CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Fifty feet east and forty feet west. The extent of the view from Mir’s window. The extent of their world.

Better than Hell.

Utterly shit compared to Freedom Farm.

However many times Mir told themselves this was fine, was in fact good, they still had to dredge up a smile for Tor and Cor whenever one of their siblings bullied them out of this room. The force wasn’t physical here, not like in Hell, but the hopeful faces, the sympathy and pity that pissed them off still dragged Mir out from where they felt safest.

They rolled their shoulder pleased at the way it was healing. The wound in their upper arm didn’t hurt much anymore, although, by the feel of it, the muscle still had a little healing to do. They’d taken the itchy stitches out themselves this morning, using the bathroom mirror to see the back of their arm and a pair of scissors.

Mir peered through the window of the spare bedroom their siblings had allocated them in their three-story brick building. The ground floor housed their offices, the second floor was living accommodation, and the two large bedrooms were on the top floor. Mir’s siblings insisted that they take the biggest room, a spare room apparently, although Mir could smell both their sibs in here. The twins said they still slept together, like they’d done as pups, unless Toren coming in late would disturb Corish’s sleep.

The communal-sized bed could have slept half a dozen adults and swamped Mir. When resting, they didn’t often sleep, they found themselves huddled on one side, leaving space for phantom family members. For Tavish. Heart clenching with loneliness, Mir turned back to the window. Last night had been more disturbed than most; backache had made sleeping impossible, not that Mir slept much these days.

Silver gray wallpaper reflected enough light for the room to appear large and bright. The heavy, high-quality furniture screamed of their siblings’ stable income, but Mir still felt like an invader, intruder, the fifth wheel. It wasn’t their home, and even the blood they shared couldn’t heal the broken ties and make them more than strangers in such a short time, despite the ghosts of the people they’d been. This wasn’t Mir’s place; would never be, so they kept staring at the street below, yearning yet fearing what lay outside these walls.

Guessing the gender, occupation, and affiliation status of the people hurrying past on the street below distracted from their own troubles.

Beta. Office worker. Unaffiliated.

Beta. Office worker. Affiliated.

Beta. Retail assistant. Unaffiliated.

College Student.

Mir peered at the casually dressed youngster hurrying along the street with textbooks under their arm. Their face remained annoyingly out of focus, but with their jeans and plain rusty orange shirt, they might not even be old enough to have officially earned a beta name. The game of deciding if a beta had affiliated or not got a little trickier with students.

For the mature betas, Mir had decided the more uptight they appeared, the more likely they were to have affiliated with an alpha. If an independent beta fucked up at work, they didn’t risk a beating by their master, just a telling-off by their employer or themselves if they were self-employed. Although… if they didn’t bring in enough money, an unaffiliated beta could lose their home or starve.

Maybe Mir had gotten it wrong; it wouldn’t have been the first time. Perhaps unaffiliated betas had more to be stressed about after all. Mir knew about farm work. Knew about knots. They didn’t understand a damn thing about the world their siblings inhabited, and embarrassment about their ignorance kept their lips firmly buttoned. Is Toren even affiliated to Corish?

The number of people who used the paved street below at all hours of the day and night boggled their mind. The building was surrounded by similar, three-story, redbrick properties that blocked Mir’s view of the rest of the city. The pavements on either side of the road had half-barrel wooden planters filled with bright flowers every twenty feet, in an attempt to bring nature into the city. A sanitized, unrealistic facsimile. Real nature was smelly, untidy, and often ugly.

From up here, Mir could hardly smell the flowers over the blended scents of people. Beta council workers even came by once a day to pick up the horse shit and collect household waste.

Many of the upper floors of the buildings boasted window boxes with a variety of flowers or herbs. Mir’s window didn’t have a flowerbox. But outside the kitchen window downstairs, a variety of herbs grew in a carefully tended box to be plucked to add fresh flavor to a dish. Their siblings seemed so at home in this alien environment. Chest aching with longing for the scents of freshly bitten grass, and the chicken shed, Mir could do nothing but stare blankly at this strange world where they didn’t belong.

Everyone out there seemed to know where they were and where they were going, and by the way they hurried along, every one of them needed to be there sooner than later.

Few strolled here, and even less stopped to admire the flowers or chat and pass the time of day, except when the patrons in the bar across the road spilled out onto the pavement in the evenings. The pub and the grocery shop next door catered to the universally beta office workers, but the street was seldom empty of vehicles or people for long, even in the middle of the night.

Watching and wondering about the lives of the people below was easier than contemplating their own or the nightmares that battered them whenever they slept. It reminded Mir of watching the trains go past the farm as a pup, but this constant traffic proved far more distracting. It let Mir concentrate on the now. Thinking about their past or future sent them into a mental tailspin that left them huddled on the floor beside the bed or in the bath behind the locked door of the ensuite.

