Omega Hunted (The Raines Pack #1)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

SOREN

The noise dragged me out of sleep so violently that for a heartbeat I couldn’t work out where I was. My hand flew to my belly before I was properly awake, searching for the reassuring weight of my daughter, and Asha answered with a slow push into my palm.

Red light.

A shrill burst from the siren echoed through the building, followed by the deep mechanical voice that normally announced anything from shutdown to medical appointments.

This time the words dissolved into static before I could make anything out, and then there was just the light and my door gaping open.

I blinked at the flashing emergency lamps sweeping scarlet across my ceiling, trying to understand what had happened.

The building was usually so quiet, so controlled, every hour of every day running with the precision of a prison.

The SED patrols changed every twelve hours.

Boots echoed along the corridor. Radios crackled.

Keys rattled against belts. Center 14 called the men in their black Shifter Enforcement Directorate uniforms welfare officers, but nobody locked behind those doors believed that.

The lights had never flashed. The alarms had never sounded.

Every morning, the SED walked these corridors, checking doors, scanning wristbands, counting omegas as though we were livestock. Today there was nobody.

My door had never been open.

Red light.

I climbed out of bed before my mind had caught up, my hips protesting as Asha shifted inside me.

The pregnancy had become an awkward balancing act over the past few weeks.

Everything ached. My lower back burned whenever I stood too quickly, and my feet had swollen enough that my sneakers barely fit anymore.

But the door was open.

There wasn’t a guard looming to force me to a physical or make sure I swallowed the right drugs.

I could leave.

I have to get out of here.

I stumbled to the door, and the corridor beyond my room was empty, sirens screaming, their relentless wail filling the omega wing.

Smoke drifted along the ceiling, carrying the acrid smell of burning plastic where the electronic lock beside my room had melted into a blackened lump.

The tiny green light that had taunted me for every failed escape attempt for months had finally gone dark.

Next to mine, Yannick’s door stood open, the room stripped bare after they’d taken him to the birthing suite a few days ago, so I hurried to the room opposite, Franco’s, but the handle refused to move beneath my grip. “Franco!”

“Help!” Franco’s frightened voice called through the door. “What’s happening?”

“I don’t know,” I answered, pulling harder even though I already knew it was useless. “My door was open. Hold on; I’ll get you out.”

The lock didn’t even click. I hit the control panel with the heel of my hand, searching desperately for some kind of release, but the tiny red light glowed back at me without changing. Goddess, no.

“I’ll be back!” I yelled over the siren, then ran to the next room.

Locked.

The one after that.

Locked.

Every door to each omega cell refused to open. Somewhere behind me an omega had started crying so hard his words dissolved into sobs, while another pounded frantically on the metal, shouting for someone to let him out before whatever was happening reached us.

“Please!”

“I’m trying,” I yelled back, already moving again.

I slammed my shoulder into another door hard enough to send pain shooting down my arm, but the lock held firm.

I tried another and then another, hauling at the handles until my breath came in ragged gasps and my hips burned beneath the weight of my pregnancy.

Asha shifted inside me, and I rested my trembling hand over my belly for the briefest moment before trying the final door at the end of the corridor.

It didn’t open either.

My cat was no longer the distant, exhausted presence he’d become over the past few months. He was awake, every instinct flooding through me with a desperate urgency that made my pulse race.

Run.

“I can’t.”

Run!

“I can’t leave them.”

Orders echoed up the stairwell and through the building, and I knew we were running out of time.

I stood there for one agonizing second longer, staring at the line of locked doors, hearing frightened omegas calling for help from rooms I couldn’t get into, their voices rising in panic while I stood uselessly on the other side.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, knowing they would never hear me over the alarms. “I’m so sorry.” Then I shouted. “I’ll get help!”

The apology and promise felt pitifully inadequate, swallowed by smoke and sirens before they’d even left my mouth, and I hated myself for turning away.

My cat pushed at me from inside, frantic and insistent, driving me toward the stairwell, toward escape, toward help.

Every step felt like I was abandoning them, but he knew what I couldn’t bear to accept: staying wouldn’t save anyone.

If I remained, I’d become another omega trapped behind a locked door, waiting for my baby to be stolen from my arms or my next heat to be used to force another child into me.

The stairwell reeked of chemicals, and the odor grew heavier the farther I descended, forcing me to pull the neck of my pajama top up over my nose.

The emergency lights now flickered, plunging each landing into alternating pools of crimson and shadow.

Halfway down I almost stumbled over the first body.

An SED agent—not one of the kinder ones—lay sprawled across the concrete with his rifle several feet away, his eyes fixed blankly on the ceiling.

Another one lay farther down, slumped against the wall with blood spreading beneath him, and when he saw me, he reached for me, the same disgust I’d seen when he hurt us twisting his face before it gave way to fear, then despair, and after one wet, choking cough, he died right there in front of me.

I picked my way through the dead as fast as my aching body would allow, forcing myself not to look at the faces of men I recognized, men who’d patrolled the omega wing for months, who’d watched us suffer and done nothing, and kept moving because there was only one way out.

The birthing level stood between me and the main entrance, and I slowed as voices cut through the smoke ahead, close enough that every instinct screamed at me to run.

“Protect the assets!” Adrian. The man who’d built this place to cage omegas, steal our babies, and turn our bodies into something he could use and sell, and the jailer who’d made sure none of us escaped. The sound of his voice rooted me to the spot. “I said move them!”

There was a burst of gunfire, close enough to send ice through my veins.

I kept low and edged toward the open theater door, because I’d only ever seen the birthing suite, the doctor’s office, and the locked omega wing, but there had to be more than that, another corridor, another door, some way out of this nightmare.

Somewhere beyond the rooms they’d allowed me to see there had to be a phone, a fire exit, anything I could use to get outside and bring help back for the omegas I’d left behind.

My heart hammered so violently it drowned out everything, but the gunfire as harsh surgical light spilled through the open doorway and cut across the smoke-filled corridor.

I checked inside the room where they’d hurt us, examined us, drugged us, and done things to our bodies we’d never consented to, searching through the horror for the door I knew had to be there before fear could stop me.

There was a body on a gurney.

Yannick.

For one impossible heartbeat, I couldn’t understand what I was seeing.

The omega’s belly was flat beneath blood-soaked sheets, his babies gone, his body abandoned where they’d cut them from him, one arm hanging limply over the edge of the table and his head turned toward the door, eyes half-open and empty, as though he’d died still waiting for someone to come and save him.

“No…” I crossed the room in a daze, barely aware of anything except him.

A stuffed wolf had fallen onto the floor beside the table, one stitched ear dark with blood, and I bent to pick it up.

He’d carried that stupid little wolf everywhere, stubbornly holding on to it through every cruel joke and taunt because it was for his babies.

It was my brother’s, he would say, over and over, as though that should have been enough to make them understand why it mattered.

As though anything we loved had ever mattered to the people who kept us here.

I rubbed desperately at the stained fur, trying to make it clean again, but the blood had already soaked too deep.

“No,” I whispered, looking back at his face.

He’d talked for weeks about his boys. About the tiny cabin he was going to find somewhere far away from his family, where no one could ever take them from him.

About teaching them to shift and climb trees and howl badly at the moon until they all laughed themselves stupid.

He’d built that future piece by piece, clinging to every impossible detail because believing in it was easier than accepting what this place intended to do to him.

Yannick had been stronger than me. He’d dared to imagine a life beyond this place, while I’d never let myself picture anything for me and my daughter because wanting something that badly, only to have it ripped away, had been too terrifying.

“Wait!”