“Not Marcus, it was the Ratcliffe boy, Orion.” She watched me closely as she delivered the news. “He said he feared you would be a target at the ball and that, if you were forced to attend, you’d have a security team.”
“Orion?” I frowned, then remembered the conversation with his father. “We can’t use them. They must be agents of his father.”
Mum shrugged, then went back to chopping carrots.
“I’ve done my due diligence, looked into the company and its structure. They come incredibly well-recommended, used by royalty when they visit our country, but I agree—having our own team would be wise.”
“Oh, well played, Mother,” I said, lifting my bottle of water in her direction, then watched her as she continued to prepare the food. “So, are you ever going to tell me about the…thing with Orion’s dad?”
She didn’t answer until all the carrots were sliced and slid into the salad bowl, the contents mixed together with tongs, a rainbow of Kai approved food showing through the glass.
“Come with me,” she said.
“Is this when I find out you’re some kind of international spy-slash-thief and this is your secret lair?” I asked as we walked through the house. “Oh, it’s just the garage.”
“Not just the garage,” she said, pointing to the slim grey boxes wired to the wall.
“OK, disappointing,” I said, peering at them. “Unless they’re really cool super computers used to hack the government mainframe.”
“What? No. Where the hell do you get these ideas from? I swear, I left you alone too much as a child. They’re batteries.”
“Batteries for what? Because if I plugged them into my vibes, I think I’d jackhammer my vag off.”
“Jesus, Cyn! Is this the way you talk to alphas, because…” She caught herself, smiled, and then shook her head. “They are batteries big enough to power our whole house. You might have remembered some renovations I did on the house when my company started picking up? Well, this was part of it. It took a considerable amount of under the table money to find an electrician willing to do it, but we rewired the house to run off the batteries.”
“But the house runs off solar panels.”
“Most that do can only power the house while the sun is out. On an overcast day or at night, the house is forced to draw power from the grid, maintaining the hold the power companies have on the market. Panels are prohibitively expensive for most and don’t last especially well, and the government has a lot of power plants that are beginning to age, needing to invest in more. We’re at a turning point in the power industry.”
It was right then I could see Miranda Rhodes, CEO, standing before me. Her quietly confident manner coupled with the shine in her eyes had me sitting up and paying attention.
“My degree was in industrial design, and the assumption we always operated under was find a human need and provide an elegant solution to it. Our newspapers have been full of complaints about the rising cost of power. Climate change and increased affluence mean more and more demand is being put on the market. But our government doesn’t want to invest further in more power plants, being the one holding the bag whenever there’s a brown out. So in comes Benson Ratcliffe.”
Her smile twisted into something hard and fierce.
“In return for tax breaks and fuel excises and a million other little government supports, the massive mining company of Ratcliffe Industries will build new power plants, coal powered, of course, all over the country, guaranteeing a reliance on coal for generations to come.” She let out a long breath. “He’s future proofing his business.”
“And what are you doing?” I asked quietly, a little afraid to ask.
“Battery technology solves all the problems—it’s clean energy, the consumer purchases small batteries rather than massive government investment in more coal powered plants, and it empowers the individual. We can create linked battery networks, where the householder can sell off their excess power to others, upping the price during demand times, or not. Rather than have their power prices dictated to them by power companies or the government, they are producers, consumers, and sellers in a massive power generating market.”
She shook her head, visibly deflating.
“It won’t happen. All these young alpha entrepreneurs talk about
disrupting innovation, but most just want to erode worker’s rights and the roles of unions. They come from the very class that benefits from the status quo, and they’re not afraid to do what it takes to maintain it.”
It felt like someone slid a cold knife blade up my spine, just a warning of what was to come if I wasn’t a good little girl. I grit my teeth, feeling my body shake, even though there was no immediate danger.
“I didn’t want to tell you,” Mum said, her cool expression faltering, the mask well and truly cracked now. Someone human, vulnerable, and unsure emerged. “What if you hit it off with the Ratcliffe boy? I was told that omegas are instinctively drawn to the alpha they need, and I didn’t want to colour your decisions with this. I underestimated Benson, I acknowledge that. I never thought he’d… Then Marcus McCallum came to see me. We talked, and we planned…”
She had to see the way her words affected me, freezing me still, pinning me to the spot, a helpless omega again.
Breathe, I told myself. Just keep breathing.
Like I had a choice, but by focusing on that, it drew my attention back to the here and now, didn’t let my mind go racing ahead, my omega vigilance triggered. I breathed in the slightly petrol smelling garage, heard the tick, tick, tick of sprinklers outside, the rising hum of cicadas.
“He had a fair idea what Benson would do, made me see the potential moves coming. Apart from putting an outright hit on me, a risky move for someone high-profile, Marcus knew that you were my point of weakness. You’d already been attacked, something Marcus knew about.” She frowned. “I’ve never been able to work out how. I had my best people deep dive into his network, even used some hackers through some agents.”