It was a small service, closed to the public and attended by less than six people. Nona French gave the eulogy, the homilies were lovely, and the people who actually cared about her, devastated.

It had been an absolute nightmare for Corday. He sat there, the Premier in the seat beside him, and glared at the empty coffin while he worked his jaw.

The date of Claire O’Donnell’s death had been two weeks prior, but the fucking North Wing doctors would not release the body. He had screamed, railed, threatened to bring the wrath of god down if they did not hand her over. Yet they continued to claim that her plummet off the crossing had left the body in pieces, so they delivered ashes in place of a corpse.

Corday had absolutely lost it.

Omegas were supposed to return to the earth, the death ritual burial... Dane’s bastards had desecrated her.

When word traveled between the wretches subsisting underground that the infamous Claire O’Donnell had killed herself, she was suddenly a saint in their eyes. It was sickening. Those same people had treated her name like a curse, had blamed her for their suffering after Thólos’ liberation. Now the tragedy of her suicide opened their eyes?

People were disgusting.

On the dank walls underground, pictures of her were pasted everywhere Corday turned.

The Premier even called for a day of mourning, and Thólos had a fucking ten-minute moment of silence.

Corday had gone through her loss once when she’d disappeared from the Omega sanctuary. It was nothing to the pain he was in now. Everything had gone wrong; furthermore, the guilt was killing him.

Why had they not given him the body? Was the fall really so bad she was totally unrecognizable? Thinking back over the last year, obsessing over every last detail, Corday searched for the thread that would explain away his building feeling of foreboding.

How many times had he sat in the softly colored blue room with her when she had hardly been lucid enough to speak? Why were they constantly sedating her?

Claire had never complained about it... and he wondered if she’d had the mental capacity to understand the extent to which they controlled her. She was just one small Omega the Premier kept sequestered like a pampered pet.

Why had they not pulled the plug when she refused to breathe for weeks after she had been found in the Citadel?

And the doctors had been so possessive of not only her, but of the things Claire kept in her room... like she was some specimen, or experiment, and everyone wanted to see what she would do.

Corday began to have a sinking feeling whatever they had been pumping into her was not for her benefit, but for theirs. That was why they would not release her body—they wanted to poke around inside first, to take her apart.