Chapter 16
“I’m curious,” Oberon said, making his way down the side of the bed. “How did she deal with your influx during those years she kept you locked up?”
Fenrir braced himself when the alpha stopped at the foot of the bed and he felt the mattress dip as the large man climbed on.
“Omega.”
He cleared his throat, urging himself to remain still as the alpha’s warm body settled between his spread thighs. “I thought you said you’d read my file?”
“Humor me.” His hands came down on the globes of Fenrir’s ass, but he didn’t hit him. “Relax,” Oberon suggested when Fenrir jumped upon contact. “Your body has been through a lot. Let me help work some of these knots out.”
“First you put knots in me, and now you want to take them out?” Fen stated dumbly.
“If you behave, maybe I’ll give you my knot again. Would you like that, precious?”
His dick, trapped between his stomach and the mattress, twitched, and Fenrir ground his teeth against the sudden flash of arousal.
“Your hole just answered for you,” Oberon told him. “Even after all that time being filled, the sound of my knot is—”
“What are you playing at?”
“You’ve asked me that already. But you still haven’t answered my question.
This thing between us sent you spiraling for a week.
That’s nothing compared to the almost two years you were forced to suffer at her hands.
Words on a screen are too impersonal for something as nuanced as this.
Paint a picture for me. I want to hear it from my omega’s perspective. ”
“Don’t.” Fenrir moaned when the alpha started to massage his ass, both hands kneading his muscles, and he forgot he’d been protesting against being referred to as Oberon’s.
That magnetic attraction he’d felt for the alpha since the beginning hadn’t gone away, no matter how much he wished otherwise. It was still very much there, pulling him toward Oberon, making him lift his hips and press himself against the man’s delicious touch.
If he wasn’t careful, Fenrir would fall right into the trap.
And it was such an obvious trap, too.
Of course the Leviathan would leave Fen in the hands of this skilled alpha. Would trust him to pick Fenrir apart and leave him exposed.
Maybe he hadn’t been able to do it at the estate, but Oberon wasn’t entirely wrong. Instead of taking that heat inducer at the party, Fen should have attempted to escape. Taking his chances on the run from both the Wardrobe and the White Frost then would have been better than needing to do so now.
Now that he knew what the alpha was like in the bedroom…Knew how much he enjoyed hearing the man’s dirty words whispered against his ear…
“You’re turned on,” Oberon noted, laughing when Fenrir turned his face into the pillow. “You don’t have to be embarrassed. I’m hard too.” His hands slipped upward, rubbing against the bunched muscles at Fen’s lower back, then higher. “But that’s not what we’re doing right now, precious, remember?”
“Right,” he growled. “This is an interrogation.”
“A cleverly crafted one,” Oberon didn’t deny it. “If you’re honest with me, it’ll end with us both satisfied. How does that sound?”
“Like a lie.”
“I’ve never lied to you, Wolf. Can you say the same?”
Of course he couldn’t.
Fenrir didn’t like to think about his past. There was nothing good there.
He hadn’t known his parents. They’d died shortly after he was born, and his grandparents had taken him in.
Both of them had been very set in the old ways, their beliefs that alphas were superior to omegas, and that betas shouldn’t be allowed citizenship on the planet, made it hard for him to make friends.
Whenever he got close to forming any sort of connection with a classmate, they’d discover his connection to the town’s mayor in the news and distance themselves.
The world had been progressing forward, but his grandfather, an alpha who lorded his second sex over the rest, had been opposed to progress, and he’d continuously done everything in his power to block laws that he didn’t agree with.
As the mayor, he should have been trustworthy, if nothing else, but upon his death, it’d been revealed that he’d also had a drug problem.
When his pheromones had begun to lose their potency, and younger, more viral alphas had entered into politics, his desperation had led him straight to the Wardrobe’s door.
“The first four years I was with them,” Fenrir found himself saying, voice quiet, tension easing from his muscles as the alpha continued to massage him, “the Wardrobe treated me as free labor. I didn’t mind.
It meant I had a roof over my head, and the meals were always warm, which was better than cold or picked from a dumpster.
My grandparents' savings went to the government when they died, and it was revealed my grandfather had been skimming funds off the top in order to afford his steroid addiction.”
