortable, even when they don’t deserve it.

I used to envy that skill. Now I wonder if it makes her more difficult to trust. God knows I can’t trust her.

We sit across from each other in a little lounge area, cameras surrounding us. My mother seems perfectly at home with the lens in her face. She acts as if it’s not even there.

Or maybe she always acts like there’s a camera on her, now that I think about it.

“We need to talk about Conrad, Mother.”

My mother lets out a dramatic sigh. “I imagined as much. I assume you two have compared notes at this point?”

“We have. And it seems like we were misled. Were you part of this, Mother?”

She doesn’t hesitate. “You know that I was. You aren’t stupid, Carissa, though you go out of your way to make things harder on yourself. You must have figured out by now that I took matters into my own hands.”

My palms are sweating, and I can feel my pulse starting to beat faster. Anger and resentment combine with resignation, exhaustion, and a lifetime of bitterness. “Conrad will never trust me again,” I say. “And... I think I still love him.”

My mother scoffs. “For heaven’s sake, Carissa. You never loved him. You were 18, and you’d known each other all of five minutes. You didn’t even know what love was. And besides, a match is about more than instinct. It’s about compatibility between families. And you and Conrad just weren’t compatible.”

“We could have been, if you didn’t fuck over his family.”

“Carissa, why are you starting an argument with me?” my mother asks. “What do you want me to say? That we made a mistake? Maybe we did. But we also revealed a weakness in that family. And look at him now. Years later, he’s still obsessed with what happened to him when he was a teenager.”

“His parents died! You practically killed them!”

“I did nothing of the kind. I made a business deal. Well. Your parents and I made a business deal. If those two betas couldn’t manage their emotions well enough to handle financial ruin, they shouldn’t have gotten into the business game in the first place. By the way, what you did with the Kaplans? That can’t happen again, Carissa. Connecting Bobby with that friend of yours. What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking that he didn’t deserve to be ruined by my family just because he was stupid enough to think we would help him!” I shout.

“What do you have against us, Carissa? What have we ever done to make you think you’re on someone else’s side? You lived in our house, used our money —”

“Not in years, Mother.”

“Fine. You’re independent now. Is it worth it?”

“It’s worth it every fucking time you bring up money. It’s worth it because you can’t throw it in my face. I’d rather be poor and not destroy people than rich and —”

“Listen to yourself! You’re just a child, Carissa. Underneath it all, you’re nothing more than a child. You still think that you can escape your upbringing. That you can pretend your childhood and the education and privilege we provided can be given back. You were raised on the blood of a thousand companies, and the families who created them, young lady. You can’t ever wash that off.”

“I know that,” I say. I can feel the tears rising in my eyes, but I’m not going to let them fall. “I know exactly how much of who I am comes from your money and your cruelty. There’s nothing I can do about that, though. All I can do is try to lead the life I want now, and try not to do any more harm. I would never purposefully hurt someone the way you hurt Conrad’s parents. Or the way you were planning to hurt the Kaplan pack.”

“It’s the cost of doing business, Carissa. You’re naive if you think it isn’t.”

“What are you doing here, Mother? Really. Why did you come? Was it just to remind me that I have blood on my hands? To bring me down a peg?”

“No, Carissa, of course not.”

“Then why? It certainly wasn’t for my benefit.”

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