Page 35 of Packing for Vacation

“Mmm, depends on what you define as okay. I just found this really weird thing tucked in between those blankets we got at the last thrift store, and it was not in there when I grabbed them because we pulled them all open to check for holes, which means that omega woman behind the counter slid it in the bag, the bitch, and I just feel really icky about the whole thing. Now I know why she was giving us strange looks.”

Matiu is already on his feet, his hand outstretched towards her, while I’m still reeling from sweet Lizzie calling anyone a bitch.

“I can’t even remember what the omega behind the counter looked like,” I say.

Lizzie hands Matiu a shiny pamphlet as I get to my feet. I recognise the colours of the One Alpha cult before Matiu even finishes lifting it to show me, his brows turned down in a deep frown.

“Those fucking cunts,” I growl, forgetting that I really should be on my best behaviour with Lizzie here. She stares at me wide-eyed, and I gape at her for a moment. “Sorry. They’re bad people. Please excuse my language.”

“They’re a monogamy cult, right? That woman was side-eyeing us because we were all there together. I didn’t realise they had a foothold here in New Zealand.”

“Yeah,” I confirm. “They’re a cult, and they’ve been here for two decades now. Monogamy isn’t quite the right term, because in that cult an alpha is allowed multiple omegas. It’s just the omegas that have to stick to one alpha. Hence the name.”

“And they’re religious?”

“They have an interesting interpretation of a pre-existing religion that is extremely patriarchal in nature, yes.”

“Anti-feminist,” Matiu offers. “Anti-common sense.”

“Horrific,” I supply. “Horrific for the women that get sucked into it. They’re raging homophobes, too, of course. Only male alphas. Only female omegas. No betas.” In my mind I see Elaine as she is now, a shell of her former self, wearing the brown full-length cult dress, her mousy brown hair pulled back in a single braid that snakes down to her backside. “No heat suppressants,” I continue. “No hormonal support. No birth control. No talking to outsiders. No future. Just no fucking life at all.”

“Is it a big thing here?”

Sweat breaks out on my palms as I glance at Matiu. I should have seen this question coming. Both of our scents have turned bitter and burnt, but if Lizzie notices, she doesn’t say anything.

“Not too big,” Matiu answers evenly. “We knew a girl, back when we were in law school, who got tied up in it. It’s a shame, because in my opinion it ruined her life. The local branch is run by an alpha who has already been imprisoned once on sexual assault charges. They take that whole keep her barefoot and pregnant thing to the extreme, and it’s the most bizarre and heartbreaking thing to see a woman get pulled into that and willingly give up her freedom while spouting to you that she’s exercising her ‘divine rights’ as a woman and that it’s feminism that she’s practicing as she moves in with her assigned husband on cult property where she’s forced to stop her study and cease contact with the outside.”

Everything he said is factual, and yet there’s a whole lot of details about Elaine that he conveniently left out.

We didn’t just know her. Sick guilt swirls in my gut.

“She said it was feminism because she chose to join them? Did she know the cult leader was a rapist?”

“She knew of the convictions. She said they were false.”

“She was a law student?”

“At one point, yes.”

Lizzie shakes her head. “I hate how easy it is these days for people to end up red-pilled into complete… I don’t know. I can’t think of a nice word to describe it.”

“That’s ‘cause there’s no nice words for it,” I say.

“Do you know how she’s doing now?”

Matiu answers “No,” at the same time that I answer “Yes.” I ignore the way his eyes bore into me.

“I bumped into her at the supermarket a while back, when I was working for a client out in Drury — that’s at the southern edge of Auckland. One of her kids ran into my legs, I didn’t realise he was hers until I looked up and there she was. I counted thirteen of them with her, and they were all peas in a pod, all with her blue eyes.”

“Thirteen children. How old is she?”

“Thirty-seven. At least a few of them were sets of multiples. And she was pregnant again.”

“Was she happy?”

“Ah… no, I don’t think so. She was… tired.” Gone. That’s what I realised when she’d looked at me with her sad, dead eyes. The woman I’d fallen for was gone completely, ground down to nothing under the weight of the life she’d chosen a decade and a half earlier. She could have had the world. Matiu and I would have given it to her. Instead her round belly had stood out in stark contrast to her stick-thin arms, and there’d been a bruise on her wrist. “I said hello, and then I spotted her husband in the distance and backed off. I didn’t want to cause trouble for her.”

“Would he have beaten her?”