The end of the session was abrupt and savagely silent.

            As the time reached thirty minutes exactly, Bridget lowered her clasped bare feet back to the wooden surface of the floor and released her ravaged captive from between her sweltering soles with a gentle thump.

            Crumpled into the fetal position, Alexandra just sniffled, closing her eyes and no longer caring in the slightest that her friend was seeing her like this, so vulnerable and humiliated and stained with tears.  She didn’t even bother flinching when Bridget plucked her up between a thumb and index finger with refreshing gentleness and deposited her back into the cell on the corner bed.  The Alpha’s only reaction was hugging the mattress to her body for comfort, as she knew full-well by now such a feeling surely wasn’t coming from any other nearby source.

            “I’ll be back later, and we’ll have that conversation.  For now, get yourself… cleaned up,” Bridget instructed dryly, each word like poison on her tongue, and she felt her voice cracking again, her hands trembling at her sides, though thankfully neither was noticed by her quietly hysterical best friend.

            Alexandra managed only a tilt of her head even as she buried her face in the bed and continued to cry.

            As soon as Bridget had marched militaristically back across the house and sealed herself in her bedroom, she stumbled with weak knees into the adjoining bathroom and turned the shower on full-blast to fill the room with the dull crashing roar against the basin.

            With adequate auditory cover, then, she dove onto her bed and buried her face in her pillow just in time to drown out the pent-up echo of the distraught howl that had been threatening to rip its way from her body for the past three hours she’d spent having to process what Alexandra had done and then subsequently reprimand it personally.

            Bridget screamed into the muted surface of the pillow until her anguished cry became an ear-splitting shriek, and then finally died down into hoarse gasping as she unsuccessfully fought back the sobbing.  Her placid shell had been on the verge of cracking as it was, but at this point, after what she’d just done to Alexandra, she was barely holding it together.

            She hadn’t believed it at first, not for an instant.  In fact, when the report came through that High Command had approved Alexandra’s arrest and placement with an enforcer, she’d been unable to move and fumed silently at her desk with fire in her green eyes and her trembling knuckles tightened to a pale white.  Even before she was able to move, she’d received a couple of uneasy glances from enforcers Kyle Rodgers and Claire Lindon, who, as the only others present, had clearly seen the report too, though both knew it would be ill-advised to say a word about it to Bridget as a storm began visibly brewing inside her.

            Though she was well-known as a caring and gentle soul unflinchingly dedicated to absolute justice and the preservation of peace whenever possible, it was an unspoken rule that all bets were off when it came to her best friend Alexandra.  The two girls were positively inseparable, more tightly bound to each other than any other living soul, and though it had never been tested up to now, it was simply understood that should a single malicious finger ever be laid upon the smaller girl, there would be very serious hell to pay.

            Once the Omega had managed to catch her breath and slow herself down from pure rage to mere incensement, she stomped directly into the office of Senior Enforcer Hart, who’d processed the report.  Shoving the tablet he was working on to the floor, she’d had to clamp her shaking hands behind her back to prevent herself from hooking him in the jaw for having dared allow such a thing to go through.

            He calmly placed the item back on his desk while she glared at him, her hands now on her hips.  Hart had explained to her that he had given very careful consideration to it all before sending the report to High Command.  When the fury didn’t dissipate from her expression, he offered to show her his reasoning for it.

            With a scowl, Bridget had agreed, taking a seat in front of his screen and crossing her arms, hardly able to keep from quivering as this sad façade continued onward without recourse, knowing that her friend would be arrested very soon and brought to Aegis where she would be placed in a cell to await processing.

            Alexandra.  In a cell.  It didn’t seem real.

            The first thing Hart showed her was a recording from an Aegis security feed over a mixed race shopping area taken the night before.  It was faint from the distance, but six Betas were clearly seen in the light walking along an elevated walkway into the alley in close quarters.  Emerging from a store in the center of the view about four minutes afterward was an Alpha who was easily identified as Alexandra when she turned her head nonchalantly in the direction of the camera, batting at her dark hair and swinging her shopping bags over her shoulder.  At first walking toward the path that led to a stairwell down into the parking garage, she paused for a moment, pressing a hand to her lips, then made off in the other direction around the side of the building and into an alley, where the camera’s view couldn’t reach.

