Chapter 45
Chapter 45
Daniel
“I don’t like this,” I say as I pace in the living room in Aria’s apartment.
“Me either, but she’s not alone. She’ll be fine.” Ezra says, but I can hear the unease in his voice as well.
“What’s wrong? Do you feel something?” I ask, stopping in front of him.
He shakes his head. “She seems worried, but it doesn’t seem serious yet. It’s hard to tell. Sometimes it feels like she blocks me out, and then other times I can sense more.”
“I’m not sure if she realizes she can control it. Sometimes I can sense everything and other times it’s almost like a whisper.” Noah adds.
“What is it like? I mean, do you get emotional impressions of how she’s feeling? Can you…talk to each other?” I ask.
Ezra snorts. “Talk to each other?”
Noah nudges him, and then shakes his head. “No, we can’t talk to each other. It’s an emotional connection. The weirdest thing is being able to sense Ezra, and now Jaxon.”
“Jaxon?” I look at him in surprise. “They bonded?”
Noah’s rubs the back of his neck sheepishly. “Uh, yeah.”
Ezra chuckles. “He’s being a dick about it too.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
He shrugs. “He’s acting all happy and proud. It’s annoying. I wish I could block him out. I wonder if Aria can teach me.”
Noah sighs. “It’s probably because she’s an Alpha. She has more mental power than us. Better control.”
That makes me snort a little. “I don’t know anyone who has more control than Aria does.”
“What do you mean?” Noah asks.
I shrug. Aria never fully opened up to me or anyone other than Buck and Beth, but I’ve been paying attention. Her struggles have been obvious for a long time, but I never brought it up because I wanted her to open up to me on her own. What I do know for sure is she was in an abusive relationship of some kind, and because of it, she has been scared for people to know she is an Alpha. Not that I blame her. A female Alpha is rare, and can be received in different ways. Some people see a female Alpha as rare and important, and others see them as abominations. Women are supposed to be gentle and sweet, two things Alphas definitely are not.
“She’s been trying to keep her Alpha side buried for years. Most people didn’t even know. She’s been surviving as a backless Alpha for years and thriving. How many male Alphas can do that? The number of Alphas I helped put in prison over the years because they became too violent and ended up acting out. She never has.”
Noah looks a little confused. “Never? How is that possible?”
“You put Alphas in prison?” Ezra asks quickly after him.
Focusing on Ezra first, I nod. “When I graduated law school, I worked as a prosecutor first, but eventually left to do private practice.” I look at Noah next. “And it’s like I said, Aria has crazy control. But I think it was more fear than anything else that helped her stay in control.”
“What do you mean?” Noah asks.
I shrug. “She hasn’t told me everything that happened to her before she came here. She was hurt pretty bad, and extremely skittish. When Buck first introduced her to the club, she looked like she was ready to run. It was obvious something bad happened to her, and she reeked of Alphas. It took several weeks before all the scents wore off.”
Ezra sits up a little straighter. “She was covered in other Alpha’s scents?”
“Yeah, at least five,” I say, nodding.
Noah’s eyes widen a little, and Ezra’s jaw clenches.
“Anyway, she eventually got used to us but has always kept a wall up when it comes to her past.”
“I wonder what could have possibly happened to scare her so much. I mean, we went up against some aggressive alphas growing up, but they would just push us around enough to intimidate us. What would they do to a woman Alpha?” Ezra shakes his head.
“You grew up around Alphas?” I ask.
It makes me realize again that I don’t know shit about these guys and yet we’ve all been thrown together. Might as well get to know them now.
He nods. “We grew up in foster care. The state doesn’t have the budget to keep all the kids apart. The only kids they separate are the female Omegas. Because it would be too dangerous to keep them in the same place as a bunch of hormonal Alphas. But the rest of us were all kept together in a big group home. They had rules and stuff so the Alphas didn’t hurt us, but it would still happen. Shit really went to hell though when Noah presented as an Omega. They didn’t know what to do with him. Male Omegas are so rare that they don’t have separate housing for them. So he was stuck in the group home too. We protected him the best we could, though.”
“All of you were in foster care?”
“Yep. Roman is the oldest, so he was there before the rest of us. His parents died in a car accident when he was three. My parents ditched me when they couldn’t afford their drug habit and a kid. Jaxon’s family was deported, but he was born here, so he couldn’t go with them, and he had no family here. Noah…” He looks at Noah.
“I went into the system as a baby. I found out later that my mom had an affair with some politician. He didn’t want to leave his wife and didn’t want a kid. He paid her off, but after a couple of weeks with me, I guess she decided life wasn’t worth living. She dropped me off at a random hospital and stepped out into oncoming traffic.” Noah explains.
“Fuck man, I’m sorry. Did you ever go looking for your dad?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “The guy probably thought my mom wouldn’t go through with the pregnancy. He probably doesn’t even know I exist. What’s the point?”
“You said Jaxon’s parents were deported? How? If he was born here…” Ezra interrupts me.
“They didn’t care about the law when they kicked his parents out. It was during that time when they were trying to ship off as many Betas as they could. We’re grunts to them. They can do whatever they want to us, and we can’t do shit!” His voice grows tighter with each word, and I start to regret asking him about this at all.
He gives me a weird look. “How did you even become a lawyer if you’re a Beta? Aren’t those jobs usually saved for Alphas too?”
“Usually, but I had help. My mom worked for a very nice older couple, and the husband sponsored me. They never had any kids of their own, and he saw how hard of a worker I was. He wanted me to take over for him one day, but in the end it didn’t work out that way. So I came here.”