Beginning of Chapter 9

Four was a slave to the world.

An Omega that lived in the bowels of great, devastating poverty. An Omega borne in the slums of the Eastern pack to a world of rising flame and falling ash.

Rowan grew to the bombs falling from the sky; to the whirring of aircraft soaring across the lands; to air so gritty and grey it always stung his eyes; to blood bubbling from the blistering skin of his radiation burnt sisters; to the growls and snarls of the Lonely that prowled his forsaken land.

The East was a world overtaken by zombies and ravaged by civil war.

He spent most of his first years in dirt dug with broken nails, sleeping to the smell of burning flesh and then the rot of his father who'd tried to keep them all alive—Rowan and his two older sisters. They were Alphas that were pampered and waited on, spent most of their lives sitting at home while Rowan scavenged and hunted for food with his father.

'It's the way of the world,' was his father's explanation on a particularly long night of nothing. 'We need to protect them so that they can protect us in the future. Remember Rowan, Alphas are to be revered and respected. Omegas must always care for them. We are not as strong as they are.'

Those words didn't make any sense to his young mind with his sisters so weak and fragile—unable to kill a Lonely the way he and his father could, avoiding the bites that would turn them; stand in line for ten hours at the ration stand in the sun, frost and rain; or even shift into wolves.

He did not remember his mother, for the Alpha had never been there. But his father had always been waiting for the day she'd come home and save them all from their suffering. And he continued with his dreams through the bowls of watered-down sweet potatoes, the withered potatoes, and the measly pieces of rationed dry bread.

And then later when their country grew so poor from the war that they could give no more, the peeled pieces of bark from the trees and the wallpaper, the weeds buried in the permafrost, and the inedible soup of oilcakes that had his sisters wailing and snarling for their lives. The mantra had repeated on his lips from the beginning of his life.

'As long as your sisters are here,' he'd said to Rowan, snatched the animal feed that Rowan had stolen from the soldiers and fed every last crumb to his siblings. His sisters had wailed in disgust, at the coarse residue that was dry in their mouth. But there was nothing for Rowan, only the last bits of plaster boiled into a slurry, and then later the leather of an old coat—it tasted like glue. 'Then she will come. She will come and protect us.'

His father passed in an air raid; mind lost from the death of his siblings. It had been inevitable; his sisters did not run when the bombs came whistling down upon their home and even then, Rowan believed they would not have lived much longer.

They'd grown ill, each with a phlegmy cough from weakened lungs in the cold, their eyes glued to their faces from the frost, their fingertips black from the cold. They had been paler than the snow, veins blue and straining against thin skin, their voices cracked and dry like stones on a sieve. And while his father had burnt everything just to keep them alive, had hacked the edges of their homes, the bits of scaffolding that could afford to lose more wood, they only grew worse.

And so, they'd arrived after a long day of running to a broken home of debris, the silence, and the bodies. There were thousands of them, and what used to be a small village was now flattened ground.

His father had stood with his face to the sky, arms out and reaching for his Alpha. He'd been bony, seemed so much smaller against the sky. The bombs that day had been like rain, hundreds of planes in the sky, glowing and blue with protective spells. The smoke clouding the sky in deep, solemn grey, sweet on the tongue.

'Rowan,' he'd said with the biggest smile, 'she's coming for me. Our daughters are all dead, but she'll come again, and she'll breed me, and I'll have another litter of girls. We'll be alright with another Alpha.'

Rowan had screamed and cried for his papa to shift, but the bomb hit just then, and his father's body had flown across the world, broken and bent in all places. Through the wheezing of his burnt lungs, Rowan had cried and crawled upon the rubble cradling his father.

His father had blood spilling from his mouth, bubbling and phlegmy as he spoke with so much devastation and rage it had broken Rowan inside and out.

'Rowan, my only son, why—' he'd sobbed, 'is it that you lived and not your Alpha sisters? Your mother will never come now. She'll never come for an Omega.'

'Papa—'

'I wish,' he'd spat through the blood, 'I wish you were dead.' Rowan did not stay to watch his father die, did not end his life to make the pain go away quicker. Instead, he stood, shifted, and left with no tears in his eyes.

Rowan was the bastard child of the Queen of the East.

The Eastern pack had fallen that day, the royalty slain by the Northern pack. He'd finally met his mother, hanging from the walls upon a pierced spike—a showcase of their victory. Her eyes had been lifeless and her beautiful face was so much like Rowan's that it had been disgusting.

He ventured into the North as he grew, became the sort of Omega to take on odd jobs, the kind of man to be offered on the robots that spun across the gravel screaming of an Omega in Heat for just two credits. An Omega that would drink a cocktail of Alpha piss just for ten coins and kill a Lonely in a pit just for five.

An Omega that survived on nothing, an Omega that worked for everything, an Omega that burned in hatred.

And in his dreadful days on his knees with his ass in the air for an Alpha to reap. He'd watched the large floating screens that played across the cities—featuring the royal family, showcased the Alphas, the rulers and the princess Euodia. He could have picked someone better, but Rowan was enamoured by her weakness, found it easy to fall for an Alpha that was not really an Alpha.

A Beta.

And the reverence transformed from interest to deep longing, he found himself dreaming to be picked up from his grave in the city. In some of his fantasies, there were delusions of Euodia in his arms. His mouth on her nape, nibbling and nosing, his teeth marking her skin, his wolf purring to the taste of her fluids. His Heat was spent to thoughts of her fingers in his puffy hole.

A Beta was not an Alpha, and Rowan's broken mind loved that.

But when Rowan grew, he became Robin. He stole from the rich, sneaked food to the poor, saved Omegas from broken families and abusive Alphas. He'd been the beginning of the resistance, the key to the end. A capture led to the end of his love for his princess, and no it wasn't because of his identity as a vigilante of justice.

His body had been tossed before Euodia as a traitor only because they'd caught him stealing.

Just a slice of bread from an Alpha was enough for his capture.

The face he adored had grown sour, seemed almost cold as she'd commented on his oddly beautiful face. 'A diamond in the rough,' she'd claimed, 'a waste.' Then a spell had been cast upon his body, a torture of eternity. His hole no longer open but grew filled with an automatic reaction of fear for penetration. Pleasure was all he could receive but never nirvana. An inability to orgasm in his Heat was death to an Omega.

And she wanted him dead.

But Rowan did not die.

He never did.

Because he would not depend on an Alpha.

And thus, he would not tell his mates of the Alpha in the wastelands with the mask of blue a scent so juicy and rich it had forced a jolt to his cock. He would not speak of the Alpha that he'd smashed into the ground with his paws. The Alpha that had his body brewing with heat and bristling with something more. His heart had been soaring, airborne it had lurched out of his mouth and turned him nauseas.

Rowan had left her to his team for clean-up, and a mere hour spent pacing around the town would soon become his biggest regret.

He would not speak to his pack of the Alpha that had made him stumble through the confusion of it all, tasting the crisp of fruit in his throat and feeling the blood grow swollen along his shaft. He would not say of how he'd ran back to the pile of sleeping Alphas and had been genuinely distraught by the collars that prevented their blossoming scent.

He would not tell of how deeply he'd sniffed over each trying to find the one that made his knees weak. With their shaven heads, all had seemed so alike that he could not deduce the differences. The blue mask had been gone; her clothes ripped free. And suddenly it was as if he searched for a needle in a stack.

He would not tell them that he only gave up when his soldiers arrived to take the women away minutes later. That secret he would take to the grave, and his search would become a niggling ache in his jaw to mark an Alpha and taste her peach.