Page 22 of Slashed Bonds

CHAPTER 2

No Gifts In The Policy

~MORRIGAN~

“Are you going to keep moaning for me, Baby?”

The question arrives against the shell of my ear, low and unhurried, in a voice that’s been rearranging my nervous system for two and a half years.

I don’t answer.

He won’t make me.

So I’m sure you’re wondering what kind of side hustle this is.

Probably not, since everyone knows what an escort is, and thankfully that’s not the job description.

Per se.

Being a rejected Omega with a shattered heart and a mood chart that reads like a seismograph doesn’t mean a girl stops having needs.

Or Heats.

Except broken Omegas like me don’t get Heats. Not the real thing. Not the three-day marathon of fuckery where you sink into a nest surrounded by your pack and come out the other side glowing and stupid and content enough to function for another two months.

Nope.

What I get instead is chaos.

Peaks with no schedule and no warning. Nights where my skin runs a fever and my body screams for something it can’t have, and there’s no bond on the other end to answer it, because there’s a scar where the answer used to live.

That’s the part that drives rejected Omegas into the ward.

Not the loneliness. The biology. A body that keeps ringing a doorbell in an empty house.

Fortunately for me, I have an arrangement.

The Underground Heat Playground.

Which sounds like a rave and functions like a discreet private clinic with better lighting. Elite Alphas and Omegas in sport and the gifted arts who need a fix urgently and can’t be photographed getting one.

Hockey players, mostly. Football after that.

And golfers.

Golfers.

I have thought about that statistic more than I’d admit under oath. Something about all those hours of restraint, I assume. All that whispering.

Tennis is fourth, which I accept because I spent grade six convinced I’d be a tennis player, right up until the wrists gave out.

Hockey doesn’t ruin your wrists for three business days. Hockey might break a knee, an arm, a leg, or a piece of you nobody has named yet, and I’ll take the cast every time over that specific ache.

Priorities.

The rules here are short and enforced by people you don’t want to meet twice.

Everybody masks. No names, no faces, no photographs, no follow-up. Nothing crosses the door in either direction.