“You need to listen to me very carefully, Lexi,” Bridget said in the same algid monotone she’d been using for the past few chilling minutes of Alexandra’s ordeal as she gripped her best friend in her fist just below eye level. “Because I won’t be repeating myself.”
The brunette Alpha was barely bothering to process the words coming from her tremendous friend’s lips, as her attention was focused squarely on the feeling of Bridget’s firm fingers encasing her body up to her chest thoroughly enough that movement was totally impeded below that point. The slightest tightening of the pressure and Alexandra knew her ribs would be wracked with pain.
Already, the heat emanating from the soft flesh of the enforcer’s coiled hand was making her tiny companion incredibly feverish. Even with her physical discomfort reaching an all-time high for the morning and mixing rather disastrously with some slight vertigo at the dizzying spiral down to Bridget’s shoes below, though, it was nothing as painful as the mere fact of what was happening.
Bridget. Her best friend since she was ten years old. Bridget had just picked her up into her fist without any warning and tightened her fingers around her with no indication of putting her down or letting go.
It was too bizarre to comprehend.
Her gigantic hand was always, always offered out for a lift from a distance of a few steps away, where Alexandra could step safely into the middle and move freely on her own, and if she refused, the appendage was immediately retracted without question.
The last, and only other, time that Bridget had picked her up in a fist was back when she was twelve years old, when the pair of them were trying to construct a dam by the creek in the Omega’s yard.
When the sticks they’d stacked taller than Alexandra’s body burst apart in a spray of splinters, allowing the icy water to gush forth in powerful rivulets, Bridget had dived through a mud slick to get back to her friend and had managed to scoop her into her palm just in time to avoid a watery impact that would’ve almost certainly broken a few of the Alpha’s bones on her landing at the stone basin. And after dusting off the shaken Alexandra and tearfully apologizing for being so neglectful of her small playmate, Bridget had carried her rescue to a higher plateau where she could more safely observe the handiwork and had immediately put her back down, never to pick her up without express consent again.
Until now, at least.
“Are you listening to me?” Bridget whispered snappily, her tone taut and commanding despite its quietude. “Lexi.”
“Y-Yes? Bridge, what’s… what’s g-g…” Alexandra gasped, finding very little usable air in her lungs to form coherent words, even though her friends’ fingers weren’t squeezing tightly enough to constrict her lungs in the slightest, only her muscles.
“Good. Now, I need you to pay attention, because I’m only going to go through this once with you,” Bridget announced calmly again, her usual warmth still absent and even more apparent in its loss for the continued stillness of her curled lips.
“You’re going to tell me what’s going on now?” Alexandra demanded a little more loudly this time, no longer having the need to regard her friend’s feelings after not only being made to sit in the box for an hour against her will but then being picked up into a fist without being asked first like one of the common Alpha crooks Bridget had become an expert in handling and correcting over her two years as an enforcer.
Bridget nodded with a solemn tilt of her head before gently clearing her throat.
“Yes. The first thing you need to remember is that, even though we… know each other, well… have known each other well for a long time, you can’t refer to me as Bridget during all this.”
“What?”
“You’ll refer to me as Enforcer Cade, or ma’am, whichever one. Clear?”
“Bridge, I…”
The Omega batted her eyelashes a couple times, clearly conflicted. She bit her lips lightly then parted them again.
“I’ll… let that one go. Next time, I’ll have to count it against you. Now, please listen to what I’m saying to you all the way until I’m finished, and then I’ll answer any questions you have if they’re relevant.”
“Oh… okay…” Alexandra mumbled, too thrown off and wallowing in a state of denial to be able to comply so much as just exist and accept the persuasively cold words her friend was spitting out at her like a digital automator.
“Thank you. Now, it’s my duty to tell you that you’ve been processed into my custody as of twenty minutes ago, at 0900 hours. High Command has approved my taking charge of the sessions you’ve been scheduled for.”
Alexandra mulled this statement over to herself for a few moments, nodding silently, before finally deciding while swallowing a golf ball-sized lump in her throat that the depth of whatever mistake had transpired to bring her into the unrelenting fist of her best friend went far deeper than she could’ve imagined.
A cold sweat collecting on the nape of her neck, she was beginning to process it: Bridget was not here to pick her up and take her safely home after sorting out the issue herself.
She was here to do her job.
She was here to… punish her for whatever false crime she’d been convicted of.
Alexandra gazed longingly up into Bridget’s enormous face, pleading with each unmoving skin cell, searching for a sign of some kind. Something. Anything.
Nothing.
No glint in her eye. No twitch of her colorful irises to show she was at least considering the probability of her friend’s innocence. Just stillness, her beauty frozen over as she studied her new charge with the same balanced dispassion she was known for in dealing with all her new convicts.
Why couldn’t Bridget see through the madness of this? She couldn’t seriously believe Alexandra had committed a crime, let alone with words like “assault” and “murder” listed in the charges. There wasn’t even the slimmest chance she could buy this train wreck of unseen and interconnected coincidences that had delivered her here.
She couldn’t. It was impossible.
“Do you understand, Lexi?” Bridget asked after the pause went on for more than a minute.
All the Alpha could do was nod, her jaw hanging open, unable to sum up the necessary words to begin combatting the horrifyingly calm and collected speech she was receiving.
“Good. Now, moving forward, I need you to explain the… event to me in your own words so I can know you understand… why you’re here, and what will be happening to you,” Bridget stated.
“Bri… Enforcer C-Cade…” choked Alexandra, practically having to reorient her vocal cords to get out the identifier. “I don’t know why I’m here, they… they read me some charges, but… but it’s all a m-mistake, some huge freaking misunderstanding. You know me, you know I would never do anything to-”
“Just. Explain it. In your own words,” cut in Bridget curtly. Alexandra wouldn’t necessarily have stopped, except for the way she felt her friend’s palm shifting around her, so capable of clenching with the most relaxed of muscle twitches on the Omega’s part.
