Page 84 of Promised to the Alpha Prince

Had I always been attracted to Dmitri? I thought I must have been.

But there was something about Dmitri that rubbed me the wrong way, and that had always been the case. My alpha chafed against his. I didn’t want to submit to him, but I couldn’t stop myself. He was simply too strong for me, I supposed.

I didn’t know exactly what I thought about packs themselves.

Once, I’d been to a party in Nilthin where other alphas from other countries had been present, and I got into a conversation with a prince from Angleford. His name was Rohan, and we were both the second in line to the throne, and our names were kind of similar. We had a lot in common except for the fact that he was pretty much far and away gone for the heir to the throne there, Devlin Byrne, who seemed to pay exactly zero attention to him, even though Rohan was pretty obviously lovesick.

I liked to think that I was mostly smarter about things than Rohan Gallagher.

Of course, they had an omega now, I understood. We’d even been invited to her formal ball where they crowned her a duchess of something or whatever they did, because she wasn’t actually born into the peerage, which…

Well, neither was Nikolai, and neither was this Corentin person.

Who, by the way, I really thought would be here, but I hadn’t seen or heard anything else about him. Maybe he’d just disappeared. Maybe Dmitri was wrong about him.

But back to the party with Rohan and the packs.

Rohan had done some reading about scientific studies on people with designations—of which there weren’t many, because most royals wouldn’t submit to something like that—and he said that packs were a fiction created by tabloid journalists. He said that there was no basis anywhere to think that it was “natural” for alphas to run in packs with a “pack leader” or anything like that.

And the truth was, this was all predicated on a faulty understanding of wolves, really. Wolves in captivity tended to organize themselves into “packs,” with a dominant alpha leader and other wolves that deferred to him. But in the wild, these packs were family groups, with the male and female parents being dominant over the pups. In the wild, wolf pups stayed with the family until they mated with someone and started their own pack or decided to leave and become lone wolves for whatever reason.

At some point in time, a very long time ago, designations got caught up in a metaphor for wolf packs, probably because of the knot similarity, I guessed, I didn’t know. Anyway, we weren’t wolves.

There was no creature on earth where the animals naturally formed themselves into packs like this—with multiple males and one female. Even though that wasn’t even the way it often worked, because there were probably as many male omegas as female omegas. Omegas were really rare.

But, just from the perspective of mating, it obviously didn’t make sense for there to be one woman and a bunch of men. Anyone could see that was a stupid way to allocate resources for the purpose of making babies. One woman could only have one baby every year. (maybe twins, okay, maybe triplets, but the point stands.) If me, Dmitri, and Nikoali went out and fucked a bunch of women all year long, we could… I mean… that’s a lot of babies. Just saying.

So, Rohan was like, “This pack thing is unnatural. It has no evolutionary advantage, and it’s just done because of omega scarcity. And also because omegas tend to need multiple partners for sexual satisfaction.”

And if that was true, which seemed to make sense, then it only made sense that I was chafing against being dominated by Dmitri. There was no natural basis for me to be dominated by this guy or for me to share an omega. It was just the best way to organize ourselves if we were doing it, I guessed.

Best or not, it was the way it was done.

Pack leader was a common way of thinking about it. In Valhn, the pack leader was the heir, and traditionally, the only one allowed to actually bite the omega. I’d grown up knowing this, and I wasn’t sure why it was so hard to accept it now.

Seeing as I was an alpha prince, I was part of the ceremony. So was Ilse. We stood up with Dmitri, his groomsmen. Well, groomsman and groomswoman. I wore a tux and she wore a formal black gown.

So, from my vantage point, I got to watch Aurelie come down the aisle in that dress of hers, clutching her father’s arm, basically beaming at Dmitri like she was lit from within with an ethereal light.

She was so obviously in love with him.

And the way I felt about her? It seemed weird to call it love, because I felt like she and I hadn’t been given the chance to really get to know each other yet. But I did care about her.

Seeing her happy like that didn’t hurt me, not the way you think it might. It made me want Dmitri for her. It made me want to accommodate this. For her. Because she deserved everything she wanted, and I would never knowingly take anything from her.

Did I wonder what it would be like to have her look at me that way, though?

Did that hurt?

Yeah, I guess it did.

I would never ask her for it, of course. That would cheapen it. I would never act as if I was owed it from her. I wouldn’t want it if she didn’t feel it genuinely.

But I wished that I could feel that kind of love and adoration, I did.

And then I remembered Nikolai, who hadn’t been allowed to be a groomsman, because of the stupid tradition, and I felt that like a punch to my gut, because Nikolai loved me like that, and I knew it.

Wasn’t that enough?

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