In her state of suspended emotional animation and quaking limbs, there wasn’t much that could’ve yanked Bridget out of the brain-curdling terror of watching her friend cry in the grass with her leg snapped in the wrong direction, but this statement of Evelyn’s was the exception.
“What?” droned the Omega, her lips merely twitching to utter the word.
“It was a set-up. She was framed,” panted Evelyn weakly, crouching closer to the ground to keep her own knees from shaking at the sight of her surrogate daughter wounded and weeping.
“What?” Bridget repeated, unable to process anything beyond the academic meaning of each word.
“Nathaniel Tyler. The boy that was there the night Alexandra’s mother… well, it… it was him. He and his friends arranged everything to look like they’d been attacked. They pumped themselves full of painkillers and then beat each other to make it look real. They even threw Iris off a ledge at knee-height for an Alpha. That’s… that’s how…” Evelyn continued, having difficulty getting it out herself, and coughing to keep the tears at bay.
“And the video,” managed Bridget.
“They paid the man who operates that store to tamper with the records. That’s how we found out. He came in to tell us. He showed us the footage with the real clock, and then we went and found the others he’d gotten to work with him. They… all admitted it. Almost immediately.”
Bridget nodded once, jerking her neck hard enough to almost give herself a crimp. Her eyes were watering again, but this time because she hadn’t blinked in several minutes as she stared down at the crumpled and mewling form of her best friend and sister.
“We were wrong, Bridget. Oh, God…” gasped Evelyn, her voice cracking heavily as she wrung her fingers together until they went pale. “We were so, so wrong.”
The enforcer’s eyes widened, her chest heaving as she began hyperventilating, and then, her hands shaking harder than ever before, she approached Alexandra in the grass to pick her up again.
“We have to take her to the hospital. They’re taking too long,” Bridget declared sedately. “Now.”
At this point, Alexandra’s cries had become meek gurgles in the back of her throat, though the tears continued pouring. When she saw Bridget’s soft fingertips nearing her as gently as possible, though, the Alpha found the strength to open her mouth and force out the required syllable through gritted teeth: “No.”
Bridget froze, jerking back as though she’d been slapped, frowning with simultaneous mania and fear. Obviously, Alexandra couldn’t think clearly enough to realize that Bridget could get her help sooner. She wasn’t thinking straight.
“L-Lexi,” the Omega said, her steady tone broken again at the painful mention of her name. “I’ve… I’ve g-got to get you h-help… p-please…”
“Don’t. Touch. Me,” the Alpha grunted with agony.
Desperate, ignoring the fresh tears making their way out of her swollen eyes, Bridget looked emergently to her mother for permission to override the demand. Evelyn sighed and shook her head, silently rejecting her daughter’s desire to act.
“They’ll be here any minute, Alexandra,” Evelyn whispered. “Just hold on. Hold on.”
Dumbfounded and feeling more lost than ever before, Bridget stumbled backward off her haunches and slumped against the cliff’s edge on the other side of the creek, now giving herself some distance from her friend, half-expecting herself to reach out, scoop up the girl, and cradle her protectively to her cheek on an impulse if she remained in range.
“That’s it, Alexandra. Keep looking at me. Breathe. Breathe. In and out, in and out. Focus on my voice. Just listen to my words. That’s all you have to do,” Evelyn coached, directing her attention to the Alpha, who seemed to be making an effort to follow the instruction of her surrogate mother as she began huffing and puffing, replacing the screeches of before.
Bridget entered a haze as a helicopter the size of one of her childhood toys buzzed into the yard and touched down in the grass so the Alpha paramedics could load Alexandra up. As she watched them gently lay the girl on a stretcher, she had to look away, too aggrieved to see any more of it, and then looked down at her hands, curled into claws.
Her hands.
She wanted more than anything to rend them from her body.
They were still shaking, her fingers convulsing as though they were submerged in liquid nitrogen. Bridget balled her fingers into her palms, forming quivering fists and slammed them down at her sides with an earth-rumbling impact before finally retching, sapped of all will to move, down the front of her shirt.
