Page 12 of Savage Surrender

I hit send. Delivered. appears beneath it.

Tristan sticks his head through the doorway. “We got all the cameras. Hey, where did that phone come from?”

Freddie laughs. “Dude.”

Tristan’s eyebrows climb.

“That’s concerning as fuck.” He grimaces and leans in to read the message.

“So is the fact that all of you have been working with Ezra and Winston behind my back.”

“We—”

There’s a chime. Doorbell, I think.

Weller answers it. A bright-blonde woman in a gray suit stands outside holding a cream envelope and a single white sheet clipped to a folder. She introduces herself as Sara, Dr. Montgomery’s assistant, and is suspiciously free of wrinkles even though I can tell she’s not much younger than him. She looks over us, her face unimpressed with what she finds.

“Ms. Quinn. Dr. Montgomery asked me to deliver this personally.” She offers me the envelope. “Attendance is mandatory. Attire will be provided. He has requested that you attend a fitting tomorrow.”

Then she slides the white sheet free. “This is a formal notice of noncompliance regarding the destruction of estate property.”

I snatch it out of her hand.

Any further destruction of estate property will result in your immediate removal from the shared residence and placement in secured private quarters. Contact with bonded parties will be suspended. Reinstatement of shared housing will occur only at Dr. Montgomery’s discretion.

The words contact with bonded parties will be suspended stab through me. The bond convulses, and my fingers crease the page out of reflex.

The place where I hid Winston’s phone still aches when I shift my weight. Today, that small piece of my body was the only place his guards weren’t allowed to search. A different instruction could take even that.

Weller takes the page from my hand.

The assistant is gone before anyone can argue. Owen’s hand hovers beside my hip. I catch his wrist and pull his arm around me. The others close in, all four scents mixing until Sara’s perfume disappears.

A dinky little paper warning instead of hauling me off? I’m counting that as a win for the day. I stay inside the pack as we return to our wing, walking past broken cameras and the gouges I carved into the walls. I sit on the arm of the couch and turn the cream envelope over in my hands.

Heavy cream paper. Gold edges. My name written across the front in calligraphy so perfect it might be printed. It looks like a wedding invitation, which is a lot of effort for a summons. I tear it open.

Dr. Emmett Montgomery requests the honor of your presence at an evening gala celebrating twenty-four years of achievement in omega science. Cocktails at seven o’clock. Dinner and presentation to follow. Formal attire will be provided.

Raised gold numerals mark the date. I read the invitation twice before handing it to Weller so I can stop touching it. “A party.” My laugh sounds empty. “He collars all of you like dogs, then throws a party.”

“It’s an opportunity,” Tristan says, already leaning over Weller’s shoulder to read the card. “Every person we might need to reach, drunk and distracted under the same roof⁠—”

Every person Montgomery wants to impress, under one roof. He wants to put me on display. Fine. I can stand in his ballroom and tell them what their famous doctor did to my mother and me. I can call him a rapist before his security drags me out.

“Bianca.” Weller’s thumb goes still over the lower corner of the card.

“What?”

He turns the invitation toward me but doesn’t let go. “The date. It’s your birthday.”

I take the invitation back and look again. He’s right.

I stopped counting birthdays somewhere around my first year at the refuge, when the days blurred into one long winter. No one celebrated because no one knew the girl I had been before. Birthdays belonged to Bianca from Sycamore Lane - the girl in the blue dress who let four alphas kiss her at the waterhole.

That girl is dead. I haven’t celebrated since I turned eighteen. Since the bee necklace. Since the night in the water when I thought my life was finally beginning, right before it was torn apart.

“I didn’t notice.”