Alexandra sat crossed-legged in front of the glassy wall of her cell that faced out into Bridget’s bedroom, where the small prison had been placed on a shelf shortly after the end of their first post-session conversation seven days prior.
Now, with gelid hands shivering in her lap, face pale as snow, the Alpha was awaiting the first real contact she would have with her best friend in all that time, and she was dreading it only slightly more than she was subconsciously relieved for it, if only for the fleeting recognition of her consciousness by another living thing.
The intervening days since Tuesday had been trying, to say the least. Bridget had provided Alexandra with a set of clothes and necessary toiletries after she returned from work the day of the arrest, but it had been a wordless transaction, and for the first time, the Omega refused to look her friend in the eye for even a moment of the interaction. Alexandra had silently accepted the offerings, grateful for the chance to change her clothes after how dirty her pajamas had become during the course of the morning, but she didn’t feel any satisfaction from the emptiness of the exchange. In fact, despite her anger at her friend and the entire situation, she still longed for contact in some roundabout way, even if it was as bitterly disappointing as before.
Things only gotten worse in the days following. Bridget brought Alexandra her pre-heated meals at eight in the morning just before she headed to Aegis, at noon for lunch, and again at six in the evening, but they were delivered without any opportunity to speak.
Alexandra knew that this wasn’t a mandated part of her incarceration; in fact, enforcers were encouraged to carry on conversations with their wards as a chance to expand on their lessons. Moreover, she knew that Bridget often took advantage of this opportunity in her work to gauge the progress of those in her custody. This treatment now of cutting Alexandra off from human contact was entirely of the Omega’s choosing, and that cut just as deep as any of the heart-rending abuse.
The week had proceeded at a snail’s pace, and the Alpha was practically out of her mind that, at minimum, she was looking at another forty-six weeks of this, and that was with perfect remarks from Bridget on her progress, something she doubted would be forthcoming given her refusal to lie about what she’d done.
On Friday afternoon, Alexandra got another bittersweet reprieve from the mind-numbing solitude when Bridget broke the silence.
“I meant to give this to you sooner. It’s your tablet to prepare for your Beta culture and class relations exam next week on Thursday,” the Omega had said as she lowered the fragile piece of technology into the cell between pinched fingers. She still didn’t allow their eyes to meet, purposefully staring just above her friend’s plain of vision. “There should be a list of which ones to focus on in the menu. If you break the tablet, it won’t be replaced. Do you understand?”
The prisoner accepted the device from her friend’s fingers and nodded. She as well as Bridget knew this was just another of the required exercises to hand down, and that the exam itself would be a joke for her. After all, the Alpha had already willingly read most of the books in the reading list simply as part of her education as a citizen and had been far too moved by most to ever forget them. It was only a silly formality having it explained to her, and yet again forced the twenty-year-old to recognize how robotic her friend’s words were when rambling through the necessary speeches. Listening to Bridget speak like this was so eerie that it made her relieved to be left in silence again, however briefly.
The enforcer had made one additional direct contact with her friend on Saturday to pick up the dirty laundry and return it twenty minutes later, but otherwise had continued on as distantly as before. Evelyn Cade made no appearances in the room, and Alexandra supposed she couldn’t blame her, if she truly believed the report like everyone else did, though this conclusion didn’t ease the pain any.
The days stretched on so infinitely that the Alpha had taken to skimming back through the reading material just to stop herself from going mad with the boredom, though it was a pointless activity otherwise, and reliving the vivid literary works added too much to her emotional burden to make her want to try for long.
Alexandra couldn’t decide what broke her heart more: the total ignorance, or the frosty receptions she got when she was being paid attention at last.
Now, as she leaned her head against the chilly translucent wall of her cell precisely a week after this whole violent mess, waiting for the inevitable with her stomach tied up in knots, adrenaline and rage kicked up inside her. She was resolved, however shakily. Whatever was coming, she would take it because she had to, but she would refuse to take it without a raised chin and defiance burning in her heart.
It was her truth, and the only truth there was. That was all. No one would take it away.
Bridget marched into the bedroom later in the morning than her friend had been expecting and kicked the door closed behind her with a heel. She had a strappy blue skirt on and sandals that slapped softly at her heels as she strode, suitable for the warmer weather. In her right hand was a bright red popsicle fresh from the wrapper.
