1. Avery #3
When an alpha was in the market for an omega, they were looking first for someone to bear their children or, if the alpha and omega were of the same sex, parent the alpha’s offspring from a surrogate.
Second, an alpha wanted someone with exquisite taste and style who would oversee their staff, and host as well as arrange to attend all society engagements and, of course, run their household.
An omega was expected to be immaculate and represent their alpha with grace, poise and beauty.
If the alpha was a member of the jarl , the whole perfect omega thing was even worse.
It was all completely beyond me and always had been.
My interest in being anyone’s 1950s housewife was utterly nonexistent.
I had friends, though, who had been training to be perfection-in-the-flesh their entire lives.
Linden, among others, was the epitome of delicate omega beauty.
Me, on the other hand, who showed up with black eyes, various cuts and contusions, and smiling with a split lip, was no one’s idea of genteel, ephemeral loveliness.
I was too muscular as well. Omegas were supposed to be lithe and lean, fragile.
I was the exact opposite of that. The only fun part of attending the parties was seeing the alphas recoil in horror when they met me.
“Are you listening to me?” Linden snapped his fingers in my face. “I said that the whale is here.”
“No, I was checked out. Sorry.”
He groaned miserably.
“Whale?”
“Yes. There’s a cyne here tonight, and you know you can’t find an unmated one here in the States anymore. You have to travel abroad to land one.”
“You are aware that a whale isn’t a fish, aren’t you?”
“What?”
“I mean, you land a marlin, you don’t land a whale,” I instructed, winking at him. “I feel like you should be watching more Discovery Channel.”
“God, I hate you.”
“I know,” I agreed with a smirk, “but tell me who you’re looking to catch.”
“Graeme Whitaker Davenport the Fifth .”
“Okay.” Linden spoke the name like I should know who this alpha was. I didn’t, of course, and was not at all impressed by the suffix he made sure to emphasize.
He sighed deeply, utterly beleaguered. “He’s the Earl of Wakefield and Muir.”
My scoff was fast. “You’re making that up,” I baited him. “We don’t have earls in this country. Maybe you need to watch the History Channel too.”
“Listen––”
“It all started with the Mayflower and––”
“Can you just be serious for five minutes?”
“I dunno, let’s find out. Start the timer.”
His growl was loud in the small alcove. “Graeme’s family is from England, but he was raised here in America and then went to college abroad,” he explained to me.
“Apparently his father died when Graeme was very young, and then, tragically, his mother, who was an omega, succumbed to grief, as you know some do. His grandparents, who lived here, raised him and his brother.”
“Sounds reasonable.”
“They have real estate investments all over the world.”
“Like my family.”
“No,” he assured me, the patronizing tone not lost on me. “They make your family’s company look positively bougie by comparison. They do ten times the business your father does. He’s worth billions.”
“What’s bougie mean again?”
“Avery.” He said my name like a curse word.
“So he’s super rich.”
“Yes,” he replied irritably.
“Cool” was all I could think of to say.
“For heaven’s sake, Avery, you need to take this seriously.”
“Why do I?”
“Because at some point, as an omega, your own body is going to force you to bond. The pull can’t stay dormant forever.”
But I was betting the “omegas were slaves to their need to be bonded to an alpha” panic was a good story, same as Santa and the Easter Bunny.
I had done my research, as well as talked to many older omegas who’d never bonded, who had regrets, same as anyone else, but none of them had gone mad because they remained single.
In the wild, yes, a lone wolf was in danger.
The pack took care of all its members, and everyone got fed and stayed warm.
But in the world around us, a lone wolf went to Costco and ordered Grubhub and shopped on Amazon.
This whole terror about being unbonded was exhausting.
This wasn’t the 1850s, or even the 1950s.
Being single needed to stop being the worst thing anyone could think of.
“Are you listening to me?”
“Yes,” I lied, because when I heard his voice go up I tuned back in, figuring he was asking a question.
“I don’t care what all those unbonded omegas told you,” he stated, the irritation thick in his voice.
“They either don’t remember or didn’t want to scare you.
