by Addison Cain
“Your tea will get cold, Brenya.”
So the Omega sipped, finding the hot beverage overly sweet.
“You taste honey.” Annette took a delicate draw from her cup. “An extra spoonful should always be added for when the Alphas are rough.”
Rough was not near enough to describe what Centrist Alphas were.
Brenya took another, deeper swallow.
“This blend was specially prepared to soothe your aches and lighten your spirits. Rosehip, turmeric, ginger... my mother’s recipe. She made it for me the morning after my wedding night.”
“What is a wedding night?”
“It’s when the transfer of your ownership moves from your parents to your husband. It’s the moment past the contracts and negotiations and physical pleasure, where you bear the true weight of an Alpha for the first time. Tradition demands that the following morning, there is a breakfast only married women might attend. Usually, it’s a pleasant affair of comfort, congratulations, advice, and sweet stories.”
“And when it’s unusual?”
Another practiced smile, this time accompanied by a small plate of square foodstuffs. “When it’s unusual, extra honey is added to the tea. Occasionally, a ranking male relative might petition parliament for marital negotiations on behalf of their kin. This is a miniscule proceeding, filed once, and usually forgotten. In Central, it is bad manners to formally interfere with another’s wife so long as the marriage contracts are upheld.”
Brenya had been taught her whole life that Bernard Dome was a society of equality and freedom, where all who lived under the glass worked in harmony for the greater good. Tens of millions of citizens believed that lie, they even enjoyed their ignorance. It seemed, despite their current circumstances, Annette’s life had been far uglier… and would get uglier still.
Her friend felt almost nothing. Brenya felt entirely too much.
And there was nothing to be done for it but sip tea and drink in the moment before it was gone forever. “I don’t know what it means to be the most powerful woman in Bernard Dome.”
Because surely she was powerless.
Annette set down her empty cup. “It means, sweet Brenya, that you can have as much honey as you want.”
“Annette… I’m sorry.”
Blue eyes as pretty as the sky outside the Dome did not glitter with amusement, playfulness, or energy for life. They did not glitter at all. “I understand now why you begged for Beta rations. Honey only goes so far.”
Throat bobbing from a nervous swallow, Brenya set down her too sweet tea, silently agreeing that the honey would never be enough. “Annette, everything you’re saying to me, he will hear. I’m sure he’s even watching.”
“The Commodore? Of course he is watching. He sent the honey.”
It was hard to even speak his name. “Ancil, Annette. Your husband.”
“No.” She shook her head. “Ancil is not watching. There is nothing in this room of worth to him.” A feminine wave gestured toward the two silent Beta attendants, in their matching dresses and pinafores. “Not that they won’t report to him later. But if he has any questions, they will center on your behavior today, not mine.”
Failing to glance at the attendants, Brenya drank in the blue eyes of her friend. Eyes that seemed much wiser than she had ever shown herself to be. “And what will they say?”
“That, though you acknowledged estrous, you have failed to mention your new pair-bond. That you appeared emotionally unstable. That you ate and drank all that you were given. That you squirmed in your seat and picked at your cuticles. This will please him. He will not want you to outshine his new Omega. Lucia’s performance in a social situation would have been flawless.”
It wasn’t flippant. It wasn’t rude. It wasn’t bitter. Annette was simply matter of fact.
Brenya had missed the honesty of Beta conversation, so much so that the soft smile on her mouth was genuine. “Then they can tell him that I didn’t mention the pair-bond, because I didn’t come here to talk about Jacques. Jacques talks about himself enough.”
Reaching for the teapot to refill their cups, Annette offered a simple “I know why the Commodore fell in love with you.”
“I don’t understand what ‘in love’ is supposed to mean, but whatever it is you felt for Ancil, that is not what the Commodore feels for me.” Eyes going out of focus, Brenya stared into the middle distance, poorly trying to explain the horror in her chest, the gnawing, unwelcome savagery, the endless intrusion. “It’s a hunger that will never be satisfied. And it will keep eating me until I am dead. It has no consideration for my life. I don’t really exist to it. I’m just the trough where it feeds. And it hurts, Annette, far more than falling from the Dome did.”
“And to think, I desired to be an Omega more than anything else in the world.” There it was, another brief flash of grief that no amount of Beta rations would ever fully quell. “Maybe Ancil would have loved me back if I was.”
“I’ll love you instead.” Just as she loved the Dome and the good people laboring within it. “I’ll love you, even if he never lets me see you again.”
“The Commodore won’t.” There was no emotion in Annette as she confirmed what Brenya felt echo as true through the pair-bond. “You made a grave mistake when you walked through the door. You forgot that you were here to hold my baby.”
A wash of cold dread chilled Brenya to the bone. She stumbled for an explanation, because he was watching, and he was calculating, and she had poorly tried to manipulate and failed. She made herself look at the child in the cradle. One conveniently positioned right beside her. Rosy, chubby cheeks, the tiny nose, and puckered lips. “Your son… is asleep.”
