Page 73 of Into the Fire: Before

I couldn’t hear the rest. Their names buzzed in my ears like flies around a body.

Brea sat to my left, one arm tight around my shoulders and the other grasping my hand in her lap. It would’ve been comforting if I didn’t have the sense she was clinging on to me as though worried I’d—poof!—right into thin air.

Caine sat on my right, Lin and Brooks standing behind us. Vikki sat across the coffee table, an overstuffed messenger bag on the floor beside her. Grim lines traced across her forehead and from her eyes, mouth. Maybe they were smile lines. Or maybe they’d set in after a lifetime of furrowed brows and pinched lips.

Lin broke the silence next. “What makes you think any of these are connected?”

“Different time periods, different areas, different looks,” Caine continued seamlessly. “The only thing they have in common is they’re omegas.”

Vikki gave a small, sad smile. “No,” she said quietly. “It’s not.” We waited for her to continue. She shifted in her seat and sat up straighter. “All of these omegas disappeared within a year of presenting. And all of their mothers participated in the samepilot program for an anti-nausea treatment when they were pregnant with them.”

Brooks shifted behind me, his gentle scent sharpening. “This would’ve been, what, twenty, twenty-five years ago? I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

“They did it quietly,” Vikki replied. “Nearly two thousand participants across the state in a five-year spread.”

“And only”—Brea counted the photos still ogling us from the table—“eight people missing?”

“The only children of the treated pregnancies who presented as omegas,” Vikki said. “Every one of them. Except you.”

Goosebumps pebbled my skin again, dread sitting in my stomach like lead. Caine issued a barely audible growl, leaning in closer on my right. Lin reached forward, squeezing my shoulder. I just shook my head. “That…that can’t be right.”

Vikki held up a folder. “This is a list of every single person treated in that program, connected to the birth certificate of every pregnancy that went to term. Alessandra Sylva Lennox,” she read from the page, “entered the program six months before she gave birth to Taryn Rose Lennox at New Gilden General.”

My fingers were numb.

“And these,” she said, pulling out a stapled stack of papers, “are the compiled designations of every child delivered after treatment.”

She handed the stack toward me. I watched my hand reach out and grab it. I blinked a few times, trying to focus as I skimmed over the page. Lots of names, lots ofbirth certificate numbers, and dates, and random configurations of letters and numbers. In the right-most column, a sea ofBETAs ran down the page. I flipped through one page, then another. A fair fewALPHAs broke up the column, maybe a dozen per page.

The firstOMEGAappeared on page eight. Even with so many entries, it was impossible to miss, highlighted in yellow as it was.I quickly fanned through the rest of the pages, finding all seven other highlightedOMEGAs.

I flipped the packet back to the front, trying to control my breathing.

Every omega. Except me.

“They missed me because I wouldn’t have been on this list,” I said, voice sounding dead even to my own ears.

Caine shook his head. “Everyone’s on—”

“The Census,” I said, staring at the papers in my hands. “I never Registered—Gran, she didn’t—I—”

“She only Registered this year,” Brea finished for me. She gave a gentle squeeze of my hand. “After the shop incident.”

AfterHeath.

I looked back down at the packet in my lap. The logo at the top read Phoenix Labs. My eyes trailed down to the bottom of the page, though, noting a file name in a small font:WWCorp_PL_DesRes_9703.

WWCorp. Wainwright Corp. Had to be.

The room spun around me, air suddenly too thin, too too thin.

We’d been working under the assumption that Heath was the one behind my second attack. And while he had plenty of money, itwasfinite. He’d have run out eventually, or gotten bored, or found a new perfect bride to take his attention away from us.

Heath had been a daunting opponent, but a beatable one. Or, at least, an evadable one.

Multibillion-dollar corporation, though?

There was no running from that. No waiting them out until they moved on or gave up. They had enough resources to pay for a million different bounty hunters, a million rewards.

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