But I’ve seen omegas go into heat after having sex with an alpha who didn’t offer for them, and it’s horrifying to watch. They lose all sense of themselves.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Avery!” he nearly yelled. “The facts are indisputable. You sleep with an alpha and he casts you aside, you go into heat, calling all-comers until it subsides. Some omegas find mates, but most of them just go insane.”
“Insane?” I parried. “Really?”
“Avery, you––”
“Tell me, Lin, where are these hundreds and hundreds of crazed omegas kept?”
“They’re thrown out onto the street, Avery. You know that.”
“This whole thing is perpetuated by––”
“Heat happens to an omega when the alpha they trust with their body doesn’t claim them,” Linden replied flatly. “That’s crushing for an omega.”
But that part I knew for certain was bullshit. I’d slept with many alphas and betas, gammas, and more than a few humans, and fucking the alphas was the same as fucking the others.
Did omegas go into heat? Yes. Without question.
But heat, for all intents and purposes, was an omega pumping out a ridiculous amount of pheromones to lure a mate, basically drowning the other wolf in their scent, and that, I suspected, could be overwhelming for the omega as well as for anyone in their vicinity.
But did I think the omega lost control during any of that? Hell no. That was ridiculous.
“You need to form a bond,” Linden declared, “and so do I. And since I know what I need to be happy, which includes exorbitant amounts of money, my strategy for happiness is to seduce the earl, marry him, and live like a queen.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I agreed, because it was not my place to judge him.
We were different people, raised in vastly different circumstances.
He was a commodity to his family, nothing more.
He had been polished like a priceless jewel his entire life.
Every moment he wasn’t with me when we were younger had been filled with etiquette, grooming, and diction.
I remembered watching him learn how to walk into a room, hold a cup, and to be the embodiment of beauty and sophistication and good breeding.
His father had nothing at all to do with him.
His mother was merciless in his preparation for his debut, at eighteen, into society.
As far as I knew, me and my mother were the only ones who ever hugged him.
It always made me sad to see him look up for approval and never receive a smile from anyone.
Most omegas were just like him. They fell into one of two categories: either their family was interested in using them as a bargaining chip to merge with a another, equally affluent family, or the omega was flat-out sold to the highest bidder.
I annoyed the crap out of my family, but they loved me, and I knew that with absolute conviction because my childhood had been completely and utterly normal.
Usually omegas were sequestered. In my family I was treated the same as my siblings; all of us were hugged and kissed, scolded and grounded, and told we were unique and smart and funny.
Beauty, how we looked, wasn’t all that important to either of my parents.
They were much more concerned with what kind of people we were.
Being born into my family was a blessing. If I never bonded, it didn’t matter; my family wasn’t dependent on me making a match. Linden’s was. I had no right to criticize him or his motives.
“No one here is more beautiful than me,” he stated without a hint of self-doubt. “The earl is mine for the taking.”
I gave him a quick pat on the cheek. “I one hundred percent agree with you,” I conceded. “Except for Bridget.”
“Oh, Avery,” Bridget cooed as she swept into the alcove that was suddenly a bit tight with three of us in there. “You’re so right.”
“Get out,” Linden demanded icily.
“Calm down,” she tutted at him, leaning into me as I put an arm around her. “If the earl is into men, then you win. You’re the prettiest one I know.”
I never understood why there wasn’t some list that was given out before these things: this alpha likes girls, this one likes boys, this one loves every color of the rainbow.
It only made good sense not to waste everyone’s time.
Why, even now, every alpha had to meet every omega was beyond me. There were so many antiquated customs.
“I’m the most beautiful person you know, period,” he corrected her, bringing me back to the conversation.
She cocked her head sideways to look up at me. “You’re the most handsome, though,” she murmured, reaching up to touch my jawline. “But would it kill you to shave?”
“You sound like my father.”
“Honestly, Avery, I can barely see your gorgeous dimples.” I chuckled as she squinted and tipped my head to the side. “Why are you covered in lipstick?”
“My mother, my sister, my sister-in-law, they were all over me. You know how it is.”
“It’s because we’re like catnip to all the others—alphas, betas, and gammas. They can barely keep their hands off of us,” she said, using her fingers to try and clean me up. “And you especially, because your family loves and wants to smother you in equal measure.”
“Who, me?”