Page 80 of Sawyer

I grab the bacon first and break it in half before popping some in my mouth. Damn, bacon always hits the spot. I pop off the lid on the syrup container and dip it in before popping more into my mouth.

“Amazing,” I say around a mouthful of food. “Diner food hits the spot every single time.” Feeling ravenous, I dig into my food, wondering if I look like a pig or just a girl who hasn’t eaten. Sin doesn’t stock his shelves very well.

For a moment, silence wraps around us, letting us play out this little domestic scene where we’re a pack. We just fit, and that is what gets me. We just fit.

“I’ve never seen a girl devour so much food.” Sin pushes his bacon over to me as he leans back, patting his belly.

“Well, I’ll have you know that stems from years of never knowing where my next meal would come from.” I snatch up his bacon and bite through it with a snap like the carnivore I fucking am.

Forks clatter to plates, and all three just stare at me. “What did you just say?” Rumor turns in his seat to face me, his voice low and dark.

I said too much. Retreat. Retreat!

“Care to explain?” Bryn scoops up the last of his eggs and eats them off his fork slowly.

“I mean, after I left home…” I’m lying again. Bryn raises a brow and gives me that full-blown alpha look that screams don’t lie to me again. “Listen, my parents weren’t abusive. They were just distracted.”

“That’s still abuse.” Rumor points at me with a fork.

“My brother is an alpha, and my baby sister is an omega.” I take another bite of my bacon. “I’m the disappointment. According to biology, I should have been either an alpha or an omega.”

“Baby girl, it doesn’t always work like that.”

“Obviously.” I wave my hands over my body. “They were busy going to football games where my brother was the star quarterback. They took me to dance classes, which I continued until I was eighteen, but once my designation revealed that I am a gamma, they stopped coming to my recitals and focused on my siblings.”

“Abuse,” Sin grumbles.

“I’m not saying it isn’t. I’m saying that I learned how cruel the world is during that time. With them being so distracted, I ended up at home alone most nights, figuring out how to bake a pizza or make pancakes.”

“You said you didn’t know where your next meal would come from.” Bryn won’t let it go.

“I knew my parents wouldn’t put me into the academies for the other designations.” I push my food around my plate. “They encouraged me to join the gamma union and become a handmaiden. They hoped I’d work for either of my siblings’ future packs.”

“That’s fucked up,” Sin spits.

“Again, I won’t disagree,” I reply. Old wounds slowly bleed again as I revisit all the pain of the year I turned eighteen.

“What did you just think about now that made your scent sour?” Bryn asks.

I drop my fork and sigh. “That was the hardest year of my life. My little sister was just carted off to Castle Omega, and my brother went out to sea. It was just my parents and me. I naively thought that they’d somehow—”

“Give a fuck,” Sin supplies for me.

“Well, yeah.”

“They didn’t,” Rumor surmises, filling in the blanks.

“No, they didn’t. They pulled me out of all my dance classes when I turned eighteen. I still had months left until school ended, just normal schooling for those of us who got left behind.” I don’t hide the bitterness in my voice. When an alpha, delta, or omega reveal their designation either naturally or through testing, they are carted off to special schools all around Terra. These academies teach those designations how to function in society.

I call them reform schools.

Mages usually don’t leave their islands until they are old enough to, so that leaves betas and gammas, who are thrown into the public school system. I was determined to graduate and attend an academy afterward to prove that I could be someone as well.

“I came home one day to find a union rep.” I sit back, no longer hungry, but it feels good to tell them what I lived through and how much pain I tolerated. “My parents signed me up.”

“They took everything from you.” Bryn’s expression softens.

I scoff. It was worse than that. “They believed they were doing the right thing. They just wanted a future for me.”

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