Now is fine. The babies are safe inside.

For now.

Mir forced the unwanted thought away. Every day, every hour that passed, was a little nearer to going into labor. From what Tavish had said, they’d gone beyond the earliest part of the ‘normal’ range to deliver triplets two weeks ago. Birth meant the babies’ DNA could be typed. Birth meant their sire, or sires, would be discovered. Birth meant losing them like they’d lost Tavish.

Gritting their teeth against their idiot prickling eyes, Mir concentrated on the scene below.At seven-thirty in the morning, the sea of betas were hurrying to work, study, or the markets.

It was that older beta again. Mir had seen him coming out of the door next to the grocery store several times. Slim and in their late forties, possibly fifties, and impeccably dressed in a pale gray suit, they stuck out for several reasons. Firstly, they didn’t seem to be in a particular hurry, and they always glanced up at the buildings. Perhaps they were into architecture, but what really drew Mir’s attention was that the beta wore spectacles. Growing up, there had been a couple of betas in their hometown who had them, but never an alpha or omega.

The well-dressed, clearly professional beta stopped right below Mir and examined the office windows. Mir had spotted Omega Justice engraved into the large window of the office before Toren and Corish hustled them upstairs, past the half dozen betas busy at their desks, the day Mir arrived. Not one of them had glanced over. Perhaps they were used to their bosses hurrying half-dressed, heavily pregnant omegas up to their apartment. But that had been the first and last time Mir had been at ground level.

Like a princess in a fucking tower waiting to be rescued by her prince. What a joke. If this was a fairytale, Mir would more likely play the grumpy troll who growled “Geroff of my Land,” rather than anything in a frilly dress and glass slippers. Mir grinned at the thought of the horror on the prince’s face if he made it past all the dragons to rescue the fair princess who looked like she fought ogres for fun and was already knocked up by the dragon.

The smile dropped. Like the fantasy prince, Tavish had promised rescue and a Happy Ever After, and yet here Mir was, living with the equivalent of two of the seven friendly, hospitable, damn nosey, and protective dwarves. Dwarves who would give up Mir’s babies to the evil King on the result of a stupid test.

They looked down again, but the beta had moved on. An alpha with an omega appeared at the far extent of Mir’s view, and even though he was forty feet away and not looking in their direction, Mir stepped back while still trying to recognize him. Hell was a long way, but all those alphas had to come from somewhere. Fuzzy brown hair, pale skin, large beard, red and brown kilt. They didn’t recognize him. At this distance, anything more than his build, coloring, and hair styling was indistinct because of crappy omega eyesight. Eyesight that could probably be corrected with spectacles, but no omega Mir had ever seen had them.

The omega with him seemed young, or at least small, but she averted her eyes from the office as her alpha hurried her along with a hand on the small of her back. Perhaps he thought she’d catch some horrible disease, such as a backbone, from the view of the interior of the office. Yeah, this place frightens alphas because of my siblings. Pride swelled, and Mir brushed a hand over their belly.

“See?” Mir whispered. “Not all the family are fuck-ups like me. Be like them, not like your parents, whoever the hell your sires are.”

Or like Tavish. Mir couldn’t even say his name aloud in private. He hadn’t come to get Mir like he’d promised, and Mir’s crappy brain flipped between being purposefully abandoned or something terrible happening to the kind, beta-ish alpha.

Sakish told him what a skanky bitch I am, and he found himself a better omega.

Or he’s up on the hill beside his Ma, buried in an unmarked grave because he was never an official alpha.

Locking the hideous thoughts away, they resolutely turned their attention back to the street. More people passed this house daily than Mir had ever seen in a month as a child, and more than they’d seen in the whole of the last eight years, including the visit to the Grabar estate. Toren and Corish hadn’t let any of their seemingly endless stream of visitors or their employees come up to their living quarters. But Mir heard them and sometimes smelled them when down in the living area.

They stayed in their room, apart from when their siblings dragged them down to eat in the early morning or late evening. Meeting anyone, suffering their curiosity, sympathy, or pity, was too much of a reminder of what a fuck up they was. Hiding from the question, “How long do you have to go?” was a major priority. For the asker, it would be a polite inquiry for a happy event. For Mir, it would be the end. Luckily, Tor and Cor seemed equally embarrassed about Mir, and nobody had come up the stairs apart from them since Mir arrived, as far as they could tell.

Their siblings had promised a lifetime roof over Mir’s head and a supply of heat suppressants. However clever a lawyer Corish claimed to be, the law was the law. Children belonged to the sire, not the dam. Despite carrying the growing baby inside them, omegas were considered vessels for an alpha’s offspring, not someone with an equal or greater investment.

But after the babies were taken from Mir, and they would be once their sires were established, Mir would have no purpose, no use, in this beta city world. Mir imagined sitting at this window, watching the world pass them by forever. No, that wouldn’t happen; they refused to be a burden on their siblings for life. Perhaps Mir could help interview the omegas the law firm helped.

