My parents still lived in the same house, and I still remembered the house phone number by heart. My mother had never had a cell phone. She wasn’t allowed one.
I dialed the number with shaking hands. I was going to hear her voice again.
The phone rang. Once, twice. I felt ill with nerves. As the phone continued to ring, doubts crept in. Maybe they had changed their number after all. Or had Domenic finally removed my mother’s connection to the outside world? We’d have to find another way to reach her.
“Crawford residence,” my mother’s voice said, startling me. She sounded resigned, or maybe just exhausted.
I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t form words. What did I even say? The words crowding the front of my brain were all unhelpful for the present moment.How could you let them hurt me? Why didn’t you take me away?
“Hello?”
I forced something out. Anything. “Hi, Mom.”
Silence for a few moments. “Bridget?” Her voice was shaky with emotion.
“Yes,” I said. “You said you wanted to talk—”
The line went dead. I pulled the phone away from my face. Had it died? No, the screen was still lit up.
I dialed the number again. It rang and rang, and no one answered. When the voicemail finally kicked in, I hung up and threw the phone on the bed.
Once again, my mother had disappointed me. And I’d made such a big deal out of calling her. What a stupid waste of time.
Tears gathered in my eyes. The anticlimax felt like a gut punch. Was I upset that I hadn’t had time to yell at her? Or that I hadn’t been able to tell her I still missed her despite everything? I wiped my eyes angrily. Both were true.
I listened to the voices outside the door. I could discern each of their voices, even though I couldn’t hear what they were saying. What would they say when I told them all of this had been useless? Could I hide in here for a while?
No, I owed them an update. I sighed and stood. My legs shook from unspent adrenaline.
They stopped talking as I opened the door. My eyes found Nathan’s first. His hair was mussed; his eyes wild. “I’m sorry. She… Well, she hung up on me. So I guess this was all useless.”
Nathan shook his head. “You’ve got to stop apologizing for things that aren’t your fault. Please.” He shot a wary look at Andrew.
There was another layer between us now, another wall. He’d been so… polite after watching me touch myself and describing the things he wanted to do to me. I wished, not for the first time in the last hour, that Omega hormones affected short-term memory so I could forget the whole thing.
Not true, my brain said, or maybe just the newly awakened Omega part of my brain that wanted to crawl inside Nathan’s skin.You’d never want to forget him telling you to take off your panties.
“What exactly happened, carissima?” Gabriel asked.
I threw myself onto the couch. “She answered, and I said it was me, then she immediately hung up. I tried to call back, but she didn’t answer.”
“This changes nothing. I will speak to my friends, and we will go a different route,” Gabriel said. “It will just be a little harder.”
“Right, but what’s the actual plan?” I asked, trying to contain my anger. “What are they going to do?”
Gabriel said nothing for just a fraction too long. “Well…”
“No,” I said, my voice rising. “No killing anyone. I want to know what’s going on.”
“We will notkillanyone. But we will… talk to Dr. Davis. We will tell him we want to talk about why he was making us pay for treatment, and then ask him to be helpful.”
In all the stress of the last few days — having a gun pulled on me, being tracked to Maggie’s house, Nathan almost dying — I’d forgotten about the payments. “The guy who threatened me said I was ‘fucking with the money.’ But it was just you paying for treatment.”
“He would have kept paying, if the treatment kept working,” Gabriel said grimly.
Andrew didn’t try to deny it. “I wouldn’t have been the only one. I can think of a dozen other guys who would pay twice what I did for the chance at a playing advantage.”
I exhaled roughly. “So the cells stop reacting like they should. I start trying to figure out why, and emailing participants. Marco and Domenic, for some reason, really care that this study doesn’t fall apart. Enough that they threaten me and Nathan to keep it quiet.”
