Page 195 of Ruled By The Alpha

His Dark Touch

by

Flora Quincy

Prologue

If I told you my fantasy, the dream I pray to return to night after night, you would run away screaming. You would think it a nightmare. Yet you would be wrong.

During the day, I am tortured beyond your wildest imaginings. At night, I worship at the feet of my god and master. One day, he will come for me. And then the world will shake with his fury, for he will burn my enemies and send them to the hell I live in.

Chapter 1

My customers that night left me too tired to wipe the smudged makeup off my face, but that is what the drudges were for. This one was new, a scrawny boy who was hoping to be accepted amongst us. I’d insisted on taking little Zorza in when his owner, a beta butcher, had taunted the omega with a gelding knife. His price had been a night with me—cheap compared to the cost, body and soul, Zorza would have had to pay if he’d stayed.

“Mistress, you must remove the makeup. Your skin…” He took the damp cloth and scrubbed at the greasy paint used to make my skin darker—better to hide the bruises. “They should treat you more kindly.”

“Poor, delusional child. My clients? They don’t buy me to be kind. They buy me to kiss their feet and call them by titles that are not theirs. They are not our masters. Never forget that.”

“They are not our masters, mistress,” Zorza said, mimicking my seriousness. “A real master will come soon and take you from here. A true master takes care of his possessions.”

My body hurt too much to laugh. The night’s last client, General Keller, liked to beat me within an inch of my life. He’d take a belt to me, kick me, stamp on my hands until they broke and I was too hoarse from screaming to make any sounds. He was not permitted to take his beta cock out to get dirtied in an omega cunt, but every time he came, I could see his dick pressing against his pants and wetness of his worthless spunk.

I knew from servants’ gossip that he couldn’t get hard without violence, and the governor had already had to cover up the death of two wives. A third would be suspicious. Butan omega whore? Those rare jewels whose bodies healed so perfectly? They could be ripped apart, and after a long sleep would emerge whole and perfect again.

“I am not meant to be cared for, child. Worry more about yourself,” I warned him. I’d long since given up the hope of being claimed by a master, by a mate, by an alpha. They were legend; one hadn’t breathed the putrid air of this world in centuries.

“I worry about you, mistress. Omegas must worry for each other.”

“I just need sleep.” I clearly couldn’t get through to him. Even though I’d been carried into my room on a stretcher, my leg broken in three places, Zorza still believed in miracles. Still believed in every omega’s dream.

But unlike the younger, naive girl I’d once been when I’d arrived at this place, I no longer looked forward to my dreams. Good alphas no longer existed. No alpha would come to claim me, and the alpha in my dreams—whose feet I had fantasized pressing my face into the cool marble—was merely a figment of my imagination. No one like him could exist in this world.

“Sleep, mistress. The alphas will return. I promise it to you on the Father and the Mother, who gave the world the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. The True Masters will return, and we will take our place at their feet.”

It was an old prayer we were taught in the convents before being sold to brothels or betas with enough gold to pay our blood price. Even now, five years after my own purchase, none could afford my blood price. My virgin cunt was a priceless treasure, one the madam used to taunt the clients who came to stare at the omega before they paid to touch what they were not worthy enough to possess. In that way, the brothel made a fortune selling my body to sadists who knew not how to play an omega’s body like the delicate instrument it was. I could go further than any beta could imagine; that was my secret treasure.

“Sleep, mistress,” Zorza said again, and his small voice soothed me into a deep sleep.

*

My dreams, however, were not soothing. For the first time in two years, I found myself in that marble hall facing the throne of the first alpha.

Here my body was whole—long limbs knit together, ivory hair hanging to my waist as it would be when I woke from this sleep, my black eyes gazing up at the throne. On a seat of black marble, he wore blood-red leather that stretched tight over his chest and strained to contain the immensity of his heavily muscled thighs. My dream-god had returned, but instead of glorying in his presence, I turned away from the dream.

“You turn from your god?” he asked. His voice burnt like hot coals on my skin, but the fire radiating from him kept me warm despite the chill in my heart.

Wait. Had he spoken?

I stilled. In the long years leading up to this moment, he had never spoken, just watched as the figments of my imagination tortured me for his pleasure. It was torture not because of pain, though there was that, but because of the unreality of our encounters.

“You speak now?” Even to my own ears, I sounded bitter. “When I know you are no longer my future?”

“Have you lost faith in me?” His voice caressed my senses. “Look at me, Tenora.”

I was no longer enthralled by him. I could no longer believe in this dream. And it made me bold, reckless, and brave enough to spit on the priceless marble. “You abandoned me, master. I believed, but you abandoned me two years ago.”

I shook my head, trying to clear my mind and force myself into a fantasy less real than this—anything less heart-wrenching than what I could not have.

---