Page 1
Merrick
Several years later...
Merrick sat at a little table in the bar’s corner. The table was filthy, the chair was filthy, this place was filthy. He’d thought Sector 10 bad, but he’d been wrong. Sector 2 was far worse. Razor wire laced the perimeter, walling it off from the paved streets of all the other sectors. It existed as the antithesis of order and control. His older brother, Nothonal Darre, had used his power as Alpha Administrator here to create a home for every male that refused the King’s mask of civilization.
This dirt-floored, mold-encrusted shack existed in the squalor of a landscape of battle ruins. Owned by a slumlord, the place served distilled alcohol like poisoned water and salted hard-tac for food. The drink at Dover’s End had been premium stuff compared to anything Merrick found here.
No one came here to drink, though. As far as he knew, this was the only place with a proud trophy of a little omega woman, sitting pretty in an iron dog cage behind the bar.
Head shaved, she sat naked in the humiliation of her own fear-stink-piss and unwanted slick, shivering with the cold. A half-starved, sterile breeder cowering in her cage. Keeping her head down—her arms wrapped around her body—she never showed her face unless forced. Not that anyone cared about her looks, the thick shock collar with the GPS around her neck, or the shackle cuffs on her wrists and ankles. They all just wanted in that magic omega cunt.
Her owner rented her out by the hour. Those who paid left all their weapons at the bar—she wasn’t dangerous—she leaked her arousal juices for whoever growled at her. No, she took every chance she could get to end her life.
Merrick sensed movement and tensed. A human walked between tables with a bucket, gathering empty cups and baskets, pushing in chairs as he passed. The drone man kept his eyes on the floor as he moved, careful not to draw attention to himself. Shoulders tipped, as if something broken had healed wrong, he dragged one foot and stank of defeat. All drones were slaves in this sector, easily replaceable. No Admin subterfuge of working off their freedom price, working for a service agency, or what-have-you. Breed owned, used, and controlled all the flesh.
Without a functioning Administration in this sector, there was no registry. People born here lacked indent tattoos. No one was tracked. No one was watched.
Most of the women born in this sector, breed and human women alike, were sterile. Edge farmers who’d built compounds beyond the broken wall of Sector 2, sold some kind of Un-land herbal concoction at the dark market to cure the cobweb virus.
Even though he kept to himself, he hadn’t missed the alphas gossiping about stuff that stopped the shriveled ovaries and painful cysts of the cobweb virus. It got their pricks hard thinking about fucking their own omegas and treating them however they pleased right next door to Constantine Kane’s breeder laws.
The old drone shuffled to a stop in front of Merrick.
Merrick looked at the empty, dirty cup on the table in front of him. He gave a slight negative shake of his head. It moved on.
He needed several more cups of the toxic rock-gut alcohol to stomach looking at the woman in that fucking cage again. He might be a pile of shit his own family wouldn’t sniff to step over, but what kind of idiot caged an unwilling woman like that?
The ugly answer was there before he finished thinking the question: the kind of man that would whip an omega girl for standing up for those she loved.
He’d done shit. Bad shit. Liked to be rough, mean, tease until a beta didn’t know if she should be laughing, crying or moaning. He’d left women bleeding before. Those bitches deserved what they got when they took a chance at his dick, but an omega? How could an alpha do this to an omega when they were precious—rare—especially in this place of the condemned?
His hand went to the familiar whip handle at his waist, gripping it as he struggled with regrets that came without do-overs. He’d slipped into Sector 2 a few years ago to escape the death penalty for deserting the King’s Army, but his past still sat heavy on his chest, a rock embedded in cement against his bones. It wasn’t right. It should have turned out different.
Somewhere beyond the King’s blockade, his beta breed children were growing up in cheap, discard apartments, training to become valuable members of breed society. Maybe they didn’t know his name—knew nothing about their fallen, black-hearted father. Didn’t know he’d run illegal shine and untaxed goods under the nose of Admin guards, selling them to males who pretended to follow all the laws. Didn’t know that as a boy his dream was to wear scribe robes and read all day. Maybe no one told them that their father was the youngest son of King Rhineholth, a boy who drank his milk from a silver cup.
He left everything behind on the day he ran into Sector 2 to fight his way through the pits, taking winnings, earning broken bones, and trusting his mother’s omega blessing to keep him alive. Some of the petty tyrants who’d claimed space tried to hire him, but Merrick wanted nothing to do with asshole land-grabbers pretending to be better than him.
That naked, raw omega in the cage twisted up things his head. Her scent made every male in the place drool. Merrick suspected that the smashed nose of the slumlord gave the male a scenting defect. How else could he stand it? The spicy sweet aroma got under Merrick’s skin, digging up thoughts of another female, pretty and young. One who’d put a cage around her heart against him.
“That’s robbery!” A voice yelled from the front of the bar.
He didn’t look up at the obnoxiously loud ring of metal on metal when the tavern owner slammed a rod down on the omega’s cage in answer to the yell. The idiot did it a lot.
Drunk alpha and beta males raised their fists and shouted towards the front, hoping for a fight.
Arguing at the front of the bar increased, both in volume and combatants. Every time Merrick was here, someone tried to take the breeder by force.
“Want what’s mine. I won that round of pit fights. Killed them pigs for you. You’ll give me my reward,” the man shouted.
“You got yours by the rules,” the barkeep shouted back.
“They ain’t had shit. You owe me.”
“No one made you enter the pit. Owe you nothing.”
Sworn and paid men always sat close by to defend the caged woman and their greasy, pimpled-up master, of course. The wooden floorboards under Merrick’s feet vibrated as alphas stood to their feet, and others, the fighter’s friends, joined the argument.
When a man won a pit fight to the death, he claimed all the other fighter’s possessions. As one of the few rules enforced here, all murder and theft were a public sport. Anyone could challenge anyone, but if you got caught doing it outside the pit, the Mad Monster of Two would tromp down from his falling-down Admin tower and get you with one swipe of his claws.
