1. Avery #2
My name was always uttered with the same mix of exasperation and resignation by the man who’d carried me around on his shoulders when I was a child. He loved me and wanted to throttle me in equal measure.
“C’mon, let’s quantify it,” I baited him, pushing like I always did.
“I’m certain I have no earthly idea.”
“Let’s say a million, just to be in the ballpark.” I snickered and turned so I was beside him, draping my arm across his shoulders. “Tell me, and be truthful.”
“You––”
“Has telling me to listen to Ambrose ever worked out for you?”
“This,” he growled at my mother, gesturing to all of me, “is your fault.”
“Well, yes, I should hope so,” she agreed, beaming at him, completely unfazed.
He sighed deeply, clearly resigned, long-suffering, and then turned to me, pulling me into a tight hug, nuzzling his face into my hair and inhaling deeply. That maneuver was all wolf and left his scent on me, which marked me as his offspring, his child, his son. His own.
“Oh!” My mother whimpered in delight at seeing us together.
When he leaned out of the embrace, I noticed his furrowed brows were back. “You couldn’t have shaved?”
“I was in a hurry,” I assured him, drawing out the last word. “I work out of the Eighteenth District, old man. Do you know how far that is, in traffic, from here?”
“Yes, but––”
“And you wanted me here at six?” I scrunched up my face and shook my head at him. “You’re lucky the monkey suit is clean.”
He was about to say something when my bicep was grabbed and I was spun around to face my brother.
Ambrose’s deep, dark midnight blue eyes, the same as our father’s, were trained on me, along with the familiar glower perfected by Alexander Huntington.
Only the silver at the temples was missing from my brother’s hair.
What was different, what softened his face, were the laugh lines.
Ambrose Huntington was a serious man, but his wife never let him get away with anything, and she made him smile often.
I was grateful for her every day and thankfully she was there, slipping between us, a sliver of joy in a scarlet crushed-silk gown.
Dove Huntington lifted her arms, and I bent and hugged her, lifting her off her feet for a moment, making her giggle with delight.
“Can you two please not,” Ambrose groused at me as she kissed my cheek.
“How are you, you gorgeous thing?” she purred as I set her back down on her feet, gazing up at me in absolute adoration, waiting for my answer.
“I’m good,” I told her, taking her hand as she slipped it into mine. “We caught the guy wanted in those acid attacks on the models.”
She gasped. “Was it who you and your partner thought?”
I nodded. “It was, fortunately, and we caught him before he hurt anyone else.”
“You know what he’s doing?” my brother asked her.
“You don’t follow the crime in this city?” Andrea Donahue, my sister, appeared beside my father. “My God, Ambrose, how can you not?”
He threw up his hands in defeat as Andrea stepped into the small family circle we made and opened her arms for me.
I greeted her just as I had Dove, lifting her off her feet and squeezing tight.
She laughed, even though I knew she didn’t want to.
She never did. In her mind, anything that she considered feminine or girly was bad.
Wolves, on the whole, were a sexist, misogynistic lot.
Had she been born into any number of other families, she would never have been allowed to work in whatever business made them their fortune, even having been born an alpha.
But Andrea was my father’s daughter, and he saw no difference between her and my brother, even with my brother being his heir.
For my father, whoever was the smartest and most capable would take over from him when he retired, sex be damned.
At the moment, my brother was CEO and my sister was CFO, so it was a crapshoot, unless you knew them.
For me, my money was on Drea, because she could think outside the box, and Ambrose only saw four corners.
I also secretly hoped Ambrose would throw caution to the wind and return to his real love, which was painting, but thus far that had not happened.
“Don’t shake her too much,” my brother-in-law, Crawford Donahue, ordered me when he reached us. “Your sister’s pregnant.”
“What?” I put her down gently to take her chin in my hand. “Poppet, you’re gonna be a mommy?”
She snorted out a laugh, and then, seconds later, uncharacteristic tears filled her eyes as she nodded.
I grabbed her again, and she melted against me, shivering, unable, it seemed, with the new hormones coursing through her body, to resist the pull of my warmth.
