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For the first time since being taken from my home, it hits me that I really don’t have anything to go back to. Even if I manage to escape from here, what’s next? An omega workhouse? Pleasuring alphas who come in, being nothing more than a body to them? I know the facts of places like that, the women with bruised-up faces. Getting high to ignore the pain of what’s happening to them.

Sometimes, disappearing altogether.

Society might like to act like omegas are the problem, but everything wrong with those places starts and ends with betas and alphas. They’re the ones forcing us to have to work in them in the first place. Betas usually run them. Alphas come to meet their needs.

And omegas face the brutality for all of it, both physically and socially.

“Hello. Mylah. What are you so caught up about?” Aurora waves a hand in front of my face, and I realize we’ve walked all the way from my bedroom to the main ballroom, which echoes empty with the sound of our shuffling feet.

“Workhouses,” I say, before I can rethink it. Aurora’s face goes stormy.

“Right, yeah,” she says, throwing a glance over her shoulder at the guard trailing us. “Did you read the chapter on them?”

I did. The book talked about how the suppression of omegas specifically functioned to line the pockets of others. It’s omegas in those places, doing all the work, and yet they’re not the ones making the money. They get nothing—in a lot of places, literally just a place to live—while the betas running the place pocket all the cash.

It wouldn’t be very good for the betas and alphas involved if omegas were able to be their own people, because they would lose all that free labor.

“Yeah,” I say, finally, when I realize Aurora is staring at me again. “I read the whole thing again.”

“It’s kind of infuriating, isn’t it?” she asks, keeping her gaze straight forward and her voice low. “To see so clearly how everything is messed up, and feel like there’s nothing you can do about it?”

“Yes. It does.”

“But there is something we can do about it,” Aurora goes on, cutting her eyes in my direction. I furrow my brow. Maybe there’s something she can do about it, as a princess with all these resources. As an omega who can stand up to her brother, the king. She already doesn’t face all the same cruelty as omegas off the street. From nothing.

Like me.

“There is?” I ask, instead of pointing any of that out.

Aurora glances over her shoulder again. The guard with us looks like he would rather be anywhere else.

“Suppression,” she says quickly, her arm tightening around mine. “Remember? I talked to you about that?”

A chill runs through my body at the thought of it. I wish there was more information. I wish I wasn’t in a position to learn from a single book and one omega. If only I could talk to other omegas. If only I could read about it. If only stuff like this wasn’t so penalized.

“I remember,” I say quietly, trying to ignore the way my heart kicks up. Aurora is an omega, which means she can scent just as well as I can. Surely, she can smell my fear. Can tell that the thought of an operation…it’s terrifying.

Once more, Aurora slips into the bathroom with me. This time, she doesn’t even give the guard an excuse before shutting the door and turning to me.

“Mylah,” she says, earnestly, “I haven’t had a heat in months.”

That gets my attention. My mouth falls open, and I look Aurora over head-to-toe, as though I’m going to identify some injury I hadn’t noticed up to this point.

“…you had the operation?”

She glares are me. “Do you really think I would tell you to try it if I hadn’t already done it myself?”

Rather than answering that, I just give her a chagrined look. Aurora rolls her eyes and turns, flushing the toilet before she turns to the sink, flips on the faucet, and starts to wash her hands noisily.

“Seriously, Mylah. It’s an option. I can take you tomorrow, if you want. Augustus is gone—there’s something going on that he won’t tell me about.”

I instantly think of him in the woods, that other king—Zade—finding us. The look on his face, like something really bad had happened. My stomach clenches at the thought. I would know if something was wrong with Augustus, right? He was able to sense that I was in danger earlier; wouldn’t I be able to tell, too?

Not that there’s anything I could do to help him. It’s not like I could go flying through the woods, throwing myself at a bear.

“So?”

I blink at Aurora, clear my throat, and tell her the only thing I can. “I’ll think about it.”