“Yes, sedated so he wouldn’t cry in your arms.” Looking down at her child, Annette reached out a hand to gently rock his cradle. “The tiny thing cries constantly, since he’s been denied my breast. I can’t risk it, you see.”
Because of the Beta rations.
Staring down at her son, Annette smiled. “I told you, wives find our purpose in our children. I have never seen anything more perfect than my son.”
Brenya couldn’t follow where this conversation had gone. “Jacques told me that your parents held important positions and—”
Still rocking the cradle, Annette confirmed what Jacques had said. “They have very important positions, positions that could petition parliament and be heard. Which is precisely why I have forbidden them from entering this room. Neither my mother nor father may touch my son. Because I know what they will say.” The cradle continued to sway, Annette’s focus completely on her sleeping child.
Something was very wrong here, Brenya wishing she understood the nuisance of conversation. “What will they say, Annette?”
“To forget. To allow my son to slip away. They would make promises that my marriage contract might be dissolved and a new husband provided. Yet Ancil would never bear an unwanted complication to restrict his Omega’s offspring’s legacy. If I leave this room, my son will die.”
This is what Annette had been trying to convey from the beginning, but Brenya was too stunted to understand. And now that she’d had to say it straight, there would be so many consequences for everyone who had sipped honey-laced tea. “So you are working within the confines of our station and situation, which is why you ate the Beta rations and told me not to interfere.”
“His name is Matthieu, and I refuse to forget him.”
8
Greth Dome
There was nothing that had ever existed or that might ever exist like the feel of his Omega’s cunt choking his cock for seed. Vocal—because it was safe to fully let go in this home he had prepared for them—Shepherd let out guttural groan, praising her, in harmony with her cries of pleasure.
Like the sucking kiss of the best-trained whore. The rippling grip of soft hands squeezing the life from the neck of their prey. A slick-drenched sleeve that had been shaped to accept a cock he knew was intimidating in size. The woman who possessed
such powers drained his tightly drawn balls until there was not a drop left to wring out.
While she screamed his name. While she bit, scratched, undulated, and prayed.
Her body stripped him bare, forced his climax, drank his seed. Her body craved.
At long last, his little one craved.
The way they fucked in the mornings now, it wasn’t perfunctory, it wasn’t out of a sense of her fear or his duty to remind her of who she was. It wasn’t because he pressured her to enjoy sex. It was because his little one woke hungry. And Shepherd had the bite marks to prove it.
His mate was starved.
For him, for his company, for his affection, as if the cloud was finally lifting. She could see him, he could embrace her. They even… played.
He had never played before.
Men like him had not been designed for such things, yet he gave that experience to her, no matter how foreign or unlikely it might be. After all, he had not destroyed Thólos and conquered Greth—he had not carved out a new world—intending to sit on the side and watch others experience freedom while he did not.
Shepherd was going to take this life by the throat and know its pleasures, train himself to understand them. With the help of a rambunctious Omega. A healing female who had defeated her addiction to the flood of narcotics she had been given in Thólos—powerful drugs he had seen strong men fall to. And she had done it unaware of what she swallowed or why.
She wanted to feel normal, she had told him, so that she could feel his love. It was worth more to her than a perpetual high or the false safety of chemically induced apathy.
Claire O’Donnell, who fought daily to face her demons and gain ground against them.
Who was finding joy… with him.
Knowing that the Gods truly favored him—that beyond all likelihood, his Omega had been delivered to his lap on the brink of estrous. Never would Shepherd regret a single moment of forcing their bond, of taking what the world owed him.
He possessed the perfect woman because when the opportunity presented itself, he acted.
And stole her from the world.
Once he had her, he learned as all mated Alphas must, that he knew nothing of what a pair-bond truly signified.
No wonder Alphas sold their souls to possess such a thing. No wonder they stole. No wonder they rose up from the Undercroft foaming at the mouth in their craving to gather their mates.
Claire might always resent how it was done, that the females matched to his Followers had no choice in the matter.
Such things were kept from her eyes now. And the violence of Thólos had evolved into the cunning of Greth. Here, Omegas were plentiful. They registered proudly and were flagrant with their freedoms. Chosen by unbonded Followers as simply as browsing a catalogue.
Rarely were they taken by force, not when they could be wooed openly and competed for. There had been four registered fights to the death between his men. The victor claimed the Omega—who was blissfully unaware of the goings on between the males.
One of those situations had gone wrong. The Omega preferred the dead rival and found herself unexpectedly bonded. Mistakes had been made with the Follower’s keeping of her, which required diligence and effort to correct.
Shepherd understood, perhaps better than any other, and offered counsel that—had Claire heard it—would have left her weeping in rage.
Ultimately, Shepherd was correct, and the Omega was learning there was more to a match than the beauty of her partner.
A thriving pair-bond required an Alpha willing to invest the effort. To affect diligence in cultivating their mate. They required an Alpha willing to both adapt from mistakes and compel resistant Omegas.
Fuck her until she couldn’t remember her name. Watch her mannerisms and learn who secretly lived behind the façade. Feed her well. Dedicate time to the attention she may not want but her dynamic craved. At the slightest hint of progress, double down. Overwhelm her.
