Page 24 of Savage Surrender

The presentation.

I don’t know which parts he wants to display. I hate the thought of anyone in that room seeing any of my personal details. A bunch of rich losers blowing smoke up each other’s asses.

My sperm donor takes the cake. He turned me into his demented little dolly. Maybe I was always predisposed to violence, but I became a murderer because of him. I lost myself because of him. I lost five years with my family. With my mates. And I can’t stop circling the ugly truth. He let her torture them. He knew they were mine and gave them to her anyway. In some sick way, I think he wanted to punish me because he lost my mother.

I don’t know what he’ll show. I don’t know who he plans to show it to.

All I ever wanted was to be a normal omega with a handsome-as-fuck pack of alphas. I didn’t want any of the rest.

My fingers settle over my knees beneath the robe. The skin there is slick with lotion, but the scars still rise beneath my touch. They couldn’t buff those out.

“Ah. Your dress has arrived.”

I’m finally permitted to stand. Blood comes back into my legs in hot, needling waves. Someone opens the robe and guides my arms out. Beneath it, matching lingerie - lacy, expensive, and selected by a stranger. Awkward.

Nope. Not dwelling on that thought. There are limits to the amount of homicide a girl can schedule for one evening.

As they turn me and lift my hair, I go somewhere better.

Smoke woke me before dawn.

Not enough to trigger panic. Enough to make me sit up, sniff once, and follow it barefoot to the kitchen, where I found all four of them committing crimes against baking.

Freddie stood at the stove in his boxers, golden skin and sleep-mussed hair, trying to rescue something in a saucepan. Owen attacked a cloud of smoke with a dish towel like it had insulted his mother. Tristan leaned against the counter and judged everyone with the detached cruelty of a man who had contributed nothing. Weller - immaculate, terrifying Weller - had cake batter drying on one cheek.

It was, regrettably, precious.

“What is happening?” I asked.

Freddie spun around. His whole face broke open, dimples and all. “Happy birthday, baby. Go back to bed.”

“What is burning?”

“We’re making you a cake,” Weller said, as if the evidence supported that claim. Then he bent and brushed his mouth over mine, soft enough to make my chest hurt. “Happy birthday.”

“No icing, Princess.” Owen lowered the towel, shoulders dropping. “We tried to make some with what we have, but it tasted like shit.”

“It’s fine.” I couldn’t stop staring at the cake.

Its top was several shades too brown. It listed slightly to the left and had collapsed in the middle like it had lost the will to live. Four exhausted men had made it for me at five in the morning, and they filled the kitchen with the dense, impossible scent of us. And cake.

Two of my favorite things.

“It’s perfect. It’s⁠—”

Tristan came up behind me and folded both arms around my waist. He nosed into my neck, drew a slow breath up the column of my throat, and the shiver went straight through me to my toes.

“Soon,” he murmured, “we’ll get you any cake you want. We’ll keep an entire bakery on retainer. You’ll never go without sweets again.”

“I love the cake.”

I did. God, I did.

It was the first birthday cake anyone had made me in years. I never told Ezra or Megan when my birthday was, because I’d stopped caring. Because caring meant remembering the last birthday that mattered, and that birthday marked the beginning of the end of everything good.

Here’s the part I hate: the cake worked.

It slipped under the wall like smoke.