Rejected By The Alpha For An Omega novel · Chapter 5 of 32

Chapter 5: Omega Row

I took the poster down and folded it into my blazer pocket.

Then I drove back over the bridge to the omega row.

Ours is a line of narrow company houses behind the mill, down where the tailrace runs brown and loud.

The omegas live there.

They wash the Reyner house sheets, cook for the Elders' dinners and clean the pack hall after every meeting.

They're the last wolves anyone thinks about, and the first ones I see when the flu goes through.

The address on the poster was the fourth house from the end.

Somebody had planted marigolds in coffee cans along the porch rail.

Most of them were dead.

The woman who opened the door was maybe fifty.

Thin, with Tansy's gray eyes and hands cracked red from bleach.

Everyone on the row knew me.

I'd stitched half of them.

"Dr. Bracewell," she said. Then her eyes went to my bare collar, where the chain used to be. "Or is it Luna?"

"Just Doctor. As of last night, not even that."

"I heard."

She looked at the folded paper in my hand.

Then she stepped back to let me in.

Her kitchen was small and clean and smelled like bleach and onions.

There was a nursing school brochure stuck to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a trout.

Under it was a clinic job application with my father's old logo on it.

The name at the top was printed in careful capital letters.

TANSY MERLE.

"She was going to bring that to you in June," her mother said. "She wanted to be a nurse. She said you'd hire her to mop floors and she'd learn the rest by watching."

"I would have."

"I know."

She put the kettle on, because that's what you do on the row when you don't know what else to do.

"Tell me what happened," I said.

"She went to work on a Sunday, the twenty-fourth. The Reyner house laundry. She did the night pressing, because it paid an extra dollar." She set two cups down hard. "She never came home."

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