Page 42 of Truth or Lie

To be honest, I still wasn’t one hundred percent over what she’d done to Alex. But ever since Alex had a heart-to-heart with Irina’s beta mate, or husband, or whatever, she’d seemed to be doing better. The bond Alex, Jax, and I shared through Leona meant it was a lot harder for her to hide from us these days. And that was a good thing. She was still pretty messed up in the head, but who was I to say anything? We were all messed up in one way or another.

So, anyway, I could play nice with Irina for something like this summit. She was still one hell of a competent soldier, and it’s not like she hadn’t gone through a ton of trauma, too. If she’d found happiness—or at least peace—with a beta politician, then more power to her. Her husband, Polonsky, seemed like a guy who mostly had his shit together. He was sitting with Leo and Nikolayev as the current speaker, a middle-aged beta woman, talked in a halting voice about the prison sentence she and her husband had served after failing to register their son when he’d presented as an alpha during puberty.

I wasn’t thrilled with the distance separating us from Kam, in case anything went wrong. Private security hadn’t been allowed on the stage, so we were down on the main level and off to one side. On a positive note, the staff for the event had been thoroughly vetted this time around. Even the attendees themselves had all gone through metal detectors and had their identities thoroughly checked.

“I didn’t expect to see Beckett back on duty for this,” Irina said quietly, as the beta woman on the stage wound down, receiving a round of sober applause from the great and the good in the audience.

I raised an eyebrow. “Did you think Nikolayev was going to lock him in the nursery or something?”

She snorted. “It had crossed my mind, yes.”

“Nah,” I said. “Beckett would have broken out, and then he would have been pissed. Besides, a bunch of Nikolayev’s relatives descended on the place. They came to meet the newest addition to the family and got roped into babysitting. I think it’s safe to say Anika is just about the safest pup on the planet right now.”

Thinking of Anika always got me feeling broody. Well,hornyand broody. It was still a bit of a sore subject with Alex in particular, but our pack was gradually moving toward the idea of pups. Ever since I’d seen Kam and Leo cooing over Beckett’s munchkin, I couldn’t get the picture out of my head. I wanted Leo pregnant. Like,reallywanted it. And Leo hadn’t said no.

“Lucky little girl,” Irina said, and if she was thinking about her own lost pups, she didn’t show it. “She’s going to have that whole family wrapped around her little pinky finger.”

“Ten bucks says she’ll be ruling the world by the time she’s thirty-five,” I agreed. “She’s gonna be terrifying in all the best ways.”

I glanced over the crowd during the lull between speakers. Jax saw me looking and sent anall’s goodpulse along the bond. Alex was a watchful presence in the background, and Leo was focused intently on the stage. It was good having that connection with them. Reassuring. Just as it was frustrating as hell not to have it all the time with Kam, who still only completed the connection with the rest of us when Leo’s heat hormones were in full swing.

I’d had a couple of thoughts about that, actually. Once things calmed down, I needed to have a word with Beckett, and maybe Nikolayev, too. As if things seemed like they were likely to calm down anytime soon.Ha.

Prime Minister Fairbanks was seated in the front row of the audience. His wife and fourteen-year-old daughter had traveled with him, though his younger boy had apparently stayed behind. Jennifer Fairbanks leaned over and put a hand on her husband’s knee. They weren’t that far away from us, and alpha hearing allowed me to make out her murmured apologies that she needed to take their daughter to the restroom. They left discreetly, a pair of bodyguards peeling away to follow them.

The beta official who’d been introducing each new speaker rose and walked to the podium. “Please return to order. Next, we will hear from Senajit Mandal of Kolkata. Monsielle Mandal is an omega with firsthand experience of the underground railway—a group dedicated to helping alphomic individuals escape from slavery to find new lives with forged documentation and new identities.”

I frowned. Kam was also from Kolkata. None of the other people on the stage looked Indian, though. And then, Kam got up from his chair. He crossed to the podium and adjusted the microphone, clearing his throat and settling a sheaf of notes on the lectern.

“Good afternoon,” he said. “I must begin by clarifying that my name is no longer Senajit Mandal. For all intents and purposes, Senajit died at the age of twelve, along with the rest of his family.”

The crowd murmured.

Kam looked up, his soulful brown eyes playing over the assemblage of politicians and diplomats. “The Mandal family were alphomic purebreds. We traced our ancestry through dozens of generations, and had been influential in the Bengali silk trade since the sixteenth century. We relied on strategic alliances and a fair amount of bribery to maintain cordial relations with the beta-run government, as well as our neighbors in the region. That worked for a surprisingly long time... until the day it didn’t.”

Silence had settled over the echoing auditorium. Kam looked down, straightening his notes.

“When I was twelve years old, Committee sympathizers arrived at my home, dressed in black and armed with automatic weapons.” He lifted his gaze again. His eyes were dry, but I was willing to bet I would have felt his grief through the bond if we’d been connected. “They rounded up all of the adults and took them into the courtyard, where they shot them. Armed men held my littermates and me at gunpoint inside the house, while they stripped us naked one by one to check our alignment.

He paused, swallowing. “My siblings were alphas. Vishaya, who used to love playing rugby. Jaina, who painted the most beautiful pictures with watercolors. Nalak, who was fascinated by our family’s business, even at such a young age. At the time, they weren’t deemed valuable enough to sell—there wasn’t enough demand for alphas who hadn’t been raised as slaves from birth. I was the only omega in the litter. I had economic worth as a breeder, so they chained me up, threw me in a cage, and dragged me off to the slave pens.”

More murmuring.

Despite the fact that I’d been a slave on a breeding plantation myself before I’d been selected for the military alpha program, Istillwanted to track down those vigilantes who’d put my Ginger Tea in chains and break every one of their necks.

“Breeding omegas on the plantations are chosen for genetics and temperament,” Kam said. “My pedigree might have been impeccable, but evidently I fell short when it came to malleability. After one too many instances of insolence to my handlers, I was taken to a concrete room and strapped to a table. Doctors removed my womb and sewed me shut, ensuring that I would never be able to have normal sexual relations again. They cut out my extra nipples and attempted to remove my mating gland. When I didn’t die from blood loss or infection afterward, they threw me onto the auction block, where I was sold at a discount as servant stock.”

A few people rose and headed for the exits, looking ill. One woman began openly crying. I swallowed a surge of anger at the fuckers who were acting like this kind of shit was news to them. How oblivious did you have to be, not to know what happened on the production side of the thriving slave industry? Without omega breeders, there would be no docile, chemically castrated alphas to do the betas’ unpleasant grunt work. Who the hell did they think was harvesting their vegetables, and processing their meat, and building their shiny buildings? Did they think alphas sprang into being from nothing, already fully formed?

Beside me, Irina was holding herself very, very still.

“Fortunately for me,” Kam continued, “the woman who bought me was a member of the alphomic underground. She arranged for me to be sent overseas to the UFNA with a fake beta identity and enough money to start a new life. Senajit Mandal had already been dead for years. When I arrived in my new homeland, Kameron Patel was born. It would give me the greatest satisfaction to see a day when no other omegas ever need to suffer the way I did. I hope that this summit may—”

A hissing noise cut him off in mid-sentence, and for a split second, I thought it must be some problem with the sound system. Then heavy clouds of white vapor began to spew from the ventilation ducts in the walls and ceiling of the vast hall, billowing downward to cover the stage. I was already moving when the first screams reached my ears.

---