The fluids from her mouth intermingling with the once-again flowing tears down the crook of her neck, a storm began clamoring in the recesses of her tortured heart. The face of her friend flashed into her mind’s eye even when she shut her lids as tightly as she could and remained there in full, vivid and violent and full of promise.
Bridget turned her face up to the gray sky, her cadaverous knuckles clenched into human iron, and screamed with such profoundly world-demolishing might that her previous cry of anguish was by comparison made into a crooning whistle in the wind.
“Believe me, Nathaniel,” Claire Lindon stated frigidly. “This will be so much easier for everyone if you decide to start explaining things in the very near future.”
The incarcerated Beta was seated with his arms folded across his chest atop a high glass tower positioned on a table within the cavernous confines of the Aegis interrogation room, encased in a translucent wall just high enough that it was impossible for him to make any foolish maneuvers to escape. At the other end of the table sat the junior enforcer with arms folded on the surface, eyes intently trained on the guilty party, who stood at a height of no more than the infinitesimal distance between the creases on her thumb.
Frowning at his behemoth accuser, whose tanned face and smooth black tresses filled his entire current worldview, Nathaniel Tyler simply shook his head from the left to the right and crossed his legs to get more comfortable.
Claire’s dark eyes wandered down to the jumble of black mechanical specks propped up on the edge of the table that comprised the A/V equipment, well aware of the number of Aegis employees gathered at the monitors in the other room to witness the events of this conversation with achingly bated breath.
There was so, so much riding on all of this.
“Listen. We have all your friends’ testimonies. We have the tools you used to break each other down. We have the real video footage. And… not that we really needed it after all that, but Iris woke up this morning, and she’s been screaming your name as well as a lot of pretty mean adjectives about you and your friends. If you’re holding out for a reasonable doubt, I’m afraid you’re out of luck on that front,” Claire continued as coolly as possible, though already her knuckles were turning white from the strain of speaking so peaceably to such a little hellion.
Nathaniel remained a defiant three-inch island.
The Omega sighed bitterly. The revelation of Alexandra’s innocence three days before had ground most of Aegis’ daily proceedings to a halt as everyone available wanted to do whatever they could to help bring swift correction to this absolute catastrophe of perverted justice. The news had rocked them all to the core with cataclysmic force, and personally, Claire hadn’t felt this remotely close to gutted since that day months before when she’d strolled into the mixed area to pick up her brother, only to find him being reduced to a barely breathing pulp.
“You should know that we are aware of your history with the Warrens,” Claire breathed at last. “We know what you went through ten years ago, and it has been taken into account in your prosecution and incarceration. But it cannot absolve you of what you’ve done now, especially not if you won’t even try to cooperate going forward.”
“That’s nice,” came Nathaniel’s peeped reply, drenched in toxic sarcasm. “I really appreciate the support.”
“See, having a little conversation isn’t so hard,” Claire responded, again having to hold back the coldness in her voice. No matter her feelings on this matter, it was her duty to offer a single clean chance at legal redemption. “So how about explaining yourself now?”
“All right,” Nathaniel said with a bit more sincerity this time. He brushed a hand over his ratty bangs, his eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep. “Come closer so you can hear me better.”
“Okay,” the enforcer agreed uneasily, leaning over the table until her face was looming right over the top of the glass tower, near enough that a simple huff from her flared nostrils could’ve tumbled the Beta out of his chair and flat onto his back. “Speak.”
“Ready?”
“Yes.”
“Fuck you and your whole bunch of Messiah-Complex freaks.”
Exhaling calmly and savoring the silence, Claire decided that was enough. She’d given the requisite chance at a polite confession. There was no obligation to keep it up indefinitely, though, especially not under these very particular circumstances.
“In that case…” she sighed. “…I’ve got someone else who would like to talk to you.”
Rising from her chair, Claire didn’t even pay the Beta another glance as she turned and marched the several-step distance to the door, knowing she’d only become more infuriated if she chanced a last look at his insolent little form.
Just as soon as she’d exited, the door swung closed but was instantly reopened to reveal Bridget standing in the frame, a look of somber determination plastered on her face as she folded her hands behind her back with bellicose reserve.