“We’re going to get started on your second session now, Lexi,” Bridget announced with eerie calm, the same rehearsed drone evident in her voice, as she came to a stop over the cell and dipped the tip of the popsicle into her cheek. “Please stand up for me.”
Alexandra obeyed, resigned to this, but more determined than ever to keep her personal dignity, or at least what remained of it. The fingers of Bridget’s free hand descended into the cell and the Alpha was forced for yet another gut-churning time in her life to be collected into the Omega’s palm without being offered the chance to embark herself. She knew she would never, ever become used to this, no matter how many times she was forced into it over the course of her stay here, and she knew with even more certainty that the mere act of scooping her up without the tender requests for permission she had become so accustomed to would burn hotter than almost any session Bridget could cruelly concoct.
Gripping her friend around the sides and entrapping her in a vice of firm flesh, the enforcer lifted her charge from the cell and casually marched toward the desk of her bedroom, placing Alexandra down on its surface.
“We’ll just have a quick adjustment to make before we can continue,” Bridget said, keeping her free hand hovering over Alexandra, who lowered herself to her knees to await her fate. “Hold still, just like that, and we’ll get started.”
Befuddled by this request, Alexandra was surprised to hear a low rumble begin to emanate from an unknown source, and she flinched at the sight and sound of it as Bridget’s fingers suddenly caged above her into an aggressive claw-like formation. The Omega didn’t seem to change her stance in the slightest at the commencement of the thunderous echo, as though she couldn’t hear it. The longer it went on, the sound began to mutate into a wild roar, something far more feral than any animal could muster, and it filled the Alpha with poisonous alarm.
All around Alexandra, the air was constricting and blurring until it settled into a constant state of motion, like heat waves along a sunbaked concrete road. It got thicker as the seconds passed indeterminably, encircling her and trapping her, prompting the girl to close her eyes to escape it. That was when she noticed the seeming abandonment of gravity.
It was dizzying, as though she was being pulled higher into the air while her feet remained magnetized to the ground, tugged in two directions. She could feel support around her limbs holding her up that managed to fend off nausea, but it did nothing to assuage her fear at the sheer mind-bending novelty of the sensation. It was absolutely sickening, and only getting worse in tandem with the accompanying auditory barrage.
Alexandra desperately cupped her hands around her ears as the roaring built up to higher and higher peaks, though this did nothing to muffle the noise, and suddenly she understood what was happening even though she’d never bore witness to it personally or even found out the details of it from any Omega she knew.
She was being compressed.
She was becoming… smaller.
Smaller.
Alexandra wasn’t even certain she believed it was possible up to now, but as she finally dared herself to bite her lip and gaze upward, she felt her legs give out, and would’ve almost certainly fallen to the floor in a faint if not for the supportive push-and-pull of the vibrating atmosphere under her friend’s palm locking her in place.
Bridget’s hand was positively titanic. Ordinarily, at five-foot-six, Alexandra was about the length of one of her friend’s fingers.
Now, as she stared up at the expansive sky of soft palm skin that shrouded her in shadow, the entire fleshy canopy trembling more and more violently the longer it held in place, she wondered if she even measured up to the height of Omega’s fingernail now. She had to doubt it.
After ten years of feeling comfortable being under the Omega’s care as her closest friend and confidante, Alexandra never would’ve dreamed she could feel the slightest anxiety at the mere sight of her towering adoptive sister ever again.
Once again, though, her expectations were proven wrong with the emotional force of multiple punches to the gut.
Bridget was simply godlike. There was no other word for it. Alexandra couldn’t even describe her as towering any longer, because it wasn’t enough; she was a veritable mountain of femininity and power now. She was a living landscape that stretched so high that the Alpha had to crane her neck to make out all of her magnificent form. Her fingers were not so much colossal digits any longer as mighty pillars that surrounded her on all sides, quaking with the capacity to transform to dust anything they dug into. Her fingerprints swirled out so far past the width of Alexandra’s body that they resembled ripples in a still river. Those fingers could lower and liquefy Alexandra from any angle or distance with the most rudimentary application of pressure. She was an insect, and Bridget was an Olympian.
And once again, Alexandra remembered what it was like to feel true, biting, unrelenting fear in the rawest part of her heart.
