Page 1 of Knot Our Omega

Chapter One

Rumor

“You better hurry up, Rumor.” One of my parents’ house omegas, Lily, whispered low, only for me. “You don’t want today to go…you know.”

You know, meaning, my parents would give out consequences and not to me. No. They would never lay a hand on me because they knew it would look bad upon the alpha house. Instead, they would pick one of the house omegas, preferably one I was friendly with, and bleed them slowly in front of me and the others as a lesson.

Fuck that noise.

They chose more demeaning ways to punish me. By adding things to my daily chores like toilet cleaning or cleaning out the trash cans. Things I hadn’t ever been trained for.

I was trained and raised to be an alpha, like my twin sister Reyna. Until everything changed.

“I just need to get my hair tied back.” And it had to be perfect. I wasn’t allowed to have a strand of it out of my braid. My mother said the braid showed that I wasn’t a lowly servant, even though I was doing servant work. It didn’t.

And I was the lowliest in this family. Everyone else in this house was an alpha or an alpha’s mate.

“I’ll help.” Lily worked quickly and we were downstairs in the kitchen getting ready for tonight’s dinner.

My twin sister convinced my parents to have a “dinner party,” something she saw on a human television show. She said it would be “fun,” but really she meant, it would show the pack that she was powerful and important, which she was. Our larger pack and her pack. Her harem. Men who treated her like royalty. Men who were supposed to be mine.

She paraded her power and prestige any chance she got.

Once upon a time, I was too. Powerful and mighty despite my shorter stature. Twin alphas born to the alpha family was the stuff of hierarchy dreams. Only I wasn’t an alpha at all, presenting as omega for the first time on my eighteenth birthday. Happy fucking birthday to me.

They say a parent’s love is unconditional and that twins share a connection like no other. They lie. The second my perfume tickled a local pack member’s nose, my parents locked me away and turned me into nothing more than a glorified servant—heavy on the servant, low on the glorified.

They never failed to remind me that my place in this family was shaky.

“How many are coming?” The list of food we had to make for the evening was missing a head count. Did they expect me to guess? Setting me up to fail? Honestly, at this point, nothing would surprise me. My family was determined to make me as small as possible—a whisper of a person.

“All of them?” Lily uncovered the commercial mixer. “And they want fresh bread, of course.”

“All…as in the entire pack?”

Lily nodded. “And they pulled the other servants to work on…they didn’t say what.”

Odds were, they were pulled for nothing, and this was a test. Not for Lily. She was there because they needed someone’s safety to hold over my head, and she was the closest to my age and as sweet as the cupcakes I made for dessert.

She deserved a pack to treat her as the queen she was. All omegas did. Lily had been the one to teach me about perfuming and about scent blockers. She said the rest would be saved for when I got a pack.

“Let’s do this thing.” It wasn’t worth discussing. It wasn’t as if we had the ability to change any of this.

Hours later, we had everything prepped or cooked and the table set. All that was left was the serving. I was getting pretty good at cooking and didn’t mind it as a rule, but this meal had been labor-intensive, even for an army of omegas. They wanted too much made in too short a period of time with too few ovens. As if they were intentionally setting me up to fail.

The harsh reality was, that might be exactly what they were doing.

Everyone arrived on time—exactly. My parents expected it, and the pack obeyed. I wasn’t the only one they were shitty to. I wish I had seen how bad it was when I was younger, back when I had the potential to make a difference.

Lily and I served the dinner, standing to the side to clear empty plates, fill drinks, and offer seconds. We were to be invisible while on top of things. It was an impossible expectation, but one I’d gotten better at over the years.

“The dinner is lovely.” My sister set her fork down, looking around to make sure all eyes were on her before adding, “Rumor has become quite the little baker.”

“I agree. She’s quite the little cook all right.” My father mimicked her use of the word little.

My family loved that word. It was a way to put me down with plausible deniability. They weren’t being mean; it was simply a descriptor. At least, that’s what they wanted others to perceive.

Otherwise, they came off as monsters. Cruel alphas and leaders of this pack.

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