Even from this distance, the Omega was fairly certain she could see Nathaniel flinch at the sight of her, but he kept his composure. She wasted no time in closing the distance between them and sliding into the previously occupied chair.
“Hello,” she said, a steely chill in her tone. For another moment, there was no sound, as the pair studied one another, a mountainous defender of the city locked onto the dust-sized mastermind. Bridget steepled her fingers atop the surface of the table and inched forward toward the glass tower.
“You know who I am, don’t you?” she pressed at length.
He nodded.
“You’re the friend,” he said, surprising the stock-still Bridget with his willingness to answer seriously as well as everyone else in the other room.
“You could say that,” she responded lividly. “But I’d rather you not, because I don’t think you could ever understand what that means even if we were here for the rest of your life. Or the rest of mine.”
“Fair enough,” he reported dryly, his voice suggesting he was only half-paying attention.
“So now,” Bridget continued. “You’re going to tell me why you did it.”
Nathaniel snorted at this and rolled his beady eyes.
“Really.”
“Yes.”
“Interesting,” he said, going silent again.
Bridget drummed her fingers on the surface of the table and lowered her chin so that her golden hair was draping down over her eyes, gritting her teeth until they ground together with enough might to chew apart steel beams like crackers.
She had to stay focused. She had to keep it together.
“You know Alexandra didn’t do anything to your parents. She was coerced by her mother Alma. She’s the guilty one, and she’s been locked away for ten years,” Bridget said quietly.
“I know that,” Nathaniel replied calmly.
“She didn’t know what was happening any more than you did. And I know… you’ve had to live with that for years. What happened on that night. Nobody can blame you for wanting justice for it, and I understand you must feel frightened and confused by it all. But-”
At this, Nathaniel, who up until now had been maintaining his reticent composure like a slumped-over crash test dummy, started to snicker. After a few machine gun-like bursts of laughter, then, he broke into full-on peals of cackling, doubling over and clutching his stomach with both arms.
Bridget, irritated but unprepared to allow such a reaction to deter her quest for righteousness, snapped her fingers loud enough that it got Nathaniel’s attention with another noticeable flinch in his shoulders, though he continued tittering under his breath and shaking his head in disbelief.
“Care to share the joke?”
“Oh, absolutely,” Nathaniel agreed. “It’s just… you. Just now. All that “I know you must feel this” blah-blah-blah. Really, that’s a great one. You should use it at comedy clubs. You’ll get a big reaction.”
“Mind explaining what’s so entertaining about it?”
“Depends,” Nathaniel said with a shrug. “How long do you have?”
Unable to keep up her placid equilibrium any longer, Bridget’s right hand rose up from the table and darted into the center of the glass tower, her thumb and index finger parted just enough to create a thin crevice of less than a foot in length as they barreled toward their target with military precision.
Nathaniel flinched at the sudden motion and rush of wind that circled with the force of a tornado into his tiny pen, but made no effort to dodge the incoming digits that dwarfed him like jumbo jets as they plucked him up and rose back into the air.
“I have as long as we need,” Bridget whispered once she had the young man poised in front of the twin emerald pools of her eyes, which seemed to crackle with the energy of an oncoming thunderstorm. The back of her neck tingled with the sensation of his microscopic limbs squirming against the mighty compressing power of her digits. “And I’m through playing games.”
“Okay, great, me too,” Nathaniel grunted, trying unsuccessfully to inch himself into a less threatening position between the titanic walls of Bridget’s finger pads, using the grooved surfaces of her prints for leverage. “You think I did it just because of the Warrens, don’t you?”
“I don’t know why you did it. That’s why we’re here,” Bridget hissed.
“I want to ask you something, Cade, and since I’m trying to be honest here now, I’m hoping you can do the same.”
“I’m not promising anything, but okay.”
“Have you ever been afraid before?”
Nathaniel watched as the fleshy cliffside that made up Bridget’s brow furrowed deeply at the question, and her billowing eyelashes batted with the simultaneous fluttering of a flock of birds.