“Steroids?”
“Boosters.”
“He was old when he passed. His pheromones were fading?”
“Yes.”
“Happens to the best of us.”
“Trust me,” Fenrir drawled. “He was the worst of us.”
“So that’s why you were already used to shitty treatment and didn’t see the Wardrobe for what it was until it was too late.”
It was crazy how perceptive Oberon was.
“It made sense to test out the new product on the grunts,” he continued.
“They didn’t tell us about it at first. Slipped it into our food.
There were twenty other alphas I used to share an open space in one of the Wardrobe’s warehouses with.
Within three days, half were dead. The rest of us got sick.
I remember passing out in front of the bathroom door one night shortly after dinner and waking the next day tied to a chair. ”
He’d been eighteen and terrified. Confused.
“I was stupid and used my ability to break free. They sedated me in the hallway. That’s when Michelle took an interest. I’d never even seen her up until that point, but she’d already been the leader of the Wardrobe for a couple of years.
She had the doctors convince me that there was a virus going around and they were trying to find a cure. ”
“You believed that?”
“Not right away. But she took me down the hall to another room where one of her top associates was. His name was Rowan. I was familiar with him. He was sick just like us.”
“Rowan was the face of the Wardrobe before he attempted to start a coup,” Oberon said.
“He gathered the board and got as far as the voting process with claims that Michelle was too young and inexperienced to be left in charge. He lost and no one heard from him after that. There were rumors he’d fled the city, but—”
“Michelle killed him,” Fenrir stated. “Two days after I saw him lying there, they gave him the next round of the drug, and he died within minutes.”
Convinced there was no other way but to stick around, Fenrir had allowed himself to be placed with the rest of the trial subjects. He’d been under heavy guard by that point, so even if he’d had a change of heart, there’d been little chance of him escaping.
“Would you believe the only collar I’ve ever worn is a shock collar?” If his energy levels fluctuated too high, it zapped him. “Cold resistant. They must have invested a lot of coin in it.”
“I’ll get you a real one,” Oberon promised, palms smoothing across Fen’s upper back.
“Don’t say stuff like that.”
“Why not?”
“Because you don’t have to. I’m already telling you what you want to know.
” There was no reason for the alpha to be cruel.
“Teasing me won’t make me talk any faster.
” He exhaled and then picked up where he left off, not wanting to give Oberon the chance to speak first. “A year passed in a blur. I was sick all the time. People kept dying around me, alphas and omegas alike. Then Rebirth .25 was created. After the first dose, I started showing improvements. After the fourth…my body started to change without my knowledge. I wasn’t sick anymore, but I was feverish and always horny.
It didn’t matter how many times I rubbed one out, I was never satisfied.
“Then came the slick. I panicked the first time my body produced it. Alphas aren’t supposed to lubricate that way.
For some reason, I remember thinking about my grandfather.
I couldn’t get his disapproving face out of my head.
Couldn’t help thinking about how disgusted he’d be to discover his only alpha grandchild was leaking like a—”
“Are you prejudiced against omegas?” Oberon interrupted.
“No.” Fenrir didn’t mind being one either. But at the time, confused, alone, and hurting, it’d been impossible not to think about those old prejudices, or the family he’d already never been good enough for.
Oberon hummed and rewarded him by exuding a whiff of soothing alpha hormones. “Continue.”
“Everything is…fuzzy after the fifth dose. That’s when the change really happened.
They’ve perfected it since, but back then, the process took months.
Rewiring someone’s biology like that was painful and slow.
I blacked out most of it. The fragments I do have are all awful nightmares.
Because I started out alpha, they tossed in omegas at first… ”
Bile rose in the back of his throat, and Fenrir abruptly stopped talking.
“Should I fill in the rest for you?” Oberon offered, doing just that before Fen could respond. “Your primal instincts took over. You fucked them, ended up killing them with your Shout abilities, and kept going.”
“I didn’t fuck corpses.”
“Precious, I’m not judging you. It wasn’t your fault.”
“I didn’t…” He was going to throw up. “Release me.”
“We aren’t finished here.”
“King. I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
He wanted him to tell the rest of the story? Fine.