Rite of Submission (Rite #1) Unedited

Story Time

Seeming to be bored with venturing around the house now, Sophie had us make our way back up to her suite. A chair had been posted outside her doors, assumedly for Blake, so that he wouldn’t have to stand while on guard any more. Flopping on the sofa, she eyed me suspiciously, “What exactly happened last night to put my brother in such a generous mood today? Not to mention, that kiss in the kitchen!” She giggled, “Although, I did enjoy watching Candy turn that peculiar shade of purple when Dimi wrapped his arms around you. I thought her head was going to explode!”

I just shrugged and spread my palms, unsure of what to tell her. “I can’t explain it.” I tried to think of a way to tell her what I felt in that moment, “Candy just makes me want to... I think I hate her, and I’d like to drop kick her across the room when I see her.” It was a statement, but it sounded more like a question as I said it.

She giggled a little, “Oh, my god! You like him!” She clapped her hands together, “You like him.” She taunted.

I chucked a throw pillow at her. “Dear god no!” that seemed to sober her enthusiasm, “I don’t know why, I don’t like her. I haven’t changed my mind about anything else; I just really enjoy pissing her off for some reason.”

“Huh,” she chewed on her bottom lip thoughtfully, “I guess I get that. Did you see how she shoved her t**s in his face when we showed up?” her laughter shaking her shoulders as she tried to puff out her chest in the same manner.

“Yeah,” I smiled, “what was that about? Didn’t he just spend the night with her a few days ago? Why does she try so hard if he already sleeps with her?” I didn’t understand the dynamic between the weird cast of characters that had become the players in my living nightmare.

“We were all best friends growing up,” Sophie sighed, but I couldn’t picture the trio of them doing anything together. “She developed earlier than I did, her t**s practically popped out over night.” She sighed, “She was also the first girl I ever kissed or fooled around with.” She shrugged, “but I wasn’t the only one that had noticed her, and she decided that Dimi was the better option, hoping to be Luna some day, she even refused her mate to try and claim him.”

“So you and Candy…?”

“Not so fast!” She cut me off, “If I’m going to spill my guts, you have to spill yours too.” She wiggled her eyebrows, “A little tit for tat.”

I thought about it. What could it hurt for her to ask whatever she wanted to know about me? It wasn’t as if every intimate detail of my life had been relayed to her brother just a few nights ago. “Deal, but questions about your brother’s bedroom are off limits.”

She pouted and crossed her arm, “Oooh, aren’t you a wet blanket. Now I’m not so sure that you should know more about us.” I shrugged, calling her bluff. “Fine, no questions about his bedroom, I already know too much about what has happened in there… but we have to swear to answer honestly.” I nodded. “Have you ever had a boyfriend?” She hugged the pillow I’d thrown at her and waited, holding her breath.

“Nope, I wasn’t allowed to date. I suspect because my parents had already sold me to your parents. But, I’m not sure why it made a difference since we don’t find mates in humans.” Her eyes widened, more questions forming in her head as she waited her turn to ask. “So, you and Candy, um, dated?” I had trouble forming the sentence.

“Experimented,” she exaggerated the word. “We wondered what it was like to be kissed, so we tried it on each other. And, when she blossomed, we would experiment with some of the stuff we read in romance novels. I learned that I liked girls, she learned she wanted Dmitri.” She leaned forward and glanced at the doors behind her nervously before turning her attention back to me. Quietly she whispered, “Did you ever kiss a human?”

I smiled wide, “A few times,” I whispered back. “It only happed during games like spin the bottle and truth or dare. Have you ever had a boyfriend?”

She stuck out her tongue and mad a sick face, “No, I don’t even think I’ve ever even had a crush on a boy before. Have you?” She clamped her hand over her mouth, realizing she’d asked a question without meaning to.

I smiled wide, feeling like I’d won a point or something. “Yes, but they were all human boys, so I guess I’d never really act on it.” She seemed disappointed with my short answer, “have you had girlfriends?”

“Not really. I would say I’ve had a few flings, but no relationships. I’ve always held out hope that someday I’d find a real mate, but I’m also terrified that they would male.” She sifted through the questions she had piling up in her head, chewing on her lip again. “What is spin the bottle and truth or dare?”

