Page 107 of Broken Omega

Her father could be a problem. He didn’t want us to get the chance to meet each other.

I don’t know why he’s so against the idea of his daughter being with her true mate, and I might never discover his reason, but I need to be prepared for the inevitable uproar when he finds out what’s happened between us.

Trouble is, I’m not completely sure what he’s capable of. I was still looking into his businesses before I came out to the academy tonight. I haven’t figured out what he’s doing that isn’t quite legal.

All I know is that his morals aren’t black and white.

We’ll have to be careful. The longer we can stay under the radar, the better.

I pay up for the toiletries and the T-shirt.

The handful of notes left in my wallet afterward are going to have to get us by. I wish I’d been a bit less conservative with the amount I got out of the bank the other day. A couple hundred bucks really doesn’t stretch too far.

I make my way back to the apartment. There’s a big clock built into the side of a building across the street, an old-fashioned looking jeweler’s shop that looks like it shut down years ago. The clock still seems to be working. They really don’t make anything like they used to.

It’s just after ten o’clock now, which is probably something like an hour after we left Goldcrest.

The sudden buzzing from my pocket makes my heart sink.

No one calls this late. Not my parents, not Lana.

I take the phone out as I get to the apartment building.

The call is coming from the academy.

Shit.Should have known Edith was deadly serious when she told me to call her from the hospital.

This situation is going to escalate quicker than I thought.

My options are limited. Pick up and lie is the dicey option.

If I say all the right things, we might be safe for longer, but if I mess up there’ll be academy guards trawling all over the city looking for us before I have the good sense to hang up.

It’s not worth the risk. Better to leave Edith completely in the dark.

She has her hands full tonight, so maybe she’ll get distracted while she waits for me to call her back.

I wait for the call to end, and I turn my phone off.

Then, I go inside.

BROOKE

Ipick at the edges of my prosthetic, knowing it’ll be a pain in the ass to get it off without my adhesive remover. Thinking about the kit I spent years collecting and perfecting, left behind in my suite at the academy makes me a little sad. I can recompile it, but it’s probably going to take a while without access to my father’s funding. A decent brush set alone will set me back hundreds.

It’s a small price to pay for my freedom.

I know that, and I don’t regret what I did.

If I had one wish, it would only be that my father had listened to what I told him I wanted, when I knew high school was about to be over and I was going to be enrolled in the Omega academy.

I’d wanted to go to college. More specifically, a film and theater school with a makeup and effects program, though I didn’t reveal that part. I’d begged to be allowed to learn something before I had to be sent to the academy. I’d sworn I would go willingly to Goldcrest after my three years of college were up.

He’d shot those dreams down without wasting time thinking about them for one tiny, little second.

His defense was that I could pick a degree course while I was at the academy, any course I wanted, so there was no need to attend college before the academy.

Of course, I didn’t choose to do that, because that would have been letting the academy know I had bigger dreams than those of becoming a housewife and mother for a rich Alpha.

---