            The feed resumed at a time four and a half minutes later on the opposite end of the alley, which Hart pointed out was only about sixty feet long.  The film quality was grainier, as the camera was operated by a Beta clothing store located near the corner of the alley, but it was still unmistakable.  Alexandra emerged from the dimmed lighting of the path, hopping on one leg as she struggled to put her left shoe back on without having to stoop.  Successful, she sauntered more confidently toward the staircase.

            The final clip was from the parking garage, which showed Alexandra stepping into her vehicle, among the last in the lot, and driving off.

            The Betas never emerged until emergency services could arrive to collect them.

            “So what?” Bridget had sneered.  “What is this saying?  That she took her time walking through an alley?”

            “Watch,” he had instructed, pointing back to the screen.

            Next up was a recording from an Aegis debriefing room, where five Betas were huddled together in a cluster of chairs in front of a table where they were delivering their story to a worker of their same class who normally handled recently trauma cases.  Bridget idly wondered why there were five and not the six seen entering the alley.  They were shivering, twitching at every other word spoken gently to them, all with at least several bandages and a couple of them in casts, and as Bridget leaned in closer to examine the image on the screen, she could see a few of them were caked with spatters of blood on their clothes.

            “It’s all right now,” the Beta interviewer had said sweetly from behind the camera.  “You’re safe.  You’re at Aegis now, where no one can touch you.  Are you ready to speak?”

            “Yes.  Y-Y-Yes…” sputtered one of the young men, who looked no older than twenty.

            “What’s your name?”

            “N-N-Nathaniel T-Tyler.”

            “Thank you, Nathaniel.  You can begin when you’re ready.”

            “Okay,” he said blearily, his eyes shifting nervously all around the room.  His jet-black hair was matted down against his forehead in a bloodied crust and there was an unmistakable thousand-yard stare glossed over his eyes.

            It made Bridget’s skin crawl to see someone so scarred just trying to get his composure together sufficiently to speak.  What could possibly have disturbed someone so?  She knew the Betas had a hard existence, even with Omega protection, and that was no secret to anyone.

            This was beyond that, even.  There was something simply wild in his eyes.  Feral and terrified, like he’d been backed into a corner and been stripped of his humanity.

            “We were walking on the upper path,” he began.  “D-Down the road, in that alley.  And… and it was just us, m-minding our b-business, quiet, and suddenly the girl… t-that one you showed us, the picture, her f-face…”

            “Alexandra Warren?”

            “Y-Yes, her.  S-She came up b-behind us, and just p-picked us up, all in one h-hand, and…”

            “Did she say anything?  Make any sound at all?” asked the Beta worker.

            “N-Nothing, just… g-grabbed us, and put us on the g-ground…” he managed, slamming a hand on the table before him and tightening it into a quivering fist while taking another hard swallow.  “Then she took off her s-s-sh… shoes… and started walking.  After us.  We d-didn’t start r-running right away, we were t-too confused then, but then she put her toe on Andy’s l-leg, and…”

            Nathaniel’s account stopped here as he covered his face with his hands and began hyperventilating.  One of his friends wrapped her arm around Nathaniel and hugged his head to her shoulder while one of the less physically shaken Betas took over the story and choked through the horrendous and eventful remainder of it.  The others steadily chimed in too with their own grim ordeals whenever someone needed confirmation.

            Bridget wanted to look away.  She wanted to look away so badly that she tried closing her eyes and turning her head in the other direction, but her sense of duty and bleeding compassion forced her to remain locked on the nightmarish things coming from the screen.

            And then just for good measure, Senior Enforcer Hart pulled up a quick photo that had been snapped of the sixth Beta before her transport into emergency surgery, a nineteen-year-old named Iris, where she was apparently now stabilized but still not looking positive.  She looked like she’d been run directly over by a car.

            That was just about all Bridget could take.

            “That’s enough,” she quietly huffed with her hands in her lap, significantly more docile than when she’d first arrived in the office.

            “They didn’t see the footage, either, of Alexandra walking back.  They described her, all in pretty accurate detail, on their own, and we confirmed it with the feed.  Outfit, hair, facial features, shoes.  It all matched what we had on camera.  They described the event as taking place in under five minutes, which matches the footage on the camera,” Hart said with an uncomfortable nod, scratching the back of his neck.

