Page 56 of Hide or Die

Intruders in the den.

No alphas here for defense.

I tried to wrest back a shred of rationality. There were other apartments in the building... other people lived here. Burglars or kidnappers would have made some attempt at stealth. In the normal course of criminal investigation or arrest, the police would be required to identify themselves before breaking in.

When you were an unregistered omega, there was only one reason someone kicked down your door in the middle of the night.

My house of cards had just come tumbling down. My time was up. I could only be grateful that Kam had already left—though for all I knew, other officials were breaking down his door this very moment.

Heavy boots clattered up the metal fire escape outside, blocking any possible exit in that direction. The same high, narrow windows that gave me a false sense of security in my erstwhile den also prevented the possibility of an escape that way. I didn’t keep any firearms in my home—there was no loaded revolver hidden in a drawer next to my bed. No shotgun propped in the closet.

With the benefit of hindsight, that had been a mistake. Not because it would have saved me. Rather the opposite, in fact. Waving a gun around when the SWAT team entered would have ensured that I died in a hail of bullets, rather than enduring the fate that almost certainly awaited me otherwise.

Pulse galloping, I hugged my knees beneath the covers and buried my face against them as I awaited the inevitable. The bedroom door slammed open with the sound of wood splintering beneath the force of a heavy bootheel. In a daze, I wondered why they hadn’t simply turned the knob to open it. The damn thing wasn’t even locked.

Boot steps pounded as several men swarmed in, flashlights waving crazily around the room. Even with my face hidden against my knees, the flashes of light through the darkness were disorienting.

“On the floor!On the floor!” shouted an angry male voice.

Betas talked about the fight-or-flight response to trauma. For omegas, it was the flight-or-freeze response, and I’d always tended toward freezing. I didn’t move, feeling strangely detached from my body, as though all of this was happening to somebody else, and I was merely hearing the story reported secondhand.

“Get your ass on the floornow, bitch!” cried a different voice, replete with barely contained glee at the prospect of violence.

A rough hand grabbed my arm and dragged me bodily off the bed, slamming me face first onto the rug. A boot dug into the back of my neck, pinning me, and all of this was still happening to someone else, someone else. The pain, the choking sensation of not being able to breathe properly—that wasn’t me. I was looking down on the scene from a slight remove, at the pathetic form sprawled on the floor with her nightgown riding up to expose one bare ass cheek in the wavering beams of the flashlights. Secondhand embarrassment flooded me on the figure’s behalf. How humiliating.

“Cuff the stupid cow,” someone said.

Rough hands on skin. Arms pulled behind back. Legs flopping uselessly, trying to gain purchase against the floor. Cold metal trapping wrists.

The overhead lights flipped on. The boot fell away. A hand fisted in red hair, twisting.

“On your feet, bitch.”

The sharp, burning pain of hair being yanked out slammed me back into my body, and I gasped, scrambling to get my feet under me.

“Leona McCready, you are under arrest on suspicion of being an unregistered omega. You will be remanded for physical examination and genetic testing prior to extradition to the Committee on Alphomic Suppression for trial and sentencing.”

I stood mute, an injured mouse caught beneath the cat’s paws. Trapped and as good as dead, once they’d finished playing with me. Men in black military-style fatigues were swarming over my bedroom, yanking open drawers and pawing through the small wastebasket. One of them pulled a tiny glass vial from the trash and sniffed it.

“Smells like alpha pheromones, sir,” he reported, wrinkling his nose in distaste.

“Bag it for evidence,” said the one who seemed to be in charge.

Had it only been a few hours ago that I was curled naked with Kam, warm and safe in a nest of pillows? It couldn’t have been, surely. It felt like another lifetime altogether.

“Grab anything else that looks incriminating. We’ll let forensics have the rest. Let’s get her in the van. It stinks like a damned slave pen in here.”

The hands that had been holding me shoved me forward. I stumbled as they dragged me toward my ruined front door. The other apartments were deathly quiet—my neighbors doubtless huddling inside, thanking their lucky stars that they were upstanding betas with nothing to hide from the authorities.

The officers bundled me into the building’s refurbished antique freight elevator. I swayed as it started down toward the ground floor, and my knees nearly buckled when it came to a stop, gravity tugging at me. Ryan, the night security desk attendant, stared at me wide-eyed as I was frog-marched past him in my silky, thigh-length nightgown, hands cuffed and hair askew. I met his gaze as we passed, my eyes pleading silently with him for help.

Ryan’s lips parted as though he might say something, but then he pressed them together tightly and looked away. No surprise, really. He’d had no authority to stop the SWAT team when they’d entered the building. It wasn’t as though he could stop them from leaving, either.

He would have known that Kam visited me the previous evening. Would the authorities interrogate him? Had they done so already?

The concrete sidewalk was gritty and cool beneath my bare feet. I winced and stumbled as small pebbles dug into my soles. An unmarked white van sat parked at the curb. With horrible clarity, it occurred to me that once I was in that van, it would all be over. That was stupid, though. It was over already. It had been over the moment my front door caved in.

Strong hands wrestled me into the back of the van—not because I was resisting, but because my muscles weren’t working right. The van had benches running down both sides of the back, and the area was separated from the driver and passenger seat by a metal wall with a window covered in heavy steel mesh. It reeked of stale urine and vomit.

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