Claire was thriving under such ministrations. She bloomed when Shepherd obliterated her boundaries.
As her therapy progressed, the more he unleashed—teasing out her primal possessiveness, using her body, her chemistry, her pheromones against her until she was forced to meet a side of herself that she tried to forget.
The warrior who had dared defy him in Thólos.
The girl who had shared images of her naked body with her people in an attempt to incite insurrection.
The indomitable, determined adversary that she conveniently tried to tuck away now that the world had made her wiser.
Claire’s self-enforced seclusion was unnatural to her healing spirit.
Just as dancing with her to the music of his new kingdom was unnatural to Shepherd’s entire life experience. Yet he did it, pulling her to him. Drawing out her giggles as they stumbled through steps, bodies touching in a way if she ever touched another male, that male would be a very dead man.
He told her so. She was only permitted to dance with him. And that had made her laugh all the harder.
It had made her run her hands down the sides of her body, turn, and flash him a coquettish smirk. He could not be held responsible for the rug burn on her knees. Or the ruins of her clothes.
His little one knew she was toying with fire.
She was testing herself too.
Yes, there had been a great deal of fear in the air when he took her down and stole her wind. Feral, he had ripped apart her clothes, roaring until he uncovered a nipple and fell upon it.
She had told him to stop, and he had fucked her twice as hard to drive home a monumental point.
If she tempted, he would devour.
There would be no more cautious couplings. Not when he knew what she could take.
And she could take it all.
Down her throat, stuffed in her cunt, the most obscene things he might imagine. He’d danced with her, then indulged the wanton Omega slut Claire pretended didn’t live behind fluttering lashes and soft conversation.
The nest was no longer just her place to hide. It was his place to defile. She wanted it tidy, he purposefully disrupted her design as he threw her body about and rutted until her outrage at his rudeness had been fucked right out of her.
Claire had thought to argue with him about it over breakfast.
Shepherd responded by hiking her up under his arm in the exact manner he had done the first time they had met in the Citadel, dragging his spitting mate back to her freshly made nest, and destroyed it over a series of hours while he fucked her until her pupils were so blown she could do nothing but gush slick. A mighty knot had sent her into a tailspin of excitement, irritation, desire, pleasure, anger, and while he had her pinned where there was no escape, he lifted the nearest pillow and ripped it right down the middle until a shower of feathers had left the room coated in downy white.
It was her only warning. It was his victory. And it was a sign it was time to overwhelm her. “We do not politely couple in bed, little one. We make love, and our love is not soft, or gentle, or sweet. It is vicious, eternal. It has teeth and claws. When I fuck you, at no time will my attention be on the placement of your pillows—unless I put that pillow under your hips so I can fuck you even deeper. You want a pretty nest like you see on COMscreen articles? Build it, knowing that I will leave it in ruins as I do things to you in it that will leave you screaming my name.”
The flush in her cheeks after his statement, the tightness of her nipples… she hated that his vulgarity excited her. Because it wasn’t done out of cruelty or disregard. It was done because to him, nothing mattered more than her ultimate pleasure. If she was distracted by silk and satin, then she was wasting thought that should be on them.
Her only focus when she dared tease him with a wicked lick of her lips should be taking the pleasure her beast would give her.
A little line grew between her brows. An expression Shepherd could read like a book. Just as he knew she was about to look to the side and sigh before she spoke.
“Sometimes, I want you to be soft.”
Rolling to his back, despite the feathers, he laid her on his chest in the position she loved best. And Shepherd gave her soft in the way she really desired it. With gentle touches and luxurious purrs. He soothed all her aches. When the knot diminished, he pulled her body so she might straddle his face, and contentedly lapped between her legs—a shiver going down his spine to feel her little hands burrow into his hair as she took her pleasure.
A shiver. A sensation he had never felt before Claire. Before Greth.
That shiver… he would go to any length to know that shiver under her touch.
She came with his tongue strumming her clit, his fingers buried deep and rubbing the nerves that sought a knot. Eyes glowing, jaw loose, and breath shallow, Claire let go.
And he considered the lesson complete.
The sleepy sex-drugged smile that followed left the link singing in the perfect pitch of Omega joy.
And it lasted a few seconds longer each day.
“I love you.”
Tucking herself against his side as if she might tempt him to laze about with her all day, she offered a contented murmur. “I know you do, Shepherd.”
Carding his fingers through silken black hair, he purred. “And you love me.”
It was not a question, nor did it require an answer. It was fact.
Snickering, she put a hand to her cheek and closed her eyes.
There was little he loved more than her natural laugh. “What is funny?”
Still snickering, she said, “This morning, I added a banana to your green sludge and some local spice I can’t pronounce. According to my COMscreen, beyond its excellent flavor, it is favored by wives to calm their overly sexual men.”
Cocking a dangerous brow, he took her chin and met wickedly dancing green eyes. “You want me to be less sexual?”
She bit her lip, playful, before she teased, “I wanted you to stop destroying my nests. I suppose next time I should double the dose.”
