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I blink. “The suppressants?”
Della’s face briefly freezes, and she darts a nervous glance at Kylian. Before I can reassure her that he won’t hurt her—I hope—she says, “She was feeding you suppressants just before you turned eighteen. She didn’t want you to perfume until Lawrence was ready to get you. That’s what she told me.”
I’m still drowning in the pool. That must be why Della’s words enter my head and then they turn… murky.
“What did you say?” I dig my nails into my thighs as my words emerge all tinny and hollow and strange.
Cian leans his shoulder harder against mine as if he knows I need more support.
Rune crosses over to me and takes the seat beside mine, resting his shoulder on my other side. Two alphas bracket me. Which is a good thing. If I didn’t have Cian on one shoulder and Rune on the other, I’d flop over like I didn’t have a bone in my body.
“She fed Everleigh suppressants?” Kylian’s voice is a blast of chill air in a once warm room.
Della scoots to the farthest edge of her armchair, away from him. “She wouldn’t admit to it at first. It’s why I left. I had to find you so I could—”
An omega is the rarest designation. When an omega gives birth, she will almost always give birth to an omega.
The words roll around in my head, like a desperate fish caught in a net, flip-flopping with no hope of escape. My mom was an omega. I don’t know what happened to her, but someone—maybe Lawrence’s dad, maybe someone else—took me from her and gave me to Anna Jackson to raise for Lawrence.
“She fed me suppressants for three years?” I whisper. “Is that why these black market suppressants aren’t working the way they should? I’ve built up a… a tolerance for them? Could that be possible?”
Rune places his hand on my back. It’s a warm, solid pressure that doesn’t do a thing to comfort me. Right now, I don’t think even my nest could do that. “Cher?”
I shake my head. Whether it’s a sign I’m not listening, I don’t understand, or I don’t want to hear any more, I couldn’t say.
I don’t ask how she fed them to me.
She was always telling me how important vitamin C was for a healthy immune system. I was rarely ever sick, so I believed her and always downed my glass of orange juice at breakfast, thinking it was doing me all the good in the world.
A ground-up pill or two stirred into sweet orange juice wouldn’t even register on my tongue. I loved juice, so I always gulped it down. Now I understand what her nod of satisfaction meant as she took the empty glass back.
She was never insistent that Della drink her juice. But me? Every single morning, I had a glass waiting for me at the breakfast table.
“My orange juice,” I whisper. “That’s how she did it.”
Cian touches my shoulder. “Everleigh?”
I ignore his question to focus on the horrifying, stomach churning nightmare my life has become.
She drugged me.
For three years, the woman who I believed was my mother drugged me.
Every day except the two days leading up to Lawrence finding me in the garden.
Suddenly, there was no orange juice waiting for me at breakfast. I’d asked, and she’d said she was out. That she’d get more when she went to the grocery store.
It wasn’t the juice she was out of. It was the suppressants she no longer had to feed me.
My stomach roils.
I struggle to my feet; the comforter falling off my shoulders and the towel from my hair as I place my palm over my gurgling belly. And I try. I desperately try to stop myself from spewing all over the hardwood floors.
“Cher…” Rune says.
I shake my head, ignoring his concern. Right now, I don’t want it. What Ineedare answers, and then I need to scrub my brain with bleach when I have those answers.
Della eyes me with concern. She moves to get up, but a narrow-eyed glare from Kylian convinces her to stay put. “Maybe you should sit down, Ever,” she says instead.
