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Chapter One

Sin

The corridor is dark, colorless, just as it always is. The only source of light comes from behind a door that’s only opened a bit, yellow radiating to touch the wall beyond, accentuate that crack in the plaster that’s been there all my life.

Something doesn’t feel right as I approach the door. Anxiety and fear war with one another for dominance in my chest, and I clench at it with my fist, try to breathe.

My toes scrape along the hallway carpet when I stop at the door, pushing it open the rest of way.

The figure on the bed is still. Eerily so. And even my five-year-old brain understands at once why I was fearful. Why my senses were on high alert. Those senses that have never steered me wrong in the past.

The memory always comes to me in fragments. The skin’s pallor. How cold it was to the touch. How one eye was closed, the other half-lidded, it’s usual dark brown unnaturally milky. How one hand was clenched impossibly tight around a crumpled sheet of paper. That unsettling stillness.

Whenever I dream of it now, the fear that had clawed at my chest when when my mother wouldn’t answer my pleas to get up blooms fresh inside of me.

Sometimes, I awake with a start. Other times, with a scream.

But I always wake.

Unlike her.

And I’m no longer sure if that’s a good thing.

“Caress, and then crack!”

Mama Tremayne’s voice echoes unusually shrill across the stage. Her tone is always business, clipped, practical. Today, she’s losing patience fast.

Five Omegas stand center-stage, quaking in their leather boots and corsets. Sweet scents are soured by fear as they fill my lungs, making my nose crinkle.

These girls won’t make the cut. I knew that the second I saw them. Which means that Mama knew it, too.

Why she would put on this display and humiliate them publicly them is beyond me.

That’s a lie. I know exactly why she does it.

“Sin! Show these worthless wretches how it’s done.”

As Mama’s dull, grassy scent rises in the air with her ire, my lips flatten. I move closer to the scene before me on the stage, fingers caressing the leather-bound handles presented along the stand on my right. I let my teeth sink into my lower lip, just a touch, the way Mama likes for me to put on a show.

A mix of coyness and power, she had said. Make them think you’re just a pretty little Omega, then show them what you really are.

The house lights are on, making Mama clear to see at her favorite table on the floor below the stage, the one that gives her the best view of everything. Her gray hair is pulled back into a bun so tight that I can swear it lifts her face. Her lips are painted red, her eyes swirls of smoke and shadow around silvery irises, dull despite the anger in her tone.

Those eyes follow my every movement.

A lesser Omega would falter under her hardened Beta stare.

I don’t. And that’s why I hold the position I do.

There’s a whimper beside me. Not from the female Omegas being tested, but from the male Omega bent over the bench at my other side. His hands are bound below him, his knees spread and also bound, his naked ass offered to me, angled just right for the audience to see his vulnerably. But right now, it’s only Mama here.

I’ve always liked Matty. He’s the perfect scene partner.

I consider him a friend. Probably my only one.

My hand makes a choice without conscious thought, grasping the handle of a riding crop, the whip end a bit wider than average, making it more like a paddle, something that will hurt less. Keep him fresh for actual clients later.

I feel Mama’s disapproval from here. She wants pain, marks.