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Prologue
Brandon
Nobody ever tells you when you’re young that life just keeps on going no matter what. No matter how much heartbreak you face or how unhappy you might be, the world doesn’t just obligingly stop spinning to let you get off. You have to keep going, stay your course and endure. And no matter how much you dread facing each new day, and no matter if you’ve lost the thread and have no idea why it should be necessary to keep on breathing, you have to keep on putting one foot in front of the other, day after endless day. At least that’s what people say.
If it hadn’t been for my pack brothers, I probably would have given up years ago, soon after my beloved parents and my sweet, funny, elder brother James, were all killed in a tragic carriage accident while I was away at boarding school. I’d been devastated. And if not for my cousins’ support, I might have tried to find a way to join my family in the sudden oblivion that had swallowed them up.
Then there was Roxbury, my best friend and near constant companion. He, along with my cousins, simply wouldn’t let me slip away. Roxbury made it his mission after the accident to put a smile on my face again and give me a reason to keep living. Roxbury had more or less appropriated me as his private property from the moment we met, despite the fact I was already in a pack. He would never take no for an answer when it came to my joining him in his misadventures and being a partner in crime to all his mischief. He was exhausting, but totally wonderful and kept me from drifting away from everyone, even from myself, in those first terrible months of grief.
My cousins, mainly Lexington and Harrison, the leaders of our pack, had never approved of Roxbury, even from the first. He was from an excellent family, but they called him a rakehell, and rightly so. It was an old-fashioned word for hell raiser and indicated a man with immoral conduct and outrageous behavior. One who incurred lavish debts and drank too much, and one who was entirely unsuitable for us—or more specifically for me—to even associate with. All entirely true, I might add. But none of that mattered.
To me, Roxbury was not only devastatingly handsome, reckless, carefree, and witty, he was also the love of my life. In a platonic way, of course, though we’d made vows to each other that we’d always be close and never be parted from each other. I considered him my best friend in the whole world, and I loved him unconditionally. A friend was all he was, though, no matter my boyish dreams and secret thoughts, held deep inside, where I could whisper them only to myself. I had such a terrible crush on him. Perhaps I didn’t do as well as I thought in hiding them, because Harrison and Lex sat me down at one point and sternly lectured me about the ways of the world. They explained that I had the wrong ideas about what was and wasn’t done and having a huge crush on another Alpha like Roxbury? It definitely wasn’t the right thing. They demanded that I end my relationship with him.
Alpha males like me simply did not get crushes or fall madly in love with another Alpha male, they explained, which Roxbury most decidedly was. He was as big and tough as Asher or Lexington and as aggressive and muscular as Wyatt. Not to mention being as controlling as Harrison, who was much older than us, but was still very close to his brother Lex, and who more or less treated all of us cousins more like his little brothers.
Roxbury and I could be friends, my cousins told me. Even “brothers,” but anything else simply could never work out. And since I couldn’t seem to control myself around him, they wanted me to pull away from him for a while. They said that if Roxbury got himself together and stopped his outrageous behavior, they would allow him to be my friend. Maybe even occasionally my lover if we both understood it was merely practice—just high spirits and fooling around with each other until a suitable omega presented themselves. And even then, it could happen only occasionally, and never with any serious intent.
But as far as an actual serious relationship—a romance? Fuck no, not a chance. Absolutely not. I would need to find myself a nice omega, or even a beta, because two Alphas could not be together. They could never get along and they’d wind up killing each other, unless one of them took a more submissive role. And that was not only slightly shameful and embarrassing, but also unheard of.
Lex explained that a romantic relationship would go against an Alpha’s controlling nature, and we would constantly be at each other’s throats and even come to blows over who was in charge. And since it was so totally unheard of for two strong Alphas to be together, I needed to get my shit together and get that foolishness out of my head. Lex and the others said they’d help me, because Roxbury was too reckless, too wild, too unheeding and way too likely to be expelled from school anyway for his many transgressions. When that inevitably happened, according to my cousins, his father, a lord and formerly a high-ranking naval officer, no doubt would make him join the Navy. Then I’d never see him again anyway, as he’d be constantly far away at sea. So, I needed to get him out of my mind and heart, and have nothing more to do with him, in case his terrible reputation tainted my own.
I fought against the idea of ending things between us and treating him so badly and refused to be swayed by any of their arguments. He was my best friend, outside of my cousins, and I loved him. But they were right about school. Only a month or so later, the headmaster decided to expel Roxbury and several of his friends immediately after a wild, drunken night involving several of them carousing naked in the town fountain after a raucous evening at the local pub.
I saw Roxbury only once more after that, when he came to throw pebbles at my window in the dormitory on the night he ran away. When I jumped out of bed and threw open the window, he begged me to climb down and run away with him. He was leaving school that very night and wanted me to come.
His face had been desperate, flushed with passion, his eyes wide and dark and full of pain as he’d stared up at me where I stood framed in the window.