The roaring ceased into a piercing silence just as soon as Bridget withdrew her hand with a startlingly wrenching effort. Her teeth gritted, she slammed her wrist down against her thigh instead of the table to avoid jostling the miniaturized Alpha, grunting loudly with pain. Alexandra fell to her haunches anyway from the shock of being released from the macabre binding of the air, and doubted she had the bravery to stand back up again.
This continued on for more than a minute as the Omega breathed heavily in and out to quell the apparent agony gripping the arm she had just used to shrink her charge, her eyes clenched shut and her upper lip quivering. She had coiled her fingers into a quaking fist, and her knuckles were flushed.
Despite herself, Alexandra felt a flash of concern for her friend’s wellbeing. She couldn’t remember a time in her life having seen Bridget experience actual, physical pain. At worst, she’d seen her stub her toe on a boulder in the backyard and recover after the slightest of winces. In all honesty, Alexandra had often assumed that her friend was incapable of bodily harm. To see her reacting as such now, after an act entirely of her own choosing, was deeply disconcerting, if only for a moment, before Alexandra’s fear at her newfound stature was able to settle back in to the forefront of her focus.
Glancing around the already tremendously scaled room was daunting at her normal height of five and a half feet, but now was practically out of the question, even for gauging her new size. The mere sight of it made her dizzy, as though Bridget’s bedroom had become an infinite canyon unto itself. Walls containing the open-air majesty of the place seemed so far away that Alexandra was only able to convince herself they were tangible because she’d seen them up close in the past, and even then her faith in this fact was tenuous.
And though she knew her estimate was shaky, she guessed she now stood at no more than six inches tall.
When Bridget finally looked up again, still without direct eye contact, she was biting her whitened lips hard enough that she appeared to still be fending off some of the lingering burn but trying very hard to ignore it. She lowered the arm she’d used to compress Alexandra down between her thighs and squeezed it with her legs for additional attempted soothing.
The room remained in turgid silence save for Bridget’s elevated breathing. The Omega raised her other hand back up to her lips, still gripping the popsicle stick, and slid the frozen crimson treat, now the size of a rocket to Alexandra, back between her lips, and quietly inhaled on the moisture. Shivering, the Alpha could hear every massive droplet, even from this far down, being swished through the unknowable vacuum of her friend’s mouth. Terrifying like it had never been before.
And yet the moment still managed to feel not so foreign.
“Are you sure you don’t want one, Lexi?” twelve-year-old Bridget asked as she chewed timidly on the end of her popsicle while reclining in a lawn chair in the backyard, her best friend perched on her own miniature seat secured to the arm.
“I think it’s too big for me, Bridge,” the young Alpha replied sheepishly. “I can’t hold it up.”
“We could cut one up for you.”
“That would probably just make a mess,” Alexandra said.
“I guess,” shrugged Bridget with embarrassment. “Do you want anything else? We have other stuff. Mom would find you something. Or I’ll find you something.”
“I don’t need anything right now,” the Alpha reassured as she folded her arms behind her head, simply enjoying the beaming atmosphere and the warmth against her skin. She could hear the melted red liquid being slurped down the Omega’s gullet.
“Wait,” giggled Bridget as she brandished the stick again. “I have an idea.”
“What?”
“Now,” Bridget whispered at last, her hushed voice reverberating through Alexandra’s eardrums with the cadence of stadium speakers. “I’m going to need you to stay still there.”
Holding the tip of the popsicle in front of her lips again, the Omega’s tongue darted out and lapped along the slick curvature. She clearly was taking her time, perhaps to let Alexandra try and get acclimated to her newfound state of being just barely double the height of a Beta. Or maybe she was simply letting her drink in the gigantic visage of omnipotence that sat before her licking an icy treat large enough to splatter her with a single bounce if Bridget accidentally dropped it.
Alexandra was trying very hard to swallow, but her mouth so dry she could hear a faint rattle in her throat every time she inhaled.
With a final, very deliberate oral caress along one side of the popsicle, Bridget lowered the colossal tower from her lips, and suddenly the hand was descending toward the desk, closer and closer to Alexandra until it was deftly casting a shadow that absolutely dwarfed the miniaturized Alpha, close enough that even at six inches in height she could reach up and touch it if she’d had a shred of bravery left in her paralyzed psyche.
“Here,” Bridget cooed pleasantly, gingerly lowering the half-eaten popsicle over her friend’s chair. “Have a lick.”
“Really?” laughed Alexandra. “How? Look how big it is.”
“I’ll hold onto it. You can just stand up and taste it.”
