Page 2 of Rogue If You Want To
But it was terrifying not knowing what or who was waiting for me out there.
I fingered the pendant around my neck. It had been handed down to my mother from her mom and contained a pic of the three of us. I’d never take it off so I always had a piece of Mom with me.
Wandering to what had been my room, I ran my fingers over the height chart carved into the wall, each notch representing another inch taller until I had that growth spurt in sophomore year thanks to my wolf.
Beside where the bed had been in the corner were claw marks when I’d woken with fur covering my arms. Wrestling back control from my beast had resulted in damage to the wood. I’d placed a poster of my favorite band over them and told Mom there'd be consequences if she removed it. She’d nodded but hadn’t been able to hide a smile.
I snapped a pic, took one last look around, and walked back and forth to the car with the items to donate and keep along withmy suitcase. One of my workmates had offered to take the trash to the pit. The one item on my list was to deliver the key to the realtor.
I was spending tonight in the town’s only motel so I could sleep not surrounded by memories, and I’d leave at dawn. Not that I had a plan other than to find somewhere new. With the mortgage paid, I had enough money to survive for a couple of years. Small houses in rural towns didn’t sell for millions.
As I took a selfie of me in front of the house and plucked a magnolia from the bush Mom and I had planted, tears welled up and I was beset by doubts. But I could hear my mother’s voice saying she was in my heart and I should chase my dreams.
I didn’t have big dreams, just one of finding who I was and where I belonged.
2
OTTO
“Otto,” Beta James called out the door. “Otto.”
I knew that sitting on the balcony, ignoring my father’s Beta, wasn’t going to get me very far. Still, I closed my eyes, pretending I was in tune with nature. Listening to the sounds of our bevy lands, just soaking it all in.
I wasn’t. I was hiding.
Most days everyone left me alone when I was like this. One of the greatest Alphas of our bevy, from many generations ago, the majority of his rule outside like this… listening to the world around him. My father believed that meant maybe I’d one day be on the same path. Either that or I thought it would be my fail, and he was down with that too.
“Otto, Alpha says that you are to meet Lutris now in the garden.”
I opened my eyes. “Understood. I’ll be there momentarily.”
“You want me to tell the Alpha that you’re going to be a minute? Is that what you just meant?”
That had been neither what I said, nor what I meant, and he knew it. No one would call my father, our Alpha, a kind, gentle, or wise leader. He suffered from predator envy and tried to rule in the way of wolf packs from years gone by. He was the reason so many of us now referred to the bevy as pack. If he caught us using a “weak” name such as bevy, we were punished. He was pretty messed up.
I jumped up. The last thing I needed to do was piss off my father. “No, I’m coming with you.”
My father was cruel to my twin and me on a good day. Pissing him off was the last thing I should be doing, especially when it was so easily avoidable.
Lutris, my twin brother, and I were the only children of our pack Alpha, and as such, one of us would eventually take his place. Fate had been cruel to us like that.
In our pack histories, there had often been multiples born of the Alpha pair, first one born, then a few minutes later the other, making it easy to know who was the next heir apparent. But in our case, our omega father was unable to give birth… his heart not able to handle labor. When he took his last breath, the doctors removed us via C-section, making it impossible to determine who was “supposed to be” born first. And in otter bevies, it went to first born, no matter the designation. How nice it would’ve been to have been born a wolf, where my being an omega meant my alpha twin was next in line by default.
Fate stole both our omega father and our childhood that day.
It would’ve been so much easier if our Alpha father had just declared one of us first. The healer would’ve stayed quiet or lost his life. And it wasn’t that my father was against lying. He usedit as a political tactic often. Lutris and I wouldn’t have had to know.
Instead, we’d been raised to be rivals, preparing for the day when we will fight to the death for his job… a job I do not want.
I followed the Beta downstairs and into the garden, where my brother was already standing, his clothes off, his eyes already showing his beast.
This entire thing was ridiculous.
We were otters, for goodness’ sake. It wasn’t like we were natural predators who lived for the kill. Our beasts were opportunistic predators… aka lazy predators. We weren’t craving the hunt.
But no, somewhere in our history, they decided this was the way to go, that we would act like wolves or bears or lions. Such bullshit.
“You wish to see me, Father?”