My jaw dropped… “They’re games that teenagers play to encourage you to kiss strangers, or more naughty things.” I put on my most devious smile and winked at her, but she seemed more confused. “So, ‘Spin the Bottle’ is a kissing game. Everyone sits in a circle around an empty bottle that’s laid on the floor. Each person takes turns and spins the bottle and has to kiss whoever the bottle is pointing at when it stops.” She listened intently as I continued, “And, ‘Truth or Dare’ is another game. You take turns asking someone if they want to pick truth or dare. If they choose truth, you get to ask them a question and they have to answer honestly, kind of like what we’re doing. But, if they picked dare, you get to dare them to do something, like kiss a specific person or spend 7 minutes in heaven,” her face told me that she hadn’t heard of that game either. “Then that person gets to choose someone else to pick truth or dare. ‘7 minutes in heaven’ is where two people have to go alone together into a closet or other room, and they get 7 minutes to kiss or feel each other up or experiment.” I smiled as I made air quotes on the last word, making her blush. “Are you a virgin?”

She seemed taken aback by my question. To be fair, I had just blurted it out. Blushing again she tilted her head at me, “technically, yes. There has never been a p***s anywhere near my vagina.” She said the words so matter of fact like. “But I have had s****l relations with women before, so also no.” I couldn’t help but wonder how that worked with the way she seemed locked away from the world too. “Dmitri has girls, and I’ve had mine. What’s it like to kiss humans, now that you’ve kissed Dimi, is there a difference?”

I couldn’t help but wonder if she was hoping to find a way to have a girlfriend that wouldn’t be lost to her by a random encounter with some male that caused them to imprint on each other. I also got the sinking feeling that if Dmitri found out about this I’d be in for a day of new and harsher punishments. She stared at me expectantly as I struggled with my own internal dialog on the matter.

Sighing, I resigned to keep my word and answer honestly. “Yes,” I paused a moment, “and no.” She looked as conflicted as I felt. “I mean, the mechanics of it all works the same, push your lips together. But your brother has a more aggressive nature. Human boys are timid and unsure of themselves at first, I don’t know if girls would be the same way. I never thought to ask my lesbian or bi friends.” I sighed, “I suppose I’ll never get to ask, now.”

“You had lesbian friends?” she asked, genuinely surprised.

I nodded, “a few. They don’t have the ability to imprint and find a mate that is their end all, be all. They fall in love, and sometimes it lasts, most times it doesn’t. But, they get to move on and find a new person to fall in love again and again.”

“I’d think it would be frustrating to never know how if the one you were with was who you were supposed to be with.” She mused, “But it would be nice to know that there wasn’t just one single person that could make you feel whole. To be able to find love again.” She stared off into space for a moment, lost in the idea of the possibilities. “I suppose I owe you 2 questions now.”

“Would you want to try dating human girls? Are humans even allowed here?”

She laughed. “Of course they are!” she giggled, “there are far more humans than there are of us, and we have business arrangements with many of them.” She shrugged, “as for dating them, I’m not sure. I don’t have a lot of options as it is. But I’m also sure that Dimi may have something to say on the matter, and I don’t think that I’d like to hear it. Either way, what girl is going to want to have a relationship with someone that can’t go out in public with them?” She quickly amended, “That’s not my question.” We both laughed.

“Do you think there’s anything that would make you reconsider your opinion of your circumstances?” She looked uncomfortable asking the question.

Immediately I was suspicious that she’d been put up to the task, trying to help her brother seduce me. Maybe it was the way that she twisted her fingers in her lap, but she didn’t look like she was trying to be deceptive. “I don’t know.” She nodded sadly. “I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about if this had been handled or happened differently. I don’t even know if I’d be the same person if I’d spent my life knowing this was to be my fate. I mean how different would I be if I’d been able to spend time with you guys as I grew up? Would we have grown close or would we have tried to rebel and escape each other? I mean what if it’d happened like those movies we watched, and he’d tried to win me over?” I fell back, exasperated with the possibilities and no real answer to be had. “I’m sure there is some world where everything happened naturally, he and I ended up together and life is fine. But I don’t think that’ll happen here.”