“Okay,” the Alpha agreed. She hoisted herself up on the arms of her tiny lawn chair and craned her neck up for a drip of the melting monstrosity that hung above.
The ceiling of the sticky cylinder continued to loom closer until it was level with Alexandra, ready to bowl her over with a flick of Bridget’s tremendous fingertips. She thought it pointless to move, given that the popsicle was the size of a building to her now, and even if she’d resolved to fight back like in the first session, there was no convincing her legs to move this time. She was glued to the desktop.
There was no more hesitation on the enforcer’s part. A wall of gooey crimson rammed into the Alpha with a very deliberate motion that only just managed to not topple the delicate little woman to the ground, though it was strong enough in its bracing impact to attach Alexandra’s entire backside to the popsicle like a fly in a web.
She struggled briefly by tugging at her arms and legs, more out of a survival instinct than legitimate faith in her capacity to perform literally any feat of strength at this size. Resisting the gummy wall only made it worse, though, binding Alexandra’s clothes more tightly until the small of her back and her shoulder blades were flush against the frosty tower. Though the surface was warm for a few moments, fresh from being dragged along Bridget’s broiling tongue, it quickly cooled again, gelling the Alpha along with the layer of slicked spit onto it like cement. The iciness of the treat instantly robbed her body of its heat and she felt her jaws rumbling with chattering teeth, her limbs shivering, though it was hard to allow the full range of quaking motion due to her body being all but bloodlessly crucified on Bridget’s popsicle.
She could only make out the Omega’s face by turning her head all the way to the side and looking backwards. As usual for the past week, Bridget’s face was stoic stone, her green eyes narrowed slightly with the focus of making such surgical movements to collect her crumb-sized best friend up from the table using just a few dribbles of her saliva and a popsicle. No more cracks appeared in her armor; she was wired.
There was a sudden rush of wind under Alexandra’s feet as she kicked hopelessly to liberate herself from the arctic adhesive of Bridget’s saliva coating the surface so thickly. They were going back up.
And up. And up.
She couldn’t help but let a small scream erupt as the ground spun below in the spiraling rush. Alexandra clenched her eyes shut as the popsicle returned up to the level of Bridget’s enormous mouth, willing herself not to look down as she practically felt the bottom fall out of her stomach from the mere glance she’d chanced down at the vertical cascade. Soaring weightlessness flooded her every vein as though she’d been pumped dry of blood, and her brain was on an aggressive spin cycle. Sweat dribbled down the nape of her neck and almost instantly froze again in her clothes and tangled hair.
Bridget’s hulking fist was still coiled around the stick far below and would indeed catch her fall if the sticky pull of the Omega’s frozen saliva finally gave out, but to Alexandra the drop was more than five stories below, with nothing holding her up.
Dangling in a frigid void.
She knew that compression allowed her body to maintain its normal durability, meaning it would only result in a twisted ankle at worst if she tumbled down to Bridget’s hand. Unfortunately, the more accidental glimpses Alexandra caught of the plummet, the more impossible it became to believe in this fact.
And then Bridget’s mouth opened again in an incidental spritz of saliva as her mammoth tongue unfurled soggily from the blackness.
“You got it?” Bridget snickered as she held the popsicle horizontally over her friend’s chair.
“Almost!” laughed Alexandra as she extended her tongue to the tremendous bulk of the thing. She flinched at how cold it was and retracted a few inches down again, but once accustomed to the temperature, she leaned up again and licked at the sticky goodness with more confidence.
“Have some more,” encouraged the Omega.
“I don’t want to eat your whole popsicle,” the Alpha said sheepishly, wiping a hand across the sugary film that had been left over the bottom half of her face.
“Lexi, if you could actually eat this whole thing, we’d probably have a problem, cuz you’d just pop,” Bridget said, trying not to laugh harder at the comical sight of her friend’s sticky chin.
“Yeah, I guess,” agreed the girl with a shrug, taking another insignificantly tiny lick at the massive popsicle. “Thanks, Bridge.”
“You’re welcome!”
Bridget’s taste buds undulated like individual organisms unto themselves on the monstrous pink landscape as it descended toward Alexandra, who was fairly certain she could grip each individual one in her fist, so great was the scale of it. The tongue licked along the tip far above first, the entire popsicle trembling in Bridget’s grip with each muscular lap and rattling Alexandra from skull to toe. Each slide of the muscle along the popsicle left a glistening trail of residue that wrapped around half of the freezing cylinder, until Bridget set about caving an entire side of the popsicle into the sweltering fold of her tongue.
