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Reminded that the whims of my body would only be met by the grace of my alpha. I’d lost track of how many times the High Alpha had whispered those phrases to me. Like they were a goddamned mantra.
I looked at Morris. “H-how l-l-long?”
Something passed over his face, but he schooled his expression a second later. “It’s been three days since it began.”
My brain melted as his words sank in.
Three days of unrelenting fevers and crying.
My body trembled with exhaustion and need, and I was so disoriented I was actually hoping one of these two betas would relieve any of the pressure threatening to rip my insides apart.
In some ways it felt like no time had passed, but in another, it was like an eternity. There was no telling how long it would last. A normal omega heat cycle lasted five days. But I wasn’t a normal omega.
I couldn’t do this for two more days.
Lucid moments like this were slowly killing me.
Having my body crave attention and sex from men I hated was a special kind of torture. The omega side of me just wanted sex—preferably a knot, but at this point, any cock would suffice. But my brain knew that it was all hormones and biological urges. At the end of the day, I didn’t want this. I didn’t want any of this. Trying to reconcile the mental and physical needs of my own body was damn exhausting.
Movement at the door caught my attention and my entire body went rigid, locking up tight at the sight of the High Alpha filling the open doorway. His gray hair was pulled back into a low ponytail. Dressed in black pants and a black t-shirt that stretched over his rounded chest and stomach, his cold brown eyes heated when they landed on me. A low growl rumbled from his chest, the sound reverberating through my bones.
I squeezed my eyes shut, hating myself for the way a new gush of slick seeped from between my legs.
“High Alpha,” Jordan stammered, the appropriate amount of deference and awe to our leader filling his tone. “She’s not yet finished her heat.”
“I can smell that,” the High Alpha remarked, his tone thick with desire. The stench of rotting leaves and old gym socks made my nose wrinkle and my stomach roil even as I tried lifting my hips. “But I had to see her.”
Morris shifted in front of the door, looking like he was about to physically block the leader of the commune from entering the space. “But, sir, you told us to keep you away from her. To aid you in resisting the temptation of your nature.”
“Do you see me mounting her like a mindless, rutting fool?” The High Alpha’s voice, rife with authority, whipped through the space at the beta who dared question him, even if he’d given previous instructions to his inner circle of beta guards to keep him away from me.
My first heat was to help us both, apparently. To keep us pure before the marriage ceremony.
I got to endure the hell of my first heat with zero relief to teach me that only the High Alpha could save me from the base urges of my body. My next heat, he would claim me, but only if I first proved my devotion to him by surviving a heat without any assistance.
Yeah.
It sounded like utter bullshit to me, too.
Meanwhile, the High Alpha was having a non-stop orgy with his four beta wives next door, using hits of my pheromones as heroin to fuel their sex games. He claimed it was to take off the edge of being unable to claim me for himself, but it was a task an ancient god had set before him. A burden he would bear for the good of our people.
His people, not mine.
My life hadn’t always been like this. The first seventeen years were pretty incredible. I had an amazing set of parents who loved and doted on me, a ride or die bestie, and I was one of the more popular girls in school. I had solid grades, and I’d already secured a scholarship to my first choice university.
But that all changed the night my parents were killed in a car accident two months before my eighteenth birthday.
After their deaths, my only living relative, my mom’s half-brother, came to claim me before the government could intervene and send me into foster care for the last two months of my childhood.
My best friend’s parents had even petitioned the courts to let me stay with them and finish out my senior year. Calla’s parents were like my own parents—I’d known them, and Calla’s brothers, since I was little. We lived next door to each other, and our families were practically a pack.
Ultimately, the court ruled that Uncle Henry had more of a right to me since he was biologically related. Within a day of getting custody, Uncle Henry had sold off everything of value, from the house to my mom’s wedding rings, before moving me to the middle of the country.
That was when things got really fucked up.
Mom had always said her brother was off, and that was why he was never around. It turned out that off was code for a doomsday whack job who was convinced the government was out to brainwash us all. He dragged me to a compound where he, along with over a hundred other people, lived in the wilderness, off the grid, and followed the teachings of the High Alpha.
Things really took a turn when I presented as an omega days after my eighteenth birthday. It was about two years after most omegas presented, but I’d never been punctual in life or biology.
