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It took everything in me not to roll my eyes. Instead I clenched my teeth and refused to lower my gaze, even though my omega instincts were screaming at me to diffuse the situation by giving in. Submitting.
But my parents, thinking I was a beta just like them, had raised me to be a strong, independent woman. The odds of two betas giving birth to an omega was practically non-existent. I should have been three years into a four year degree in nursing like I’d planned since I was twelve.
Miriam leaned in, her chest brushing my back as she lowered her lips to my ear. “Our mighty High Alpha will soon make you his, omega.” Her lips curved in a cruel smirk. “And I can’t wait to see how pretty you are when he turns you into his whore. Because that’s all you are. A pretty little fuckhole that can take a knot and give him more alphas.”
Unable to stop myself, I met her gaze in the glass, my mouth curving into a mocking grin. “At least I can take a knot, and I’m not a useless, common beta.” It was a low blow, and honestly I’d have given my left nipple to be just a basic beta myself, but I knew the words would hurt Miriam.
I wanted someone else to hurt.
In this fucked up cult, betas really believed alphas were superiors to the world, and the greatest purpose in life was to serve them. Fulfill their every need.
Miriam would never be able to open up her beta cunt enough to take his knot, and that meant I was her superior.
And it fucking killed her.
Fury flashed in her eyes a second before her hand twisted around my braid, wrenching my head back. Pain arced up my spine as my vertebrae cracked and twisted. “You fucking worthless?—”
“Miriam.” Morris’s sharp voice cut through the space with authority, freezing us both in place.
Miriam hissed a breath as she looked at the open door to the bathroom where he stood, glaring at her with piercing green eyes. Behind him, Daphne hovered, twisting her hands together. For a brief second her gaze met mine over Morris’s massively muscled shoulder, and I swore I saw something that looked like respect.
But just as fast as I’d clocked the emotion, it was snuffed out, the blank look she typically wore sliding back into place.
Miriam slowly released her hold on my hair. “Beta Morris,” she greeted through gritted teeth, forcing herself back into the role of the High Alpha’s dutiful first wife. “May I help you?”
“You can help me by unhanding her,” Morris snapped, looking like he was seconds away from coming into the small space and ripping her away. His gaze flicked to me and softened slightly. “The High Alpha is asking for you. I’ll take you to him.”
Miriam glowered and stepped back. “I was planning to bring the omega to the meeting.”
Oh, fuck. No wonder Miriam was in an extra bitchy snit. Meetings around here were rarely good news, no matter how much the High Alpha proclaimed his visions were given by the god he subscribed to.
At the last meeting, he’d announced that the will of the highest power advised him of the future of a girl who had just turned thirteen. Now the pretty beta would be married off to one of the High Alpha’s inner council before her fourteenth birthday. When her dad had thrown a fit, the High Alpha quickly pronounced the man to be afflicted by the devil and was to be held in the pit until he saw the error of his ways.
The pit was the APA’s prison. It was a hole fifteen feet underground, only three feet in diameter. It was damn near impossible to turn around in, let alone sit. People were left there for days, sometimes weeks. Bits of stale bread and water were dropped from the locked grates above, and you had to tip your head back and hope something landed in your open mouth.
The guards found it hysterical to piss into the hole when the person inside was begging for water.
The High Alpha had tried to break me by putting me in the hole twice. The first time for a day when I questioned something the first week I’d been here. The second was for five days after I said no way in hell was I going to marry him. He thought I would change my mind.
Spoiler alert: I didn’t. So he found a new way to control me. And with the exception of the time I’d tried to escape, it had worked like a fucking charm.
Because there was one way to make a person, omega or not, behave.
And the High Alpha had zero problem exploiting the one weakness I would never stop protecting.
Logan.
6
Hazel
A chill tickled over my skin as a carpet of dead leaves crunched beneath my feet. The simple flip-flops and thin dress did little to protect me from the weather shifting from bitter winter to slightly-less bitter early spring.
I glanced around the commune—the compound, as the High Alpha called it—and saw the same crudely constructed log cabins dispersed through the space that I knew for a fact was surrounded by a wall of concrete six inches deep and sixteen feet high.
Hidden in the woods of upstate Montana, the commune was remote and completely off the grid. There were old electricity lines that weren’t functional since electric bills meant establishing an address that went on record. The High Alpha did everything to keep his people, and what they were doing, out of the public eye. That meant no power, no phones, and no computers. Once every two months, several trucks full of men the High Alpha trusted implicitly went into the nearest town to get food and medical supplies.
I wasn’t sure what or where that town was, but the trucks left before the sun rose and often returned long after it had set behind the mountains in the west, which made me think it wasn’t exactly a place I could walk to.