That was when Alexandra felt the first drop.
It began slowly at first. As the monstrous organ wound its way around the crystalline tower, gallons upon gallons of the melted crimson liquid began pouring down the unevenly dissipated spires in syrupy rivulets. Alexandra gasped as the first few splotches soaked icily into her clothes and settled into her skin, staining her with a sickly pink and freezing again after a few moments, but it wasn’t long before her body was forced from the shock of each freezing trickle to expect an eventual downpour.
With each repetition, it was like having a bucket of ice water poured over her petrified form again. And again.
And again.
All the Alpha could do was tremble in the hollowing frigidity as waves flooded over her in cataracts of red, practically blending her in hue with the icy wall. Soon, the remaining parts of her body unattached to the popsicle from her fingers to the ends of her hair were fastened as well. She was utterly immobile.
A few chance glances upward allowed her to see the popsicle steadily shrinking as Bridget’s magnificent tongue worked relentlessly over the mountainous cardinal landscape, cooking down the mighty tower with just the heat of her mouth and allowing it to descend in endless gooey waterfalls that forced their way up Alexandra’s nose as she gasped for breath during the worst of the descents. These glances never lasted for long, though, before a fresh gushing of algid liquid was splattering into her eyes and throat again.
As the minutes ticked by at a murderously glacial pace, Bridget’s tongue began to gloss lower and lower along the popsicle, never quite coming into contact with the trapped Alpha, but obviously intending to suggest such a thing, and a shudder almost powerful enough to break her away from the popsicle rocked through Alexandra’s body each time the writhing, oozing mass of muscle the size of a whale slithered so mercilessly close to her in a flying rampage of sloshed red sugar and frothy spit bubbles.
“Lexi,” came the droned whisper that rumbled through Alexandra’s skeleton and seemed to individually tingle at each joint. “Look at me.”
“How is it?” Bridget asked, finally lifting the popsicle out of reach of her friend as Alexandra slumped back into her tiny chair.
“Soooooo good,” Alexandra drawled quietly, wiping her wrist over her mouth a final time but missing most of the mark anyway. She laid a hand over her gurgling stomach. “I… think I had too much, though.”
“Are you sure? I can’t even tell that you had any!” Bridget giggled, rotating the seemingly untouched popsicle in her grip for study just to confirm this fact before shrugging and admitting the treat back between her lips. “If you want any more, just let me know, ‘kay?”
“Uh-huh,” groaned the over-satisfied Alpha, wrapping her arms over her abdomen for dramatic effect. “How about if I can ever walk again, then I’ll have some.”
“You don’t have to walk again. I could just carry you everywhere.”
“No you couldn’t,” Alexandra said with a snicker.
“Yes I could,” Bridget countered, still half-laughing herself, but with sincerity in her voice again. “You know I could.”
“Yeah, that’s right. So if I never, ever walked again, you would just carry me?” the Alpha pressed with a playful roll of her eyes.
“Uh-huh. Why not?”
“What if you wanted to do other stuff? You’d have to put me down sometime,” insisted Alexandra.
“No, I wouldn’t. I’d find a way. Besides, we already do all our other stuff together,” insisted Bridget gently. Clearly, she was entirely serious.
“I bet it would get boring,” Alexandra said and hung her head bashfully, unable to get the embarrassed smile off her face no matter how many muscles she contorted. She knew it was a joke to imagine, but all the same, there were so few things in the world she appreciated as hearing her best friend and adoptive sister talk like that, because no matter hyperbolic or impossible it seemed, she knew the Omega wasn’t lying about a single word that came out.
“What, boring? With you?” Bridget answered with a disbelieving snort. “Not a chance.”
Neck stiff and eyes puffy from the amount of popsicle goop that had leaked into them, Alexandra forced herself to stare blearily up at the gaping source of the words, as Bridget’s eyes were a little too high up at this proximity to make out easily.
“You could stop all this. Right now,” Bridget uttered, deliberately keeping her syllables curt to avoid blowing too much wind onto her miniscule inmate, though regardless, each delicate exhalation brought with it a hot gale that spilled around the Alpha’s quivering form.