“Of course I have. The whole last month. How could-”
“No. I don’t mean have you felt sad or mad or screwed up because you think your BFF went and kicked some Betas around,” Nathaniel growled sourly. “I mean afraid. I mean have you got the slightest fucking clue what it’s like to wake up in the morning and think to yourself that there’s at least a slight chance that you’ll be in someone’s stomach by the end of the day?”
“I don’t know what that’s like. I wouldn’t claim to, nor do I claim to fully empathize with you or any other Betas anywhere,” Bridget answered bitterly, providing the truth he’d requested. “There’s no way I could.”
“Let me try to give you the picture, then, for your own personal information,” he continued, craning his neck further upward and digging his elbows into the plush crevice of skin for support. “The only thing between us and being a goddamned pile of guts to an Alpha is your operation here. That’s literally all that’s stopping them from turning us back into an integral part of the food chain.”
“Aegis has been working to protect you and everyone else for a long time.”
“So what good does your Aegis do when Betas who are living with Omegas still can’t walk alone on the streets in a mixed area without getting torn the fuck apart?” spat Nathaniel at last with exhausted abandon, obviously having had this pent-up for a while.
Startled by this address of Corey Lindon’s case, Bridget bit her lip and opened her mouth to respond.
“How do you think we’re supposed to feel…” Nathaniel snarled before she could speak. “…when the one of us who has a couple of the most powerful things on Earth there to cover his ass isn’t even safe to exist anymore?”
Bridget pursed her lips, a sharp twinge of sympathy striking her through the caked layers of rage she felt toward the monstrous individual she had precariously pinned between her fingers.
“I don’t know. I imagine it must be terrifying. But what happened to Corey Lindon was-”
“Yeah, yeah, I know where this is going: an isolated incident because he was enough of a goddamned idiot to go walking out in prime snatching ground where he didn’t belong,” Nathaniel drawled with acidic fervor, rolling his eyes again. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“That’s not what I was going to say. Everyone has the right to be out there,” Bridget snapped, aware that Nathaniel was on a near-hysterical tangent now, but nevertheless unwilling to let such a comment go without correction. Somehow, she had a feeling the Beta’s idle statement wasn’t particularly well received in the other room, either.
“Whatever the hell justification you’ve all come up with to make yourselves feel better about it… it doesn’t matter. The fact is the Alphas don’t give a shit about what you can do anymore. They’ve just had to be quieter about their games, and then they can still do whatever they want. We’re still just bugs for them to swat…”
“That’s not true.”
“…and if someone didn’t scare them into believing they’re not untouchable again, then mark… my… words, somebody else who’s gotten too comfortable with the way things are would end up on the bottom of an Alpha’s shoe. Maybe Lindon. Certainly somebody,” Nathaniel insisted with a feverish roar. “It had to be done. For all of us.”
“No.”
“No? Listen to me now, then, because if nothing else, you need to get this clear. Until you get all of your giant heads out of your asses and start to realize that you’re not the saviors of the free world you think you are, we’re going to keep on doing what we have to to survive. That’s all. Understand?”
“I’m sorry,” Bridget said genuinely. “I recognize what that must’ve been like to see for Betas everywhere, but it doesn’t change the fact that what you and your friends did wasn’t right. Passing along your anger to another innocent isn’t the way.”
“Okay, okay, look. I may have put a girl through two weeks of shit when she didn’t do anything to me, I may have made you fuck someone over that you care about, and I can live with whatever you decide to do with me. Or not. Hell, push your fingers a little harder together right now if you want and see if I give a single solitary shit,” Nathaniel challenged.
Bridget swallowed hard, blinking twice, and pushed this thought aside, recognizing for the briefest instant a burning desire deep inside herself to follow this instruction exactly.
“But I will take my last breath knowing that I was only ever trying to protect my people. Just like you all claim to do,” the Beta declared confidently at last, puffing his chest up as much as possible given his hazardous position. “And that’s all I have to say to any of you. Do whatever you need to now.”
With that, Nathaniel folded his arms across his chest as though Bridget’s plush fingertips were forming a colossal coffin of peachy flesh for him and his crimes, and he closed his eyes and mouth with certitude.