Omegas were like candy to alphas, betas, and gammas, all ranks falling under their spell pretty quickly.
It was why we were both loved and hated so fiercely.
History was filled with stories of evil omegas twisting poor unsuspecting wolves, especially alphas, around their fingers and forcing them to commit abominations.
To me, the omegas in the stories had always seemed like easy scapegoats.
“Let her go,” Ambrose ordered me, and once I did, after giving her a kiss on the forehead, he stepped in front of me. “Did you hear me yelling?”
“You yelled?” My mother gasped dramatically.
“For the love of God, Mother,” he grumbled, letting his head fall back on his shoulders in total defeat.
I chuckled as he slowly lifted it to look at me in utter dejection as Crawford leaned in to give me a hug and kiss, the only one, apart from his wife, that he was ever so touchy-feely with.
Again, him being a beta, he couldn’t resist me.
“You’re supposed to come when I call you,” my brother muttered belligerently.
“I think you have me confused with Cosmo,” I countered. “I’m not your beagle, I’m your brother, in case you got us mixed up again.”
“Avery––”
“Don’t be a dick, all right? Just gimme a hug,” I placated him, holding my arms open.
His sigh was as deep and resigned as my father’s had been, because I exhausted them both equally, but he took a step forward and leaned into me anyway.
He didn’t even protest when I squeezed a grunt out of him.
His wife made the awww noise when he pushed his face down into my shoulder, needing me just for a moment.
“I’ll try and listen to you next time,” I soothed him.
“See that you do,” he mumbled.
I was making the rounds of the room, greeting people I only saw at these frou-frou gatherings, when I was yanked sideways into an alcove.
Rounding on my attacker, I found Linden Van Doren, who was both one of my oldest friends and enemies.
He was loyal to a fault, while still prone to throwing me under a bus at any given opportunity.
It had been particularly bad when we were younger, doing everything from smoking weed to sleeping with boys.
I was always the one grounded, and he was the one sneaking pizza to me.
“What are you doing?” I groused at him, noting that he’d curled his strawberry-blond mane rather than pulling it back into the normal queue.
“It should be perfectly obvious that I’m hiding,” he snapped back.
I crossed my arms, going for bored.
“I have some admirers—don’t bat my hands away,” he chastised me. “You’re a mess.”
I made sure to sigh like I was dying, but he wasn’t fazed in the least. Instead, he fussed with my bow tie, my shirt, my cuffs, smoothed a hand down the lapels of my jacket, and tugged and patted until he looked me up and down, shrugged like that was as good as it got, and leaned back against the wall.
“Seriously, why’re you hiding?”
“Because Daw, Tyne, and Colby are looking for me.”
“Those are people’s names?”
“You know they are,” he scolded.
“And which ones are they, again?” It was hard to keep up with all his suitors.
“Steel, oil, and venture capital.”
“Ah,” I said, recalling the last party a couple months back.
As an omega, no matter whose son I was, and probably more so because I was a rich man’s progeny, I was required to attend all gatherings where unmated alphas would be in attendance to see if any of them wanted to lay claim to me.
It was an antiquated custom that wasn’t going away anytime soon.
When I had moved out of the house and got my own place downtown, I had tried to skip the mandatory social interactions, and my father had threatened to make such a scene in front of everyone I worked with—which was a fate worse than death, with me trying to make detective—that I quickly gave in.
But now, years later, at thirty-two, I understood how unconcerned I should have been from day one.
No alpha in their right mind, no matter how rich my father was and how fat my dowry would be, wanted me. I was by no means a typical omega.
If an alpha hadn’t found their fated beta or gamma, usually between eighteen and thirty, then it became, statistically, a crapshoot that they ever would.
There was a pull thing that went on, this overwhelming draw.
I didn’t fully understand it, even when Ambrose tried to explain, but if they had not discovered their one true mate, who would somehow magically appear, then they would decide to settle down comfortably with an omega.
A beta or gamma was a soulmate for an alpha, like my mother was to my father.
There was a shared sense of building a life together, forging a path and a future.
An omega, on the other hand, was an ornament.