Page 47 of Promised to the Alpha Prince

I sat in my quarters while people swarmed around me, packing my suitcases, and then, Cole, the King Consort, arrived in my room.

I got to my feet, flustered. Omegas always made me flustered. Cole was bonded and I didn’t want him like that, but it was still always difficult in the presence of an omega. With my rut on me, it was harder, worse.

There was something else about Cole, something in his scent.

He rushed across the room to me. He was bronze-skinned and elegant, from Spesseta, his black hair falling in waves around his expressive dark eyes. He put a finger in my face. “You can’t go anywhere.”

Up close, the scent was unmistakable, and it stirred me, even though I knew that he wasn’t mine, even though I didn’t want him. “You’re going into heat,” I said.

“Oh, believe me, I know,” said Cole. “Why do you think that is? It’s your damned omega, whatever you did to her today. I haven’t even met her, but there are traces of it all over the castle. I walk the places she walked, and it’s happening.”

With female omegas, they often had something of a cycle—that is, if they were off suppressants. It could be as often as a beta woman’s cycle, a heat once a month. Sometimes, it was less frequent. But all omegas were on suppressants these days. Of course sometimes, the suppressants failed.

Alphas were all required to undergo a quarterly injection that was essentially a chemical castration. It wore off, but it meant that we couldn’t father children so easily.

If an omega was in heat, they were fertile, male or female.

Male omegas went into heat as a response to stimuli. They didn’t have any kind of cycle. A female omega in heat? Yes, that could trigger Cole’s heat.

“You’re saying Aurelie’s going into heat?” I said softly. That was why I was in a rut. Shit.

“You can’t leave,” said Cole.

No, I could not.

aurelie

IT WAS FUNNY how I didn’t realize what it was even as it was getting worse and worse.

It took Ilse to tell me.

I asked her to come talk to me, because I wanted to sort through whatever it was that had happened with Dmitri, where I’d turned into his willing little obedient omega just because he kissed me a couple times and groped my ass. I couldn’t believe that I’d told him I wouldn’t see Johannes at all. I couldn’t believe that I was sticking to it.

Disobeying him seemed, well, unthinkable.

Was this going to be the rest of my life? It wasn’t that it was awful to obey Dmitri, that was the thing. It felt very good, almost a sexual pleasure, every time I thought about seeing Johannes and then told myself no. A little burst of hot goodness washed through me when I did that, a reward. It was fucked up, but I liked it.

It was disturbing, however.

I didn’t want to be ordered around by my husband and my mate. I wanted us to be equals. I wanted to have my own agency. I didn’t want him to puppet me.

I was going to say all of that to Ilse, but she came into my room, sniffed me, and then her eyes got all big and she backed out of the room and slammed the door.

“What?” I’d said. “What?”

“You’re going into heat!” she’d said from the opposite side of the door.

It was like when you get a cut or something and it doesn’t hurt, and then you see the blood, and then ouch.

It was like that.

When she said it, suddenly, I felt the heat, and I realized I’d been feeling it all along, but now it was too intense for me to even know what to do with it. I let out a gasp and I staggered backwards, away from the door until I collided with the four-poster bed in my room and then I crawled onto it.

That had been, I don’t know, two hours ago.

Things had progressed since then.

The first thing that had happened was that Ilse sent a doctor to me, who checked all sorts of things, even did a very invasive pelvic exam, and gave me an injection that she said probably wasn’t going to work, because that kind of thing didn’t work once the heat had started to come on, but that it probably wasn’t going to hurt anything.

---