She made a face, “I don’t think I could picture Dimi trying to be romantic for anyone. I don’t even think he’d know how to try,” she frowned, “I mean, he does have a sweet side and he’s usually kind to me, and he used to follow you around like a lost puppy back when…” She froze, staring at me.

“Oh no you don’t,” I stared at her in disbelief, “You’re going to have to finish that one.”

She took a few deep breathes and wrung her hands in her lap before answering, “Your parents used to bring you here regularly to play with us, until Dimi had his first shift.” She frowned down at her fingers, “I think they stopped because his shifts were easily provoked and more frequent when you were visiting.”

“Why don’t I remember any of that?”

She shrugged, “I think you were only four or so. Would you feel differently towards the arrangement if you’d been allowed to continue spending time with us?”

“We’ll never know what would’ve been. I do know that I could give in now, have a baby and earn my freedom from him.” I looked her over, “But could you just leave your child behind? Could you even give yourself over to someone that was chosen for you?”

She chewed on her bottom lip thoughtfully for a long while. “I see your point.” We sat quietly for a long time again. “You could always stay,” she tried to sound cheerful, “What would you have been doing if you hadn’t been brought here?”

“I had my own room and clothes for a start, not that these clothes aren’t nice. They just aren’t me.” When she didn’t interject I continued, “I have no time to myself anymore, or time with my friends for that matter. Yes, they were all human, but we had fun and learned from each other. We were all supposed to go off to college, and find careers.”

“You could still go to college,” she tried to assure me.

“Even if I got pregnant today, and managed to convince myself to leave my baby behind, I’d still be a year later than my friends. It wouldn’t be the same, and I’d always be thinking about how my baby was doing.”

She frowned, “I meant there were ways to take classes online, but I suppose that’s not what you meant either.” Snuggling the pillow closer, “I didn’t get to have those kinds of experiences either.”

“Dmitri implied earlier that you could simplify those contracts for him to be able to read them faster.” I was trying to shift the focus of the conversation back on her.

“I’m a paralegal,” she nodded, sitting up straighter. “Our father insisted that it would be the best way to help Dimi, and I like the fact that I have to keep learning to keep up with the changes to laws and what not.” I could see that something dark crossed her thoughts, but she pushed it aside quickly. She continued on happily explaining the subtle differences one sentence could make to a contract.

“I don’t remember if I met your father either,” I mused, interrupting her train of thought.

“Dimi killed him,” she didn’t even bat an eyelash. When she registered the horror on my face, she continued, “I forget that you don’t know about pack politics. That was the only way for Dmitri to take over as Alpha, and name me Luna.” I don’t think my facial expression made her feel she’d reassured me. “He was not a nice man,” she whispered, frowning. This one comment started her down a long list of horrors that her father had committed. “Dmitri knew that his ‘mate’ had already been arranged for him…” she shrugged, “he saved me from being forced into finding a male mate.”

“That’s why you added the stipulation of having to giving into him of my own volition.” I finally understood, why he allowed such an impediment to his ability to get his heir.

“And the offer of freedom afterwards, regardless of the s*x of the child,” she smiled sadly. “Female Alpha’s are rare, but not unheard of. And technically you would have fulfilled the original contract since it didn’t state it had to be male. He could always choose to have more children with someone else afterwards.”

On paper, the whole thing made sense, for them. It was simple and straightforward, agree to give the pack an heir, and I’d be free to continue my life anyway I saw fit. I still couldn’t untangle my emotions from the whole thing and that seemed to be the problem. Because of her, the original deal had been altered to give me choices.

Dinner was brought up for us, interrupting our conversation and derailing my train of thought. She wasn’t done trying to learn more about me though. The food brought an onslaught of questions about my favorite foods and meals. She scrunched up her face, trying to understand how I could love to bake sweets, but not eat them. It also could have been because she couldn’t comprehend wanting to cook when they had someone to do it for them all their lives.

Crawling into bed, we continued talking in the dark. She wanted to know about all of my old friends, telling me about the enforcers’ mates that she got to spend time with from time to time. I learned that the few female shifters they had in their pack had no mates, and some were kind of what I’d called friends with benefits with her. But they didn’t get to meet very often. She was stuck living a half life.