            “H-H-How, though,” Bridget swallowed, clinging to whatever hope she could desperately grab onto that her friend was still innocent.  “How do we know it wasn’t just a…”

            “Mark of an Alpha assault all over it.  The bruises on some of those guys under the bandages?  Wide impacts, consistent with their story of what hit them.  The one in the coma says it all, though,” Hart sighed.

            “Why?”

            He nodded grimly with his hands in his pockets.  “Broken hip, and then her skull was fractured on the landing.”

            “Landing.”

            “Yes.  She… was dropped.  From a pretty good height for her, definitely over two feet.”

            “More than knee height for…”

            “Exactly.  A Beta wouldn’t have been able to do that, and according to the cameras, no one else went in there during that time.  Just Alexandra.  They were all fine when they went in, but had to be taken out on stretchers.”

            The silence was deafening, excruciating in its longevity to Bridget.  It was as though she’d gone catatonic.

            Not Alexandra.

            Not her.

            She couldn’t.  She wouldn’t.

            “I know it’s hard, Cade.  I respected her, too.  A lot of people did.  She was a great kid.  But…” Hart sighed.

            “Don’t,” Bridget gasped, a few tears already flowing icily down her cheek, though she quickly wiped them away.

            “I’m sorry, I really am.  It kills me too.  But… this?  This is open and shut,” Hart groaned resignedly.  “There’s nothing I can do for her.  Alexandra… did this.  Herself.  Somehow.  I don’t know what came over her, what’s happening to her, but we’re going to find out.  You saw High Command approved this already, and asked me to select an enforcer to handle it.  I was thinking of putting her with-”

            “Let me do it,” Bridget uttered under her breath, barely audible, interrupting the Senior Enforcer.

            “Pardon?”
            “Let me do it,” she repeated, finally looking up from her death stare with the screen.  “Let me be her enforcer.”

            “Cade.  Look.  You’re an excellent enforcer, no one has to tell you that.  But because of how you know her… well.  She’s a friend.  Let’s face it.  It wouldn’t exactly be an unbiased dispensing of justice like we all swore an oath to follow.”

            “I can do it,” Bridget continued with an unsettling chill in her voice.  “You know I can.  Give her to me.”

            “How do I know you’ll be able to maintain control of the situation?  You know the purpose of this system is to rehabilitate violently deviant Alphas. This isn’t supposed to be a time to hug and make everything all better, at least not until she’s served every last second of the time she’s earned for herself by doing what she did to those Betas.”

            “I know.  And she’s going to serve it.  With me.”

            There was an awkward silence as both parties realized Bridget was going to win the debate.

            “Don’t blow this, Cade.  You know it’s going to look strange already that I’m giving her to you, so you need to make sure this is done without the slightest deviation,” he warned.

            “Don’t worry,” Bridget said simply.  “It will be.”

            Now, as the determined Omega wept into her pillow until it was practically soaked through to the other side, she bit into the fabric to try and quell her agonized anger.  She had known almost as soon as they arrived home that this moment of recuperation would be necessary after the session, and was glad she’d been able to judge it as such and leave the Alpha in the living room to allow herself some necessary privacy now.

            The truth was that her reasons for demanding to be made Alexandra’s enforcer were selfish, and she knew it.

            It wasn’t that she intended to go easy on her friend for what she did; Bridget had seen so few looks of genuine disturbed mania in her life like she’d witnessed in Nathaniel’s eyes, and after seeing Iris’s crumpled and purple form after the final blow she’d received, it was all she could do to keep herself from applying just a little more pressure when handling the young Alpha she once thought she knew so well but had so clearly been mistaken about.

            No, her real reason for taking the duty was simple: she knew she would never sleep soundly again until she was able to discover what had happened to her best friend, and if any part of her was still left inside the tiny monster currently laying in the cell.

            As she at last managed to slow her breathing down into the pillow and clutched it tightly to her chest, Bridget knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was prepared to do absolutely anything necessary to squeeze the truth from this wretch that had so catastrophically distorted the closest thing she had to a sister.

            Anything.