The doctor, a frighteningly thin man in his late forties, swiveled his head back to check the reading on the machines. Her eyes followed his,
widening as a sequenced set of tones reverberated around him. As soon as he saw the data, he groaned in approval.
Wren was aware of the thin cotton dress that hung against her thigh, but with her wrists bound, there was no way she could force it to cover her most sensitive areas.
Not to make a fuss—this procedure was just a routine exercise for a slave omega, but she really hated the idea of more prodding.
Wren looked up and beyond the doctor. She hated this place, too. The floors were almost always damp with mold, and the metal of the facility was covered with rust. It was unnatural. She liked being at home, where she could go over her plans. Yes, there were so many plans for when she escaped.
If she ever escaped…
“It will just be a cold pinch, and a—”
Deeply inhaling, the doctor thrust the metal rod upward. Though Wren braced for it, the sharp prodding left her broken on the table.
The doctor raised his eyes, deeply circling the ovulation reader into her guts. “As you may be aware, the birthing trials have yet to be… successful.”
“I’ve heard the crying, yes,” Wren said, eyes glazing over with tears.
She’d thought she had gotten used to the painful shrieks of grief, but every time she heard the women’s sounds, she wanted to claw her eyes out. They sounded just like her.
As the doctor pulled the wand back, Wren listened to the reading tone that beeped on the slick screen. “You spend time talking with the other women?” he asked.
Wren lifted her head. “What does it say? The reading. I’d like to know.”
The doctor looked down at the machine, paused, and hesitated. “Do you talk to the other women? It’s important we log everything in order to get to the bottom of your recent changes,” he said.
Wren’s heart sank with guilt. “It’s not hard to hear them. Our rooms are connected,” she said.
To Wren, all of this made perfect sense. This facility was her life. The women were lucky—in a sense, the luckiest of everyone throughout history. When the world began to crack, the financial institutions were the first to fall. By that time, the people welcomed the fall of the old Republic. Of course, they never relinquished their full control, but everything had changed. Those who could give birth were chose to bear the fruit. Powerful alpha men, the slave traders who tattooed the marking of the Ouroboros onto their hands, took the omegas. It was their job to repopulate the world, but other things were more important.
Wren was an asset to the men, but there was considerable worry about whether the sperm would take to her. She heard them speak about it on a daily basis. An omega needed an alpha’s knot to become pregnant.
No, she didn’t trust the doctors who had held her hostage for a lifetime. Then again, she didn’t have much trust left for anyone these days.
She remembered the slack-jawed look of her father as the alpha slid the blade into his mouth. The killing brought the terrible, choked silence of death. She didn’t expect it to slide in and exhume his soul so easily, but once he pulled away, she knew the sound would always twist inside her memories. Her daddy’s empty gaze horrified her the most.
Still searching the memorials of her past for truth, she quickly remembered how the brutes tore into her mother’s neck. The numbness Wren fought against soon drenched her in a dream. Her vision came in vibratory waves. And that’s when the brute bound her and hauled her over his shoulders, bubbling with sadistic laughter.
While those memories tore her apart, something else sprang forward in Wren’s mind. Something calming. Something of her own.
Short, amber hair. A blank look that seemed to suggest trauma. Candlelight flickered behind this vision, drawing Wren closer. The young girl opened her mouth, and tears began to flow onto the back of the young girl’s withering tongue.
Who is she?
What the fuck. Was this a memory of herself? A double of a double, a copy born in the heart of her trauma?
Wren couldn’t be sure of anything. After the alphas took her, her memory had gone to absolute shit. Still, if she could just have one day on the outside, she’d remember everything that they did to her.
They’d torched her home, the ragged men who appeared as scarred silhouettes. And the dogs that drooled over the trenched soil had ravaged the villagers who held their hands up in defense.
They were slave traders. Wren had been too young to understand how it happened. The pictures, instead, ran inside her eyes as figments of a darker place within her imagination. She’d looked at the man with thinning hair, sunken eyes, and tarred teeth. He’d grinned and unsheathed his cock.
“Take every part of her except the fruit,” he chattered, voice hollow.
They broke her, tore the youthful skin with hypodermic needles to subdue her frantic movements. Rolling her pouty lips back, their writhing, fat fingers had pried her lips and exposed her perfectly aligned teeth.
Using their hands as clamps, they’d unlocked her jaw and huffed her scent obsessively. As their eyes fastened, the men howled, short, but manic enough to welcome Wren into their palace of pain.