Part of me wanted to interrogate this, to find the flaws in the story, sort the falsehoods from the truth, but I took a deep breath and let that go. Whatever the fuck was going on in Bordertown, it was none of my business anymore, hadn’t been the minute I put that pencil down at the end of my exam. I’d been reminded over and over, and now it was incontrovertibly true.
“Thank you, Omega Vanguard,” I said, sketching a small bow.
“Eloise, silly,” she said with a playful pat on my shoulder. “Always so polite.”
That rang in my ears as I went to my room, assessing my stuff with dispassionate calm, picking some stuff over others and packing it quickly but neatly into my suitcase before I carried it down the hallway.
“So you think there’s an issue of latency?” Mum asked.
“What else could it be? Jim was always so sure it was Riley for…”
I walked into the kitchen and saw that two of the Vanguard alphas had joined us as well as the omega.
“Hey, Riley,” Malcolm said with a warm smile. “Thanks for making the call and bringing us up to the point. I know a lot of kids don’t like to snitch…” Christ, could the guy come across more middle-aged if he tried? “But that was a seriously dangerous situation. The boys shouldn’t have shifted so early, but we’ve got them sedated now until we can establish whether or not they’re stable.”
“Are they going…?”
My voice trailed away as all the warmth in the room cooled somewhat. Not my place to ask. I’d been told that plenty of times, and now it was truer than ever.
“I hope they’re OK,” I amended, and everyone smiled.
“Well, c’mon, miss future doctor!” Eloise said, linking her arms with mine. “We’ve got a charter plane waiting on the airstrip, just for you!”
Questions, so many questions, swelled inside me on the ride over. Even more when Mum and I got in the otherwise empty plane and strapped ourselves in.
“You’ll be in the big city in less than an hour, ladies.” The pilot’s voice crackled through the PA system, making us jump slightly before it was drowned out by the whine of the engine. I stared out the window as we moved down the runway, getting faster and faster, until it felt way too fast.
I felt a wrench, an actual physical ripping away of my breath as my heart felt like it skipped a beat. Make that several. My heart felt like it hung in that awful space where it was going to thud, but it just hadn’t quite done it when the plane levelled off. I felt my ears pop, and then a familiar beat inside my chest. I searched the darkness, seeing so many tiny little lights twinkling, knowing one of them was our house.Was. And the guys?
Don’t think about them. Don’t worry about them. Just let them be.It’d been my mantra for some time now, since the alphas had sat me down and very calmly and very clearly outlined how things needed to be.
“You’re a talented girl,” John Vanguard had said, his voice like a heavy hand pushing me back against my chair. “You have a great future ahead of you, just not one with our boys.”
“This is for your own good,” Malcolm had said, leaning forward with an earnest smile. “Who knows more about the differences between alphas and betas than you, Riley? You’ve been such a good friend to the boys, but this is just biology.”
“The way things are headed, it’ll only lead to broken hearts all round,” Graeme Vanguard said. “Contrary to what some people might think, we care a lot for everyone in our town and we want them to have a chance at happiness.”
“This will make you happy, right?” Eloise asked. “Studying medicine?”
I’d just nodded, then, and I nodded to myself again now, because what else could I say?
That I dreamed of their sons every bloody night? And padding through those dreams was a mysterious wolf with reddish tinged fur that ruffled in the breeze, her howl still in my ears when I woke in the morning?
The future, I told myself, even as my eyes filled with tears.Think about your future.
Epilogue
So I did.
They could’ve called. Someone, anyone, could’ve, to fill me in on what had ended up happening, but they didn’t. Not even Nikki, and when I stared at my phone, my thumb hovering over her contact, I found I couldn’t. I’d left, they’d stayed, and so we were nothing to each other. At least that was what I told myself as it felt like my heart was being torn slowly from my chest, ripped out further with each day of radio silence.
But I’d escaped into my studies all the way through high school to deal with the unendurable shit of being around the Vanguards, so I did the same now. Each time a massive wave of pain rose, threatening to swamp me, I pulled out one of my new textbooks. I read the dense descriptions with eyes that blurred and a heart that just ached and ached and ached, but the longer I read, the easier it got.
The fast-track program started, and very quickly, I had enough lectures, exams, tutorials, and online study groups to fill my days and my mind. Studying medicine was notoriously difficult, but this? This was elite level shit, designed to stretch us or crush us. I might have walked into lectures in a trance, needing to see Haze lolling in one of the lecture theatre seats like my next breath, wanting to feel Blake’s arm around me or Fen’s, but pretty quickly, it became clear that I could focus on my future or them. If I had to choose one, I chose me.
As I progressed through my studies, I found that I was much more interested in the research and science of medicine than I was in treating broken bones and concussions. I made the shift into genetics, focussing on that old desire of mine to find out what made us omegas, betas, and alphas, while trying not to think too hard about why that drew my focus.
Because I couldn’t open that box. It rattled, deep down inside me, filled with everything I’d experienced, everything I remembered about home, everything about them. Whenever I thought of them, the box was opened just long enough to shove that in too.