Page 1 of Knot Excused
CHAPTER1
Piper
“Will all Omegas please report to the Capitol square?” the loudspeaker blared in my ear.
I rolled my eyes, taking a long drag from my cigarette.
If I could have ignored all this ridiculous pageantry I would have.
Scent Match Day
What a bunch of bullshit.
And no way to get out of it. Not with me immediately registered at birth as an Omega and tracked for my entire life until at 25 years old I was forced to come to the Capitol and record my scent for a bunch of disgusting arrogant Alphas.
Did Iwantto be claimed by an Alpha Pack?
Hell no.
I wanted to go back to my shitty little hometown outside the city where I worked at a gas station and went to karaoke nights with my coworkers so drunk older Betas could buy me drinks and babble that I smelled good and did I want to come be their little Omega pet?
But at least then I was free.
Alphas I avoided like the plague. I didn’t want them. I didn’t want to scent them or hear their Alpha barks.
The way the world worked was that you were either an Alpha, Beta, or Omega. Omegas were so rare that generations ago they had come up with this blind scent-match process, otherwise Alphas would literally kill each other in fights over who got to claim and mate an Omega.
Freaking psychos
Only perfuming during times of high emotion would truly reveal your fated mates, but for Scent Match Day you had to take sticky cards and rub them all over your skin, to put enough of your scent on there. Then, Alpha Packs would take turn smelling the cards, in a blind test, and when their temperatures rose, that meant they’d found their mate.
God, what a way to find the men you were basically forced to marry.
You weren’t officiallyforcedof course. But once you were chosen your fated mates’ scents usually sent you into a wild, horny heat that meant you didn’t want anyone else anyways.
Great
I brought a bottle of body spray out of my bag and gave myself a generous spritz of Bubblegum Blossom. I had no intention of letting anyone smell my real scent before I absolutely had to. Then I reluctantly made my way to the Capitol square, a big sweeping manicured garden in the center of town surrounded by imposing stone and steel Alpha buildings, including the massive palace where the highest-ranking and most powerful Alpha packs lived.
There were about ten Omegas here, and you could tell they had all spent their whole lives as pampered, high-class Omegas.
That wasnotme.
I was from the wrong side of the tracks, an Omega whose designation was seen as more of a pain in the ass by her family than anything else. Because if they could have sold me to Alphas at any point, they would have.
My dad was a two-bit drug dealer who had died in prison, and my mom had left town for a weekend vacation when I was a kid and had never come back.
Being an Omega just meant they had to take me to do a lot of boring paperwork and I was never taught to believe it was anything to be excited about.
I handed my designation card over to one of the Beta attendants and was escorted into a big canvas tent to wait for the ceremony to start.
Maybe I wouldn’t even find my scent match.Except, peeking out past the attendants I could see what looked like hundreds of Alphas out there, all of them of course bigger, strong, more powerful than everyone else.
There weren’t any other Omegas frommypart of the world, and I snapped my gum as I looked around.
What even was the best outcome here?
True love?Fat bloody likely with any of these pricks.