Fighting back a choked sob in the back of her throat in a hideous amalgamation of every conflicted emotion fighting a bloody war within her heart and mind, Bridget observed the defiant little being clenched powerlessly between her fingertips, her eyes glazed with tears, and then lowered her hand back toward the tower, depositing him back into the pen.
“We’re done here,” Bridget stated morosely into the camera and mic equipment. “I’m done.”
Alexandra hobbled down the hallway of her apartment building, a crutch under her right arm for support, a bag slung over her other shoulder with a few personal effects and medications.
It had taken a very long time to convince the hospital staff to let her walk to her apartment alone, and even after an hour of passive-aggressive debating, she hadn’t been allowed to come home alone, with a nurse accompanying her in the car and up to the door of the building just to ensure she could make it, though the care she’d received had put her on a recovery track far more rapid than she might’ve guessed when she was groggily bussed onto the emergency helicopter, right after the last time she’d seen Bridget.
As she’d laid in that bed for four weeks, she’d had no shortage of visitors. A few of her Alpha acquaintances from work, a few more from school. She’d greeted them all with reserved cordiality, though abjectly refused to discuss any remote detail on the events of her incarceration and release, and thankfully, none had been rude enough to even broach the subject.
Of course, she’d had Aegis representatives too. At first three Alphas had shown up together, though Alexandra had waved them away as politely as she could muster without cursing at them. The next week, just one arrived, a woman, wanting to discuss what had happened during her brief stay at the Cades, the full details of her original arrest, and a smattering of options once she left the hospital for pursuing her own justice against Nathaniel and his friends.
Alexandra had truthfully reassured the woman that she had no intention of creating a ruckus when she was finally able to walk again, and the worker had seemed genuinely relieved, though still incredibly hesitant to leave without the most dragged out and tearful apology the young woman believed she would ever witness, at least for the time being.
During the final week of her stay, even, when she was judged healthy enough to practice walking on her own, she had taken the exercise of journeying to the hospital roof under the supervision of two nurses, where she was able to have Omega visitors. Bridget never showed her face, and Alexandra didn’t have to question why.
Evelyn, however, had come almost daily to visit, falling into a pattern of greeting her surrogate daughter and then having to pull immediately back so her guilty tears didn’t cascade down to the roof and flood the area where Alexandra was trying to maintain her balance. Their conversations had touched briefly on the tumultuous events of the crime, and Evelyn had only stayed on the subject long enough to reassure Alexandra that at last all had been brought properly to justice, but afterward, the pair had returned to topics they might’ve explored prior to a month before as though it was the most natural thing in the world. It made the wounded Alpha happier than she’d felt in a while, but it didn’t change the incessant gnawing feeling she had in the back of her mind that she needed something.
An escape.
Now, as she trudged up to her apartment door at the end of the hall, Alexandra knew exactly what it was. Her head needed clearing, and to do that, she had to start moving. She didn’t know for how long, or where, or if it would help at all. She was simply resolved, and as she fumbled with the house keys in her pocket, she began mentally running down a list of items she would need for her suitcase. Her plan was to be gone in no less than twenty minutes.
Jamming the key into the lock, she was surprised to find the door swinging open on its own, free of her input. Placing a hand on the knob as she nudged against the frame for better balance, Alexandra took a step into her apartment, instantly noticing a figure standing in the back of the room shrouded in shadow and mesmerized by a square-shaped object in its hands.
Startling herself with her own lack of fear at the intruder, Alexandra released how little she cared if this person was here to rob or even harm her.
It wasn’t like there was much more they could take away from her.
Squinting into the darkness, the Alpha couldn’t recognize the face of the person, who she now realized was a slender woman dressed in a striped button-up shirt, jeans, and what appeared to be a pair of weather-beaten work boots. Her hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail and a pair of eyeglasses adorned her face. Through the lenses, despite the darkness of the room, her eyes flared with warm light. In the woman’s hands, she realized, was a framed photo of Bridget and Alexandra laughing together at a mixed class carnival from four years before, with the former holding the latter comfortably in the palm of her right hand.
“You two seem so close,” sighed the woman with a final forlorn gaze at the picture before looking up to meet Alexandra’s wondering eyes.