Page 12 of Omega’s Fealty

Then he is gone. Steel bolt, one padlock, two. Boots.

I stand in the pale light flexing my burning fingers.

Tomorrow I will ask for something else. A hot drink perhaps because it is cold. Sliver by sliver, I will get to him.

4. Roan

The hothouse prince is getting to me.

Freezing rain slams into the back of my neck as I stand at the rail with his cuffs in my fist, waiting for the cold to fix me.

It doesn’t. I’m hard, my heart is banging like I ran up three flights, and I can smell him on my jacket. I never even touched him. Doesn’t matter. It’s in the wool anyway.

The sound he made when I took the cuffs off. Just a small broken noise he bit off halfway, like even that much wasn’t allowed.

I grip the cuffs harder, feeling them cutting into my palm.

He’s an omega in a box, terrified. Any unbonded alpha reacts to that.

Except I’ve worked doors and private security half my life. I’ve been around nervous omegas, scared omegas, horny omegas. I’ve not felt like that.

I’ve stood in an elevator with an omega seconds away from going into her heat and felt nothing but sorry for her.

My body has never reacted like this before.

I search for another reason. Any reason. Any reason that means my reaction isn’t that.

It’s been a long time for me, and the job has me wound tight. Even as I think it, I know that it’s not enough. Before I knew if the person in the corner was a man, a woman or a kid, his scent said mine.

I know what this is.

If I’m lucky, and I don’t think I am, then it’s just a scent match. If I’m not so lucky, then I’m looking at a prime match.

This job has been fucked from the start. The worst kind of luck and now it’s got even worse.

I never registered. You register, your blood sits in a government file, and men with my work history don’t volunteer that. It never cost me any sleep.

It doesn’t matter. If the fucking hothouse prince is in the Bureau’s registry, I’ll eat my balaclava.

What the hell do I do now? Stay away from him, obviously, although that’s going to be difficult since I’m supposed to be guarding him for the next two weeks.

I stay out there until I’m soaked through. Then I go down to the galley, light the ring, and put on coffee.

I figured I was one of the ones the lottery skips. I was never going to have an omega or any kind of match. No family, no friends. There is nothing about my life that another person can live in.

It’s never bothered me. I don’t like people. People are dicks. I’ve never liked them. Never planned to be around them any longer than I need to.

My life plan is two more years of jobs, then I buy land up north, and be a cranky cabin-in-the-woods lunatic who runs any interlopers off with a shotgun.

I’ve been looking forward to putting the whole mess of other people behind me for good.

Then tonight my blood picks the crown prince of Monteverra, cuffed on the floor of a shipping container I’m being paid to keep him in.

I laugh out loud. It sounds weird in the silence of the galley.

The coffee boils. I drink it standing where I can watch the gangway, and then I think about the job properly, the way I should have done on the phone with Sully.

Six years I’ve watched him amble through deals that would give a lawyer nosebleeds, and tonight he couldn’t get off this boat fast enough.