“I don’t know. They didn’t tell me what happened, just what they thought I did. Don’t you GET that?”
Bridget studied her friend, then sighed again, blinking several times in rapid succession.
“All right. If… we have to, then we’ll do this like this too. I hope you’re listening close.”
“You better believe I am, because I want to know who thinks I did something to deserve being in here. For God’s sake…”
“Assault and battery, attempted kidnapping… and attempted murder. At just past 2100 hours last night you reported to be around a clothing store in a classified “mixed” common area, having gone shopping, and making your way back to your car. Is that correct?”
“I… I… well, yes, I was there, but…”
“You made your way into an alley instead of the more direct route to the parking garage-”
“I… I don’t even remember, I guess maybe I did. But I…”
“-where you encountered six Betas returning from their shopping as well along a walkway, at which point, with no warning, you removed all of them from the path without consent and placed them on the designated Alpha path instead.”
“Wait… I… I don’t even think I saw Betas last night, let alone got near any of them, Br… m-ma’am, I just…”
“Whereupon you proceeded to… remove your shoes,” Bridget continued, the words clearly paining her as she gulped.
“Okay, STOP there for a second, just hold on, I never…”
“And chase them around the alley, pinning them all down when you caught up several times with enough pressure to badly bruise three of them, break a leg in two of them, and… the sixth one…”
“What?” Alexandra gasped, her voice cracking, now not only terrified of the words being ascribed to her but genuinely worried for the victims of whoever had perpetrated this act and gotten off the hook.
“The sixth one is now in a coma. She sustained a broken hip and repeated bludgeoning that has bruised roughly 70% of her body, before receiving a fracture to her skull on the final high-impact blow when you… dropped her from a height just above your knee.”
“NO!” shrilled Alexandra, her eyes welling at this point at the description of the carnage and particularly what it meant for her that Bridget was continuing on seemingly with the full acceptance that her friend was, in fact, responsible for such an act. “Bridge, that’s wrong, all wrong. You KNOW me. What is this, some kind of sick joke?
“Lexi.”
“It has to be. That’s the only thing I can think-”
“LEXI.”
“What?”
“It’s… Enforcer Cade now. Or ma’am,” Bridget declared coldly, and suddenly her fist began narrowing, coiling snugly enough that in a matter of seconds, Alexandra had gone from a painless still to a numbing tremble and finally a distinctly stinging breathlessness that ran from her sternum down to her toes. It made her feel like a tube of toothpaste being drained of its dregs as she felt the air literally squeeze upward in a single puff and robbed from her lips in a terrified gasp.
“P-P-Plea…” she hacked, her cheeks flushing a deep turnip-red as she found herself unable to complete the word.
“Shake your head if you understand,” Bridget said, her tone and facial expression absolutely unmoved as she squeezed her best friend. “Enforcer Cade. Or ma’am. No Bridge. No Bridget.”
Alexandra began emphatically swinging her head up and down, bonking her face against the rippled pad of Bridget’s curled thumb just below her chin. She nodded so hard she was sure she’d do some damage to her neck if she was forced to go on for much longer, but fortunately the Omega relented just before such a thing became necessary, softening her grip such that oxygen was able to make its way back through the tiny body again.
Air rushed into the Alpha’s lungs and she heaved, huffing in short wisps as tears began flowing down her cheeks freely, sobs gurgling in her throat.
The things she was accused of that apparently had checked out sufficiently to not even raise a suspicion in the mind of this girl she would once have called her sister and, despite the fear and panic ravaging her mind at the treatment she was receiving, probably would still label Bridget as such, which only tormented her further.
Something scary was happening in the Omega. She was like a machine, barely pausing when explaining the grittier of the victims’ tragedies, and not even giving the slightest consideration to any of the statements Alexandra was trying to make to soothe the situation.
Where was the Bridget that would’ve immediately recognized that something was wrong and refused to stop until true justice was served?
Who was this person?
“Now keep listening. We’ll get this over with and I can take you home so we can get started,” Bridget continued with the exact same tone as before, apparently having put the brief episode out of her mind already.
“H-H-Home? With… w-with you?”
“High Command has determined that you will serve up to 90 sessions with me, one per week. These will be spent at my discretion to provide you with the quickest route to a full rehabilitation in your actions. After a month with me, you will have the opportunity to replace up to half of those sessions with doubled hours of community service or a variety of extracurricular Beta culture and race relations courses, reducing your minimum sessions to 43. Believe me, either one ought to be your preference over the alternative. Do you understand this ruling?”
“Please…”
“Do you understand?”
“NO!”
Bridget blinked, clearly still not yet prepared to deal with her friend’s refusal to comply, looking for the briefest moment like a deer caught in headlights and creating a hopeful chink in her armor that was visible to Alexandra for only the briefest second.
“Don’t make this harder on yourself, Lexi. You’re already in a world of trouble. Stop it now.”
“Please,” the Alpha cried with croaking exasperation, the tears now in full force, her eyes a puffy pink. “Please. Please believe me. I didn’t do anything. I swear.”
“We’ll talk more about it after we get home,” Bridget snapped. “We’re done for now.” Her voice came dangerously close to emotionally wavering on the final word. Clearly hearing it, she cringed, and suddenly her hand was lowering toward the waist on her denim jeans.
“PLEASE!” screamed Alexandra as the omnipotent fingers unfurled, depositing her hopelessly into the dark, linty solitude of her best friend’s inescapable pocket.