I’m buzzed through doors and led down unfamiliar hallways, and each time I have to stop and wait and get going again, my irritation and anger begin to boil in my chest. By the time I’m stopped just outside a door with Visitor Room marked on it, I have a solid mask of fuck off in place. Sandbag shoves me inside, and I snarl at him over my shoulder as he slams the metal door shut and leers at me from the peephole hatch.
I turn to find a metal chair, a phone attached to the wall, a thick scratched pane of plexiglass, and two people I have no interest in speaking to...my matriarch and patriarch. I stare at them with dead eyes and fold my arms over my chest, as if somehow the move will offer another layer of much needed protection.
My pat’s ruby red eyes grow soft when he sees me, but my mat’s green eyes do the exact opposite. She looks me over and finds me lacking...just like she always does. I think I’ve only ever witnessed a smile on her face twice in my life. Once was when my pat had announced that he acquired a rival lounge and that the alpha of said lounge—who had slighted my mat in some way—was no longer breathing. The second time I saw her lips tilt up with cruel happiness was right after she told me that I now belong to Alpha Bowen.
A fist slams against the metal door behind me, and I turn around to meet Sandbag’s elated gaze.
“You’ll stay in here until you talk to them,” he declares, and I wonder if he’s a sadist or if he’s being paid off. Probably both.
I release a resigned sigh and then turn and walk to the metal chair. I sit down and pick up the phone receiver and slowly bring it to my ear.
Satisfaction blooms in my mat’s eyes, and she stares at me for a beat before picking up the receiver on her side of the dirty glass barrier.
“Maybe I should kill your little pawn out there when this is done,” I announce casually, hiking my thumb over my shoulder to point to the guard. “I’ve been looking for a way to extend my sentence, so if he doesn’t return your calls after this, you’ll know why.”
My mat just blinks. “Fine. That’ll save us from having to send him any payments for his services,” she tells me just as casually.
Disappointment fills me. I look at my pat, just like I always do, pleading with my eyes for him to deal with her, because I just can’t.
To say that my mat isn’t maternal is an understatement. With her deep green eyes, hair, and tail feathers, I’ve always thought that she embodied the envy trait rather well. Nothing is ever good enough for her. No matter how green her grass (or feathers) are, she’s always looking over the fence for something better, for more.
To outsiders, she probably looks like a stern, forty-something-year-old woman with an obnoxious hair color and thin lips that are permanently bowed downward. She looks tough before she even opens her mouth. Even her pristine pantsuit shows that she means business. Everyone in our lounge knows that she’s the one that wears the pants.
My pat, with his ruddy complexion and red hair, eyes, and feathers, would probably look scary if it weren’t for his unassuming posture and his easygoing attitude. I’ve never seen him yell, or swear, or cry, or even belly laugh. He seems to be stuck on one setting all the time: calm.
It’s infuriating, especially when I was a hurting teenager who cried and begged for her father to step in, to speak, to do something. He never did. Not when my mat banned me from the house whenever I pissed her off, leaving me to sleep outside. Not during screaming matches between her and me. Not even when she sold me off to a stranger.
My pat is just...incapable of not deferring to her, and my mat doesn’t have a warm or fuzzy bone in her body. We’ve never gotten along. Things got worse when I hit thirteen and stopped trying to please her. I realized that it was hopeless to get her to give a shit about me. There are a few things my mat cares about, but none of them are named Sinclair.
“Did you think getting yourself incarcerated would stop Alpha Bowen?” she asks, her tone and head tilt condescending. “He had his