Even the thought of being in another omega’s presence was like nails down a chalkboard. It’d taken months before Mir had stopped wanting to rip Kev’s head off in Hell, but that had more to do with Kev’s persistence and humor than anything in Mir. Guilt clawed at their throat. They hadn’t thought about the omega who sacrificed herself to help Mir escape in weeks. Zepish and Sakish would know, but sending a message to ask via Clayen was a laughable goal. If Kev wasn’t already dead, flagging that Mir cared about them would make the cheeky little blonde omega a bargaining chip and a huge target.

Mir bet, that like Tavish, Tor and Cor would take Kev in if they ever turned up. More disruption in their lives because of Mir.

Tor and Cor probably thought they’d fool Mir that their lives weren’t affected by the presence of a permanent house guest. Corish stayed home most of the time, but whenever Corish left the property, Toren stayed in, as the twins surreptitiously tag-teamed babysitting their older sibling.

Tor kept odd hours and could be missing for days at a time, doing whatever a private investigator did. Probably spying on people to dig out their dirty secrets. Every now and again, Mir caught their beta sibling staring at them as if they could ferret out their secrets by telepathy or body language.

Direct questions provoked a snapped, “I’m not telling you a damn thing.” If that didn’t work, Mir tried the silent treatment or went upstairs. When Toren followed, as had happened on a couple of occasions, Mir shut themselves in the bathroom.

Corish had made Mir uncomfortable at first, but that was only due to his gender. Weeks after moving in with them, the alpha note in Corish’s scent no longer struck Mir as wrong, and he hadn’t done anything other than be friendly and concerned. Day by day, the urge to brace to stop themselves from hunching when he came into a room waned. Corish still kept his distance, probably trying not to set off a panic attack like the one in the hospital. That had clearly freaked their brother out, and both their siblings were making monumental efforts to accommodate Mir. If it wasn’t so fucked up, it would have been cute seeing Mir’s big-ass alpha brother moving at a deliberate snail’s pace around his own home to not spook their crazy re-discovered sibling.

It was easier to let them carry on thinking they had a problem with all alphas rather than concealing that one in particular had made Mir feel safe enough to stand tall and even sass one of the most important alphas in the whole of Malthusia. And punch his omega. Mir smiled at the memory, before realizing it probably hadn’t done them a lot of favors with the Grabars. They certainly hadn’t come hunting for Mir.

Because I’m a foul-mouthed, violent, big ass slut. And don’t forget the crazy.

Never forget the crazy.

Their siblings’ efforts to make Mir feel comfortable and safe were painful to watch because what the twins wanted could never happen. Cor and Tor wobbled between wanting the smart-mouthed, confident teen they’d known and a traditional, demure omega. What they had was a mentally and physically damaged burden who flipped from a shaking wreck to sarcastic and confrontational from minute to minute and sometimes second to second.

Seeing them tip-toeing around Mir’s neuroses, plus the cloying sympathy and guilt in every glance and gesture, caused anger, shame, and regret in equal measure. Apart from doing dishes and laundry, which their siblings had been managing themselves for years, and was damn difficult around their huge belly, Mir was nothing but an obligation and a burdensome one at that.

During the day, Mir coped, but at night, alone in bed, Mir craved Tavish’s presence so much it felt as if their chest had been hollowed out. Imagining his touch and his scent surrounding them consumed every thought and heartbeat. It was as bad as the drug craving in the first few days after escaping from Hell. The difference was that Mir had known the drugs were bad for the babies, but they couldn’t stop feeling that Tavish was every kind of right. His calm goofiness, his dusty, quiet home, and the shaggy ponies all made Mir sigh with fondness. They even missed the mischievous Cole and Tavish’s constant bickering with “that demon-spawned walking glue stick.”

At first, Mir kept their uncomfortable vigil at the bedroom window, because they was convinced Tavish would turn up, demand to see them, and cause a fight when Corish would, understandably, refuse him entry. Mir planned for hours how to defuse that situation when it happened.

It didn’t.

And every passing hour made it more likely that it never would.

Corish and Toren were convinced that the Grabars were all devils, considering Mir’s circumstances when they’d been found. Mir hadn’t said anything to dissuade them, not that they said much at all. What did Mir have to talk about that would make anything better?

The Grabars had powerful friends, including in the clergy judging by that priest in the hospital, and fighting them would only result in more members of the Reeve family disappearing. Maybe that was the threat that kept Tavish away.

Protecting me from a distance.

It was a much easier pill to swallow than the thought that he’d washed his hands of them or hadn’t survived the fight with Zepish and Sakish.

