3
striker
I SCENT HIM before we get into the room, and he scents like mine, just like Knight and Arrow, just like that, only he’s not like Knight and Arrow.
He’s wearing a lab coat and he has one of the little lanyards around his neck, with a picture of himself dangling from the end of it, but I can’t read his name under it.
He’s like Dr. Acker, but Dr. Acker is a beta, and he’s an alpha.
None of the people who work at Cedar Falls have a designation, at least, I didn’t think so. But I guess a beta wouldn’t be able to tell, wouldn’t be able to scent it.
The room is a room with computers in it, one of the screens showing a bunch of video feeds of various parts of the facility. They’d call them security feeds, I’m pretty sure. There’s a man there in a security guard uniform.
The alpha— my alpha—catches my gaze through the window on the door as Dr. Acker is bringing me in. His scent is rising, getting thick on the air, and I see that he’s reacting to me the way that I used to react to other alphas that were mine.
His cock is getting hard.
I can see it in his pants, but I can smell it, too, smell the scent of him leaking out of the tip of him, and it is maddening .
There’s a twitch in my balls, and I worry that I’m going to get aroused, too, and then Dr. Acker will use the stun gun on me right here, stun me in the middle of the hall while I lie on my back and make wild whimpers and try very hard not to cry, stun me until my erection goes down.
There is only one activity I do during which I’m allowed—even encouraged—to have a hard cock.
I strive not to let anything show. My eyes are wide, though, and I think—if Dr. Acker looks at me—she’ll see that my pupils have gotten large and that I’m sweating a little bit. My heart is racing as well.
The alpha can’t stand still. He’s shifting on his feet as he looks at me, licking his lips, running his fingers through his hair, his scent getting more and more intense. His breath is coming in noisy gasps, and I hear them when Dr. Acker pushes the door to the security room open.
Dr. Acker slides into the room, barely looking him over.
The alpha speaks, his voice raw. “Dr. Acker?”
“Mr. Beckwith,” she says, looking at the screens and not at him.
“You said you wanted to go and inspect the room where Lotus escaped from? Why don’t you take the guard with you and I’ll watch your, um, do you really call them hounds?”
Dr. Acker glances at him. “I’ll need Striker to come to that room, of course.” She considers.
“I thought he had a, um, pack,” says the alpha.
“Pack,” muses Acker. “Like the Polloi?
The alpha clears his throat. “You need them all together, don’t you? And you probably want to inspect the room before you take them there. I’ll stay with him. Go.” He barks it.
Dr. Acker absorbs the alpha command with a vaguely dazed look on her face.
Could I bark at Dr. Acker?
How do I even know about barking?
No, I don’t know, or I didn’t know that I knew, not until I saw this alpha do it. Now, I know about barking.
“Fine,” says Dr. Acker. “Jones?” she says to the guard. “You’ll come with me?”
“Of course, ma’am,” says Jones the security guard.
They leave and the door swings closed and the alpha comes at me, head down, whining, showing me the back of his neck. He butts the top of his head into me, just below my clavicle, and his scent is as thick as something sweet and wondrous, and I know about this too, now, somehow, though I don’t know why or how.
I bite the back of his neck.
Not hard.
I don’t break skin, but I take a bit of it between my teeth and pull it up and he lets out a noise of relief and release and sags into me.
“Fuck,” he mutters. “Fuck am I doing?” He pulls away, still panting. He reaches into his pants and rearranges his very hard cock.
My cock twitches again. I let out a whine.
He blinks at me. “This is all kinds of insane, that’s what it is. But at least you can’t out me, not if you can’t even talk. If you’re…” He swallows. “If you’re my scent match, then you’re Lotus’s too.” He eyes me. “You can understand me.”
I glance at the door, just to make sure Dr. Acker isn’t still there, even though I know she can’t be. No, look! She’s on the screen, walking into that room there, with Jones the security guard.
I nod at my alpha.
“Shit,” he breathes. “You’re not like the omegas, then? You can…” He scratches the back of his head. “You nod?”
I nod.
“And if you want to say no?”
I shake my head.
“Fuck.” He runs a hand through his hair again. “She sends you after omegas? Acker does?”
I nod.
“And you hurt them?”
I hesitate, because that’s right but not entirely accurate. It’s worse than that. Eventually, though, I nod.
“You kill them?” he says in a low, low voice.
I flinch in spite of myself. But he gave me his neck, and I feel the same connection with him I feel with Knight and Arrow. Mine. He submits to me . So, again, I nod.
“You can’t kill her,” he says to me. “You couldn’t possibly do that, not once you scent her. You’ll see. You won’t.” He furrows his brow, looking me over. “Only… what’s Acker done to you? Why don’t you run when they let you out? Why do you come back here?”
And then I realize that Dr. Acker isn’t on the screen anymore. I glance out the window of the door, and she and the guard are coming back.
The door opens.
My alpha backs away, putting as much distance between us as possible. He still smells divine, however, like sweetness and goodness and home.
“Well, you’re right,” says Dr. Acker as she comes inside. “Beckwith, she must have broken that latch right off, but I don’t know what she could have used. From what I hear, she never took anything that she could use as a weapon. Mostly she stole clothes and blankets and things. Little klepto omega, that’s what she was. She could be violent, but they had her on what they thought was the right cocktail of drugs. She hadn’t done anything to hurt anyone in some time. So, it’s odd. And then, where did she go? ”
My alpha clears his throat. “I thought there was damage to the outer door as well, on the west wing?”
“I just don’t like how all the cameras went out,” says the security guard. “That seems like quite a coincidence.”
“It was a full-facility outage,” says my alpha. “But she couldn’t have known that.”
“No,” says Acker, glaring at him, “but maybe someone else did.”
I realize that my alpha let this omega go. This Lotus, whoever she might be.
He shrugs, however, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Who could have done that? It’d be cruel to let a creature like that into the world. She’d have to be terrified. I work with the omegas—”
“I know what you do,” says Dr. Acker to him witheringly.
“Well, they’re all very nervous,” says my alpha. “The only thing that soothes them is their routine. To break that for her? It’d probably cause a fissure in her brain worse than what’s already there. You’d have to either enjoy inflicting cruelty or not understand that to let her out. So, if someone did it, it couldn’t be anyone who works here. It’d have to be an outside job.”
Dr. Acker thinks that over. “Maybe you’re right,” she says, furrowing her brow. She turns to look at me. “But our first priority is finding her, not figuring out how she came to go missing, I suppose.” She pulls something out of her pocket and I realize it’s a pair of white cotton underwear, women’s underwear. “These belonged to the missing omega,” she says to me, waving them under my nose.
It’s…
I choke.
Mine, I think, my mind exploding into little slivers of intensity and goodness and bliss. She’s mine, my omega, my mate, my match, my—
The way my alphas are mine, she’s mine.
No, no, no.
We are hers .
That is the way it works, isn’t it? We belong to this omega, to be there for her, to serve her and see to her, to give her everything she needs and to protect and worship her. We are her pack, her alphas, her scent matches.
I know it, and it cuts through me like a knife.
“No,” I say.
Everyone in the room turns to look at me.