“I’m leaving, Brandon. My father will be here in the morning, and he’s promised to ship me off to the Navy. He’s been threatening me with it for years, but he’s serious this time. He means it.” He held out an imploring hand and looked up at me with those gorgeous green eyes. “I can’t be stuck on some ship at sea—I won’t survive! Come with me and we can run away together—get far away from Morovia and Sudfarma—as far as we can and never come back. We’ll go all the way to the Verian Empire. The end of the world. We can find work and get ourselves a little house somewhere—maybe over there or in Crillia, or even farther away than that. I promise to make it work and I’ll always take care of you. Jump down to me, and I’ll catch you. I’ll steal a horse, and we’ll go far away from here.”
“Roxbury, please. You know I can’t do that. We can’t steal a horse. You can be hanged for stealing horses! And we can’t just run away. They’ll come after us and make us come home. Please come upstairs and we’ll talk this through. We have to think this thing through. We have to be sensible.”
“Sensible!” he cried out bitterly, passionately. “I’m sick of the word. If you won’t come with me—if you don’t care about me anymore, then I’ll…I’ll…renounce our friendship here and now, and you can consider me your bitterest enemy from this day forward! I mean it, Brandon. I’ll really do it.” The next second, in one of the mercurial changes he was known for, he held up an imploring hand to me. “But please don’t do this to me, Brandon. Please come with me.”
I couldn’t stand the pain I saw on his face. He was my best friend, and I knew he meant every word of what he was saying. He was reckless and wild, and he’d do what he said, and I might never see him again. I began climbing out the window to go to him, when my arm was suddenly caught in an iron grip, and I was dragged back inside, away from the window. Wyatt and Lex loomed over me, their faces dark with fury.
“No, Brandon, we’re not letting you ruin your life this way. You’re not going with him.”
Wyatt stormed over to the window and yelled down at Roxbury. “Fuck up your own life if you want to but leave Brandon out of this. Leave him alone and forget you ever knew him. Get out of here!”
“No,” I gasped and tore myself away from Lex’s hold to fling myself at the window, but Wyatt was blocking my way. By the time I’d managed to get around him and shove him out of the way, it was too late. I got one last glimpse of Roxbury’s face, red with hurt and anger. He had turned his back and was running down the lane away from me. But just before he disappeared, he turned and shook his fist at all of us. Wyatt held fast to my arm and wouldn’t let me go after him.
I’d never see Roxbury again.
We’d had word of him from time to time. His father found him eventually, after an exhaustive search, and he made good on his threats. His noble father bought him a commission as a second lieutenant, and Roxbury was forced to join the Navy. Before two years had passed—two years when all my letters were returned to me unopened—his ship was attacked by pirates in the Southern Seas. When it was over, and the cannon smoke cleared, he was missing and presumed dead—lost at sea.
I’d wanted to die too.
It took a long and concerted effort by my cousins and friends to keep me from it. And even now, ten years later, on days like today when I was walking on the beach by the ocean, staring out at the white tipped waves, memories of Roxbury kept intruding—things I hadn’t thought about in years. Gods, what I wouldn’t give to see him one more time, to tell him I was sorry. To tell him that since that last night, I had wished a thousand times or more that I had gone with him. If I had, maybe I could have kept him from being so easily tracked down by his father. Maybe he wouldn’t have been forced into a dangerous job he hated and most of all, maybe he’d still be alive and here beside me.
Life had gone on for me, though, as it always did, whether I wanted it to or not. And now, ten long years later, I was still in Lex and Harrison’s pack. Harrison had become king of Morovia, and eventually, Lexington had married an omega crown prince from nearby Igella and become his Regent. His title was King’s Regent, and all of us cousins were lords, so our pack was sometimes called the Royal Pack. Wyatt, Asher and I lived together, for now at least, in the old royal hunting lodge near the capitol city of Morovia. That would all soon change, though, since Wyatt had recently married an omega, and I had just become engaged to one.
Harrison normally ruled Morovia from the capitol city, but there had been increasingly strong rumors about the aging King of Sudfarma, King Alfrid. It was said the king, who in his day had been a strong and powerful leader, was aging badly. He was only in his late seventies, but he had dementia to such a severe extent that he had to be under constant watch by his healers and the priests he relied on so heavily.
King Alfrid had been a strong, religious fanatic in his day, and he’d had powerful magic that he hated with a passion, or so the rumors went. It was said that he suppressed his magic and despised it because of his religious beliefs. He wouldn’t have it around him, and it was probably because of his hatred of all magic that he had turned his kingdom into such a religious state. Sudfarma had not only outlawed all dark magic, but most white magic too, except for the healing arts.
When my cousin Harrison had brought me here to his seaside retreat in Sudfarma for a rest, after I was injured in a mission he’d sent me on to Crillia earlier in the year, he had also arranged for me to meet his young brother-in-law, Prince Chandler. He was hoping for a match, of course, which would be advantageous to both of us.
The old king in his more lucid states, wanted a nobleman for his only son, but not one who was too high ranking, in case he got some crazy ideas about taking over. Prince Chandler, as an omega, couldn’t be king on his own, so King Alfrid had declared that Rozamond, his sister, would take over for him as Regent when the time came. So I was considered to be a perfect choice for a husband. Close to Harrison and possessed of a large estate and a lot of money left to me by my parents, I had a calm nature, they thought, and I wasn’t prone to drama.