Mir’s sweet nerdy alpha wouldn’t have stood a chance. Not for the first time, Mir wished with every fiber of their being that these babies were physically Tavish’s, rather than just being in Mir’s heart. Mir knew Tavish, admired him. He’d make a great Pa emotionally and genetically. And fuck, Mir missed him. His absence was like a festering wound, constantly aching, but with the odd, unexpected stab of pain that took Mir completely by surprise. But this was worse than any physical injury. Mir knew about those, could fight against those, but emotional pain had always been their Achilles heel. Mir couldn’t physically fight it and blocking it out only worked for a while before it snuck back in and delivered another sucker punch.

As one day, then one week, rolled into the next, it slowly dawned that Tavish wasn’t coming for them as he’d sworn. Although Tavish dying was becoming less likely. Telish would have squeezed as much social benefit out of losing a son as he could. The death of such a prominent doctor would have made the newspapers, and surely Corish and Toren would have let Mir know?

Instead of meeting a heroic, tragic end, Tavish was probably already back in the highlands, maybe with a couple of betas to make his life easier. Perhaps Clayen and Fossen because those two wouldn’t be in favor after they’d helped Mir escape. Mir still couldn’t find it in their heart to blame the beta-ish alpha if he’d put Mir and their complicated issues behind him. But reality sucked worse than the frame room. Tavish had been an unreal interlude in their life, one they’d always remember fondly, but they had to move on. Their days of giving up, of waiting and yearning for death were passed.

Despite their resolve, Mir still watched the street, morning, noon, and night, hoping. Every time it got too much, Mir’s thoughts turned to putting on their shoes and going to find Tavish, one of the babies kicked.

As they often sent thoughts to the babies, Mir imagined the triplets talking back and arguing.

“Yeah, bad idea. Tavish is a grown alpha, not a pup. He can look after himself, unlike us. Unlike you.”

“What do you want us to call you anyway? Ma doesn’t seem right. You’re not like other mothers.”

“What are you anyway, alpha, beta, or omega?”

“Does it matter?”

“You think they most of the time, but deep down, you’re mostly ‘he’ despite carrying us around in here.”

“Untie is a cross between an alpha Uncle and an omega Auntie. How about something like that?”

Combinations like Mapa and Pama, rolled around in their head. Neither felt right, but they were better than Ma.

“I’ll think about it,” Mir told the pups aloud. As always, depression dragged the brief buoyant mood down. What was the point in considering a name the pups would never use? They would never know who had birthed them. No alpha would want their offspring to know they had come from such a terrible beginning. They might not even know they had siblings, unless they manifested balls and needed a proving certificate. If they survived their infancy.

Right now, the babies were safe. That’d change when they were born. Mir shut down every conversation about the birth, but they knew their siblings were thinking about the how, and more importantly the where.

A hospital birth would mean the babies being DNA typed immediately. The memory of being tied down hit like a throat punch. Screaming at the doctor to bring their baby back as they was carried away, wailing their distress. Body heaving, knowing the next one would leave their body soon, knowing they would be taken as well. That time, the guards had noticed Mir was in labor, but they knew what to look for.

Toren and Corish didn’t have a damn clue. Mir knew what labor was like. When they felt it starting, they’d come up here, and get on with it. These three would be Mir’s and if they had to run with them, they would. They huffed out a breath. Run again? They’d been caught by Zepish the first time, when they’d still looked like a beta, had nearly died from hypothermia the second, and got shot the third time. What were the chances of a lone omega with three newborns escaping notice? And even if they did find somewhere without people, how would they care for three babies while collecting enough food and finding shelter? It was summer now, but it wouldn’t be for long.

This wasn’t ideal, but it was a damn sight better than Hell.

Although Mir’s scent was gradually replacing Toren’s in this room, it wasn’t home, not that Mir had one of those anymore. The priest had said not to talk about the past, and Mir tried to block out Tavish and Freedom Farm as much as Hell. Neither worked in dreams, and the bad ones outnumbered the good so much that avoiding sleep became as much of an obsession as mindless street-watching.

The future, even if a miracle happened and they got to keep the babies here, was equally murky. Yes, they could probably fit a cot big enough for triplets in here, but after around twelve months, space would become critical. Coping with three rambunctious pups in this place wouldn’t be easy. Mir remembered having trouble containing Tor and Cor’s energy on a hundred-acre property.

Mir’s siblings both did vital work, and with the only access to the postage stamp-sized garden through the back of Corish’s law office, the pups would be like caged animals, or they would be if they were normal. Mir hadn’t forgotten the brief expression of horror on Tavish’s face when Mir repeated what that fucking doctor had said about it, “being down to the genetic level.” Whatever the case, Mir would love them, even if they weren’t with them.

The door across the street opened, and the spectacle-wearing beta came out. A knock at the bedroom door, even though it’d been gentle, caused Mir to jump as if it’d been a gunshot. Bastard fucking hormones.