Page 196 of Ruled By The Alpha

“You left me.” My voice broke on the confession. For the first time in my whole existence, I had learnt what heartache felt like. I had turned cynical when, without warning, the dreams stopped and refused to return. Now when confronted by him, by his anger, my hair rose around me from the electric fury, and I lost all hope of keeping myself above the pain that lanced through my heart.

“You must understand the world is not as simple as your pleasure,” he said.

“Understand the world? My pleasure?” I snarled, feral in the presence of dreams lying cracked and dead at my feet. “The world does not understand me. They play with my body, thinking they are powerful and brave to cut and break this sack of blood and bone. You do not understand me if you think they could teach me anything. The alphas left. Cowards. Cowards, all of you!”

“You dare speak to me? You dare show your teeth, your anger? You, omega, are not worthy to kiss my feet.” As he spoke, he stalked toward me. “You are nothing.”

He punctuated the words with a slap that knocked me to the floor. My shoulder jolted out of its socket, and I tasted metal in my mouth. I spit blood. In this hall, I’d experienced many kinds of pain, but had never bled or bruised or broke. Tonight, things had changed. This was real. He was real. This dream was real.

“You are nothing,” he snarled. I shrieked as he grabbed my hair and jerked me to my knees, my dislocated arm hanging at my side. “You are a whore to the needs of all.”

“I’m no whore,” I laughed through the blood. “I am as pure and untouched as every omega on Earth. Our holes? They arepriceless—not even a king can afford the least of us. And of them all, I am the most rare and priceless.”

Pain pricked at my throat when the tip of a knife pressed into my skin. I leant into it, hoping to draw blood—more proof that this was no longer the escape I had believed, just another hell. I wondered in a detached way whether dying in the dream would kill my mortal body, but I doubted I would be so lucky.

“Kill me. Prove how little I mean,” I taunted him. The knife cut into my skin and blood began to leak from my body.

“We left you to be whores. To give everything to the children of the world,” the master said. He crouched so that our faces were level. He looked the same as always—featureless except for eyebrows as red as his hair, which burnt like a flame. Flame-haired people were rare, and those born with the affliction were known to be cursed. They were sacrifices to the gods to keep the alphas away, to protect the weak and bitter betas from the wrath of the Father.

His chin too I could see more clearly than before, strong and stubborn, as if cut from the marble that surrounded us. This was the closest we had ever been. He was not warm. Gods made of marble did not give off heat, unlike an omega’s burning flesh

“What do you mean that you are untouched?” he asked.

I laughed. “The abbesses claim we are diseased. They tell people that defiling us will lead to death and damnation. My maidenhead will never be taken because they fear you more than they desire us. That is our power over the betas; they cannot have the holy treasure meant only for an alpha and his knot, for they fear your wrath in the afterlife. But the masters won’t return, so we die virgins without knowing the release we deserve. Our heats are a living death.”

“I’ve seen you fucked.” He yanked my hair and the knife cut deep. “More times than I can count… I’ve seen you fucked.”

“Here, but not there. I have not felt pleasure since before I was sold to the brothel.”

“Who dared to break your spirit, little whore?”

“The nuns at the convents,” I told him.

“Then they disobeyed.” He whispered the words so low that I knew they were not meant for my ears. But I did hear, and the knowledge that anyone had disobeyed the masters gutted me. I reached up pulled hard on the hand holding the knife. My death, Mother, I wished for it. My life was not my own. Even less my own than I had dreamed. We had failed the masters, and they had failed us. I could not choose which was more painful.

The alpha, though, was stronger, and he dropped the knife, causing it to clatter to the floor. “We must consider this. Send her back.”

Hands dragged me away. My gaze locked on his face, which slowly began to form. I caught my first glimpse of a god, scars carving his face from his eye to his stern mouth. But his eyes were worse—they were colorless, like those of a blind man.

“No!”

Chapter 2

I woke, still screaming. My arms were tangled in the silken sheets. My body was whole once again, but I reached up, and when I brought my fingers away from my throat, dried blood came with me, my skin puckered with a still-tender scab.

I scrambled to light the lamp so I could look at my neck. A scab. Impossible. And something to be hidden. If omegas could be wounded and not heal, even in dreams…

I needed to run. Hide. Gather my kind somewhere safe, away from the jealous cruelty of the betas. Yet even as my mind whirled, the scab shrank and disappeared, leaving the slim column of my neck once again pure and perfect, ripe for the next hand to throttle me in impotent anger.

After that night, I lived in fear that the dream place would return. That I would see my god’s face and taste his anger once again. But months went by, and I wondered if perhaps it had been a dream like any other. Of course, that was a lie; I knew the truth of the dream, because I remembered the pink skin that had healed as I watched it.

Finally the Blood Moon hung low in the sky. My room smelled of blood and the heavy incense we used to lull injured omegas to sleep. A runaway omega had arrived this morning with her owner hot on her heels. The cruel beta bitch had been dragging a nail-studded lash behind her. She claimed the girl was hired to help in the forge. Her job was to handle white-hot metal too fine for a blacksmith’s tongs. They had not let her heal, though, only permitting short naps, and it had left her hands mangled.

Our madam was an omega herself, and the mystery of how she’d come to own the brothel lingered about the town like rotting garbage. But I liked her. She was fair, and knew the law better than any other. So when the girl arrived, it wasn’t her deformed hands, but her age that caught the madam’s eye. She was barely a woman. Her breasts were bee stings.

With a snarl to put an alpha in its place, the madam had grabbed the child and ordered the governor be called. The beta had not expected the madam’s fierce coldness, nor the governor’s men ready to arrest her and her husband, who had wisely stayed out of the business of a runaway omega.

I was not there, but I could imagine the scene. The pathetic pleas and arguments meant nothing when the madam could refuse the service of whores and omegas to the governor and his men. Governor Quintus would rather slaughter a garrison than give up his time with his favorite omega.

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