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1
ARIADNE
“Put me down! You big oaf, I said, put me down right this instant! I’m not a log for you to carry like that, you…” I gasp when the Wildman who abducted me from the bank of the stream where I had been resting with my maybe-but-not-quite-fated mates, Finnen and Taj, starts running—with me slung over his shoulder, my legs and arms bouncing. “Put me down!”
He’s freakishly strong, I think dizzily, to be carrying me while running through meadows and groves, his shoulder broad and padded with muscle under my middle.
My aching middle, which had been aching even before he threw me over his shoulder and took off. It’s the stirrings of my heat, it seems, this aching and clenching deep inside my belly. The precursors of my ending.
Because I’m an omega whose mates don’t ever get around to sleeping with her!
Gods help me.
And not just any omega, according to the Council of the Twelve and the Temple Synod: no, I may be a Fae-blood omega, and even worse, one of the prophesied omegas who might change the route of history by bringing back the presumed-dead race of the Fae. A race supposed to be extinct since the war all those centuries ago, but whose blood still runs in the veins of many of us in the Anchar Empire, in some more than others.
“Stop!” I bang on his back with my hands. “Put me down!”
But he keeps running.
Taj said I’m his mate, and so is Finnen, and judging from their delicious scents and the way my body responds to them I’m tempted to say he’s right.
Then again, my body seems to respond the same way to this specific Wildman’s scent. The same intense, belly-aching, netherparts-wetting, screaming-need exact way.
When he’s not kidnapping me and running about with my anatomy hanging off him like a rolled-up rug, at least. And no matter how much my body wants him, how it makes me want to climb the man like a tree, it doesn’t change the fact that he’s a fearsome berserker whose name I don’t even know, who attacked us already once and who’s now carrying me away from the two men I’ve fallen for, heading to the Gods know where.
Yeah, my heart belongs to them, like it or not, to the arrogant, dogmatic priest and the rogue army Commander, but my body…
My body obviously wants more.
It wants this growling beast of a man who’s skidding down a slope and then climbing another.
Hills. We have reached hills. There was a hill nearby where we escaped from the army men.
The Commander’s men, and yeah, this is confusing for me, too, but apparently Commander Taj has made his choice. Or so he said when he joined us today and now I’m already…
I draw a shuddering breath, suddenly close to tears.
Goddess save me.
I’m already far from them. I’ve already lost them, before I even had them.
This is ridiculous. My body’s reactions and my emotions are ridiculous. Which may be typical of an omega about to enter her first heat but I doubt an omega is supposed to do that while running for her life and passing from one dangerous situation to another.
With her potential mates not sure they are her mates or that they want to consummate their relationship. Or not try to kill each other.
Why couldn’t I have one day, one frigging day to talk to them, figure this out?
Gods, this unholy ride is killing me. I can’t breathe. My ribs hurt. My heart is breaking. “Put me down, put me down,” I whisper, a sob caught in my throat. “Ow…”
Surprisingly, he slows down.
At last.
Turning my head from side to side, I try to see where we are. It’s another shelter, I realize as he walks inside, his steps echoing against stone walls. A cave, carved out of the rock. Water trickles nearby, maybe on the outer wall, and I expect it to be freezing, but it’s not. Furs and leathers cover up one corner of the cave.
That’s where he kneels down and hauls me off him to lay me on the furs, more gently than I’d ever have thought possible.
Still, what breath I have left is knocked out of me when my back hits the pallet and I’m left staring up at him.
