Obsessed With An Omega

Chapter Three-What the Beta's Daughter Learned

They came for me a little after dawn.

I had known they would. I had barely slept for the certainty of it, and so when the attic door was thrown open and Taylor's friends spilled in to drag me down the stairs by my hair, I was already half-braced, already reaching for the cold quiet place my father had taught me to find before a fight.

Because that is the thing none of them knew about the trophy in the attic. Before I was an omega pouring wine, I had been a beta's daughter, and a beta's daughter is not raised to be decorative. I had been trained since I could walk. I knew where a body is soft and where it is hard, how to turn a larger opponent's weight into their own undoing, how to end a thing quickly so it does not become a long thing. I had simply had no reason to show any of them. Until now.

They hauled me into the side yard, where Taylor was waiting with the rest of her court arranged behind her like a painting of herself.

"You slept with him," she said. No greeting. Her voice shook with it. "You crept down there and you spread yourself for him like the gutter thing you are, and now he won't even look at me."

"I made milk," I said. "He talked. Then he left. If he won't look at you, Taylor, it isn't because of me. It's because of you."

It was the wrong thing to say and I knew it and I said it anyway, because I was tired of being spat on by people who had earned nothing they carried. She screamed and swung, and the others rushed in behind her, and the yard dissolved into it.

* * *

I will not pretend I remember it cleanly. Fights are not clean; that is a lie the storytellers tell. I remember the first girl coming in high and wild and how easy it was to step inside her reach and take her legs from under her. I remember an elbow across my cheekbone that lit the whole side of my skull white. I remember using the second girl's own momentum to put her into the third, and the sound they made going down together, and Taylor's nails opening a hot line down my forearm before I caught her wrist and twisted until she folded, shrieking, to her knees in the dust.

Four of them. There were four of them, and when it ended I was still standing, chest heaving, blood in my mouth, and they were not. Not one of them had landed a blow that mattered. My father's voice was in my hands the entire time, patient and certain, the way it had been when I was small: not to be cruel, Vera. Only to be finished.

That was when it woke, and this time the fight had fed it.

In the kitchen it had come on like a fever. This was a flood. The heat did not rise, it broke, roaring up out of my breastbone with the smell of all that blood to feed on, and the yard went molten-bright around me. I could see the pulse jumping in Taylor's throat where she knelt in the dust. I could hear it, that frantic wet drumming, and the thing inside me leaned toward the sound the way a starved animal leans toward meat. My father's voice came to me, patient and certain — only to be finished, Vera — except it was not my father's voice anymore. Something had taken the words and bent them into a promise, and my body took a step toward the girl on her knees that I did not tell it to take.

My hands were already changing. The nails gone black and long, curved into something built for opening a throat, and I could feel my own face trying to become another shape entirely. A sound came out of my chest. I want to be clear that it was not a sound a person can make. It was too low and far too large for the body it came out of, a rolling subsonic growl that I felt in my teeth and in the ground, and every wolf in that yard heard what it was before their minds could catch up. Four trained fighters, and they cowered. Taylor threw herself backward through the dirt, scrabbling, her painted face come apart with a terror that had nothing to do with the beating she had taken and everything to do with what was standing over her. An omega. They had called me an omega, and here were their warriors flinching from me like pups from a fire.

The morning seemed to dim at the edges. The thing was almost through now, almost wearing me, and God help me, part of me wanted to let it. Part of me wanted to give these people exactly what they had earned. It would be so easy. It would feel like justice.

No.

I found the memory of my father — the real one, the warm one, his hands guiding mine when I was small, not to be cruel, only to be finished — and I used it like a rope and I hauled myself back up it hand over hand while the thing fought me the whole way, snarling, furious to be denied its meal. My knees hit the dust. I dragged air into my lungs in great whooping gulps. The claws softened. The dreadful sound died in my throat. And the world dimmed back down from molten to only morning, and I knelt there shaking in the wreckage of the fight, a girl again, or near enough to pass.

But it had been seen. All of it. When I lifted my head the whole yard had gone silent and still, every face turned toward me the way you turn toward something that should not exist, and I understood that whatever peace I had built here was not merely over. It had been burned to the ground in front of witnesses.

And at the gate, someone was watching who had seen the most of all.

* * *

The Alpha of the Orion pack stood at the gate. Beside him, his son Theo, a broad quiet young man who had never once been unkind to me and never once spoken up for me either. And beside them, arms folded, that pale gaze fixed on me with an intensity that had nothing to do with the fight at all, stood Caden Wolfe.

Taylor recovered first. She always did. She scrambled up, arranging her face into tears, and flung out a hand at me. "Alpha, she attacked us, she went mad, she—"

"Be silent."

The Alpha did not look at her when he said it. He was looking at me, and there was something in his face I had never seen there before, something that in a lesser man I would have called fear.

"Taylor," he said. "Go to your mother. If I hear your voice again before nightfall you will spend the season mucking the training yards. Go."

She went, white-faced. The Alpha kept looking at me, and I understood that the fight was not what troubled him. It was that flash of brightness, that thing that had come up out of me and shown itself for a single second. He had seen it. I did not know what it meant, and he plainly did, and that was the most frightening thing of all.

"Pack your things," he said at last, and his voice was rough. "You leave within the hour."

The ground seemed to tilt. "Leave," I repeated. "Leave for where?"

It was not the Alpha who answered. It was Caden, and he was smiling that slow, unhurried smile, the one that had all the time in the world in it.

"With me," he said.