Some of my anger must have shown on my face because Lisbeth sighed and gave me an indulgent smile.
“Are you hoping she choosesyouas her meal ticket?” she asked.
I gritted my teeth. “Absolutely not.”
“Good. Because if I find out you’re fucking the Omega, I’ll fire you both. Go.” She waved her hand dismissively.
Bridget was waiting for me in the hallway to the prep lab. She opened her mouth to speak, and I jerked my head towards the door to the main clinic. We stepped into the brightly lit corridor.
“This iswrong,” she said emphatically. She crossed her arms tightly over her chest as she glared up at me. “I don’t care what she says; it’s wrong.”
“I know. I agree with you. But if we fight back, she will get rid of us. She just told me as much.”
“Then we go above her head!” Bridget hissed. “We take it to the IRB.”
I considered that. Many of the IRB members were the same ones who had sniggered behind Bridget’s back at the gala. They wouldn’t listen to her. “Lisbeth is right, though. One sample isn’t enough to pull the plug on the whole study. We’ll report it in the logs, and maybe someone will raise a flag.”
She looked away, furious. “This feels… icky. I don’t like it.”
“I don’t either. But I don’t think we have a choice. Unless you want to quit?” The thought of not seeing Bridget every day was too horrible to contemplate.
“No!” she said, outraged. “Mostly because I don’t have any other options for employment right now.”
“Then we wait. If anything else happens, we’ll reevaluate. Agreed?”
Bridget sighed, then held out her hand for me to shake. “Agreed.”
We shook, like business partners, and I did my best not to react to the feeling of her surprisingly strong hand in mine.
Chapter 13 - Bridget
No matter what I'd told Nathan, I was not going to just roll over and do what Lisbeth said. I would smile and nod and make everyone think I was, but I’d learned as a child there was plenty of secret rebellion I could do while pretending to follow the rules. The key was just not getting caught.
Whenever I had misbehaved badly enough, my fathers would lock me in my closet. I was never sure of the rationale behind it, but it had been excellent at curbing my outward displays of defiance.
Growing up, I didn’t have any context for how awful that was as a punishment. I had never told any of the girls I was allowed to socialize with — the daughters of other important Alphas — because they were so confident and poised I was sure they never had to be punished like I was. I’d never forget the look on my therapist Linda’s face when I mentioned it in passing. It felt strangelygoodto have someone else verify how wrong that had been.
But along with the claustrophobia, those hours spent locked away in the darkness had given me two skills: the ability to entertain myself and to pick locks. I started hiding bobby pins in my clothes and learned to jimmy the lock open one broken pinat a time. I flushed the broken pins down the toilet to hide the evidence.
Once I could manage the lock on my closet, I figured out the lock on my bedroom door. A world of exciting possibilities opened. I would creep out in the middle of the night to wander the rooms of our house like a ghost in the frilly white nightgowns they forced me to wear. I would haunt one of two rooms: the library, where I could sit in the window seat and read by the light of the streetlamps outside, or the living room, where I could watch television with closed captions, my hand clenched on the remote, ready to turn it off if I heard any sounds coming from my parents’ bedroom. The classic movie channel became my obsession. Everyone was witty and beautiful. There was usually a happy ending. My favorites were Katharine Hepburn films:The Philadelphia Story, The African Queen, Bringing Up Baby, Holiday.
The one time I’d been caught sneaking around, it hadn’t been by my parents. My mother and Sebastian had taken a rare trip, leaving me with Domenic. The tension of sitting alone with him at the dinner table had made me restless. Even at twelve, I knew there was something wrong about the way he looked at me. That night I’d crept downstairs and switched on the TV for a much-needed escape, all without noticing the boy on the sofa.
“What are you watching?” he asked, and I spun, my hand pressed over my mouth to stifle my scream. The boy was small, younger than me, with dark hair that stuck straight up as he rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. I would have been scared of him, if he hadn’t looked so fragile.
“Who are you?” I whispered.
“Marco,” he said, with the matter-of-fact innocence of a child. “Who are you?” He couldn’t have been more than six.
“I’m Bridget. Why are you sleeping on the couch?” I wanted to ask why he was in my house, but it’s not like he could have gotten in on his own.
“I was waiting for my mom and I fell asleep. Do you know when she’ll be… done?” He sounded apologetic. My stomach twisted with an emotion I couldn’t understand, but I knew it was wrong for a woman to be with Domenic, alone and at night, while my other parents were gone. But I swallowed my anger. It wasn’t Marco’s fault.
“No.” I looked at the clock. It was just past midnight. Uncertainty gripped me; how was I supposed to entertain a little boy? I knew I couldn’t go find his mom without Domenic getting angry. “Want to watch cartoons?”
It was the first and only time I spent with another child, outside of the strictly controlled social interactions with other packs’ children. Marco and I sat on the couch watching cartoons on mute.
“She says he’s my dad,” he whispered after a few minutes. “Do you think that’s true?”