Despite her lowered state of awareness from the continual exposure to the freezing liquid over god-knew how many cycles, Alexandra’s ears perked up slightly at this, though no additional muscles twitched in her face, save for those already in motion from the cold.
“All you have to do is tell the truth. You’d have to finish your sessions, but I could give you good reviews, and you’d be doing community service in half the time,” Bridget continued slowly. “And nothing like… this would happen again. Ever again. You decide when it ends.”
For the briefest flutter of a heartbeat, Alexandra wanted to do it, just to escape this torment. To say it all just like she knew Bridget would need to hear to follow through on her promise. She wanted to open her mouth and scream that, yes, she’d pulled those Betas off the road. Yes, she’d stepped on them, beat them, bruised them, broken their legs, teased them with the possibility of escape before stealing their hope again, and dropped that poor innocent girl as though she was a crumpled up piece of garbage. Yes, she’d done all those things, and why? Why? For no reason. Because she was bored. Because they were there, and she was bored.
No.
No, she wouldn’t.
Her truth.
There was a wordless exchange, where neither Omega nor Alpha moved another inch, but both understood fully what the answer was, and the moment to make a connection was sealed off again. Both understood what was coming next even before either had guessed it would happen.
Bridget’s jowls widened impossibly, high enough that Alexandra guessed she could’ve swallowed a house scaled to her, and then descended again with heart-squelching speed. Engulfing what remained of the ravaged sludge on a stick, the Omega’s teeth clamped into the red cliffs of the popsicle below Alexandra’s body and sealed her into the unknowable murkiness. The Alpha’s lingering breath caught in her chest as she inhaled her last clean lungful of oxygen. With the massive lips finally settled over the selected bite, a gentle murmur of flavorful satisfaction sounded out. Bridget slurped the icy chunk along with her microscopic best friend into the steamy darkness of her mouth.
The rest was a tactile blur. Alexandra felt like she’d been thrown into a limbo where heat, slime, and flesh had all melded into one existence of a single emotion. She had no idea where she was as she felt herself sloshed through a river of saliva, thrown head over heels in the current, before being dexterously scooped into the indent of Bridget’s tongue. The remainder of the popsicle juices were melted almost immediately from her body and washed into the soggy onslaught as the residue was sucked from her body with just a few pulses.
She felt the taste buds vibrating against every inch of her soaked limbs and through her soggy clothes. A rush flooded her stomach as she slid down the valley before being tossed again. Alexandra couldn’t be sure, but she guessed that she met the wall of both of Bridget’s inner cheeks a half a dozen times, bouncing between them with a flick of the tongue. At one point, she felt her feet brush rapidly along a wall of molars, though she never crashed into them with the kind of violent impact she knew she would if the swishing motions she was obviously being expertly directed in by her friend’s tongue and saliva were off by a few inches.
But they never were.
With her senses thrown into such an indistinct jumble where reality could hardly be distinguished from nightmarish assumption, Alexandra became startlingly aware of one thing above all else: that Bridget’s entire mouth was moving. Bobbing, even, up and down, as though the Omega were nodding her head in intent intervals like a perfect metronome, counting by the second. She was keeping time.
Fifty-seven. Fifty-eight. Fifty-nine. Sixty.
The expulsion from the dark and muggy purgatory was instantaneous as light flooded Alexandra’s eyes and cold wind met her limbs. She was flying oh-so-briefly in a spray of saliva before meeting the cushioned landing platform of her friend’s palm, now more akin to a valley of creased flesh than the luxuriously warm armchair she was accustomed to.
The Alpha landed on her hands and knees and remained there, despite knowing that Bridget was more than capable of holding still enough to let her stand up, even at this scale. More important, she didn’t look up. She couldn’t.
She would not give anyone, even her best friend, the satisfaction. This was just the price she promised herself she would pay in favor of abandoning her principles, and she was paying it in full.
The Alpha didn’t even have tears this time. She doubted she had the energy to conjure them up anyway, but either way, Alexandra had entered a different state now. Hollowness, all-encompassing, was her being in this moment. It made her colder than when she’d been glued to Bridget’s popsicle, and yet it was still preferable to a molestation of the absolute truth.
Alexandra collapsed on her stomach and vomited from the motion sickness of the entire episode, but still didn’t look up.
Every person she cared about in the whole world believed her to be a vile criminal monster. That truth was all she had left.
And no one was taking it away.