Page 1 of Racing the Storm

Prologue

DANYAL

Iwas not made for battle. I was an Omega. I was clever, yes, and I was strong. Growing up with Alpha siblings who never let me buy into the stereotype that Omegas were less allowed me the chance to grow into the Wolf I was always meant to be.

Too smart for my own good, they told me. Far too often, and I always thought it was a joke.

Until they came.

The fake message, the plea from my brother to save him. And I was too caught up in my own self-importance to realize it was a trap before my car went flying into the median and impossibly powerful human hands subdued me.

I was terrified, yes, but they were keeping me alive because they needed me. Because they had hit a wall with who—and what—we were. And it was my work that would solve their problems.

Nothing would make me talk, of course. Rescue was coming, and they were going to be sorry they had ever laid hands on me.

They laughed in my face, and I only smiled back, because I knew this was only the calm before the storm.

Chapter

One

DANYAL

My first heat was supposed to come at sixteen, when my eyes flashed orange for the first time, but it didn’t. I think, up until then, my mother was still holding out hope she’d get another Alpha—or that I would remain a Beta in spite of the fact that I was small and timid. Both of my parents were Betas, and it was some sort of miracle that their two eldest children had presented with yellow eyes by puberty.

I was the latecomer, though. The miracle third baby that most Wolves never got the chance to have. She always called me her precious blessing, though she and my father were so caught up in the war, they hardly had a chance to parent me. My upbringing had come at the hands of Talia—my strict and immovable sister, and Zane—my brother, whose heart was so soft, I could never quite imagine him going to war and killing a single living thing.

Of course, a lot of what I believed about the world and our family early in my childhood became obvious was nothing more than fantasy. The glass shattered long before my eyes flared orange. I had long-since lost the desperate hope that we would be able to live our lives peacefully without staining our skin with the blood of others.

My parents didn’t live long into the war, and my siblings fought in their own ways as I spent my days lost in books and lab experiments. No one expected much out of me though. I was a late bloomer—an Omega with no heat, which meant I had no hope for the love of another—especially not an Alpha.

Talia and Zane never allowed me to think I was damaged or defective, though. They told me to follow my heart, and the rest would come.

And in a way, it did, just on my own timeline.

It made sense that all of my professional accomplishments would come later in life. After all, I didn’t sit up until I was nine months old. I didn’t walk until well past my first birthday. I didn’t shift with puberty—that came so much later that my parents had started to worry I wouldn’t shift at all.

My first shift was also nothing like most Wolves. It was mostly pain and confusion, and I was too humiliated to tell anyone, so I sobbed into my pillow until it was over, and I had regained human arms and legs. I hadn’t known that’s when my eyes had changed either. Not until morning. The moment had seemed insignificant in all ways other than to tell me that yes, in spite of how wrong my body was, I was still a Wolf.

The orange eyes did nothing other than prove my quiet suspicions right. Of course, I had known for years, but every time I brought it up to either of my parents, they waved me off like it was nothing.

“It wouldn’t make sense for us to have an Omega,” my father said, giving my head a weak pat. “Your mother and I are both Betas.”

I was too smart for that too. I knew better than to believe that bullshit old wives tale that status was determined by your parents. Zane and Talia were proof of that, but my parents didn’t want the responsibility of what I was.

Of course, it became a non-issue soon enough when the bombs started dropping, and my siblings were shipped off to war. I went to a shelter for wolves too young to fight or too Omega to help out in any real way. And it was there I studied, obsessed with my genetics—with the nature of others. It was there I finally flourished in something I was good at. I spent every waking hour studying who we were—a society as a whole, our gender, our status, our bodies, our shifts.

I wanted to know why a male Omega was good at calming an Alpha—if you could get one to give a shit about more than popping a knot. We weren’t breeders; we weren’t fighters. And most of the time, people believed that our heats made us incapable of performing any job reliably.

Medical school was the only thing that made sense, and for me, it was soothing because I still hadn’t gone into heat, and it was the path to answers.

I was half-certain I was broken—that my parents had given birth to a thing instead of a Wolf, and some day I’d look under a microscope at my own genes and find out that something was wrong with me.

It turns out, I was just created different.

I was twenty-two when it happened—still a med student, trying to get by day to day while ignoring the news of our people dying in droves at the hands of humans. It had been a long week, but my fatigue was worse than usual.

I didn’t think twice about it. Logically, I understood the textbook symptoms of pre-heat, but at my age, I just assumed it would never happen to me. My exhaustion? I was just overworked. The strange itch under my skin and restless feeling in my bones? I had two siblings out there fighting. I was just scared for them.

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