Chapter One
HOW TO LOVE AN ALPHA (RESERCH RESERCHED)
See the good in him wen no one else can.
Do NOT give up wen he pushes me away. That is wen he needs me the MOST.
Be so much devoshun that he is transformed.
My love is the light that keeps out the darkness.
A torchered alpha just needs one person who will believe in him.
Sole mate = when 2 people are ment to be. It hurts if it is reel. (the hurt is how you know)
vunrable vulnrable = wen he lets you see the soft part.
? ? ?
Stella Trent-Michaels was going to fix Jason Lovell if it killed her.
She’d been trying for two seasons so far, ever since Jason told her that he didn’t believe in love.
She’d marched across the Dalton Academy quad in her plaid skirt and knee socks, said yes you do, you’re just scared, and then she’d slapped him and run away.
What an omega.
In today’s episode, she was following through. “I’m going to kiss the frown right off your face, Jason Lovell,” Stella said, and the violins swelled so loudly that Cassian had to turn the volume down on his iPad.
Stella lunged for Jason.
Cassian looked down at his notebook very quickly, because kissing scenes still made him feel funny when Colin was sitting near him.
He didn’t understand why. Kissing was a perfectly normal thing that people did on television and in real life.
He’d googled it, and he saw Diwa doing it with Colin all the time.
Google said it released oxytocin, which made you feel good.
But his neck still went hot whenever Colin was close enough to notice what he was watching.
He uncapped his pen and wrote, in careful capitals, his latest learning: 8. Kiss your alphas frown’s away.
The apostrophe might have been wrong. Apostrophes were slippery little marks that appeared and disappeared according to rules that Lysander had explained to him three times now. He was fairly certain that the frowns belonged to his theoretical alpha, so maybe he’d got it right here…
He was admiring how straight his writing looked on the page when his notebook was snatched out of his hands.
Cassian’s mouth fell open in dismay.
The omega in front of him was slim and dark-haired, sharp-faced like the actors in Uptown Omegas. He held Cassian’s notebook at arm’s length between two fingers, like it was something he’d found on the floor of a bus.
He was also, unmistakably, a male omega, but there was something wrong with his scent. It was sharp and chemical, like antiseptic over bruised fruit.
The dark-haired omega cleared his throat and read aloud from his notebook.
“My love is the light that keeps out the darkness.” He looked up, and his smile was not nice. “Christ alive. Where did you get this shit? A Hallmark card?”
Cassian lunged for it.
The omega pulled the notebook out of reach with a matador’s timing, already flipping to the previous page while Cassian’s fingers closed on air. His eyes moved fast, scanning down the list, and his upper lip curled.
“T-O-R-C-H-E-R-E-D,” he read out, in a voice that carried across the waiting room. “Are you six? That’s not how you spell tortured.”
Cassian’s cheeks burned so hard he could feel his pulse in them. He’d sounded that word out letter by letter as he wrote it, and he’d been so proud of getting the ch right because tortured had a ch sound in it, anyone could hear that, so why was this omega saying it was wrong?
“Give it back.”
Colin hadn’t raised his voice. He was sitting with Tala asleep against his chest, one hand curved over the back of her head, and he fixed the dark-haired omega with a cutting glare.
The omega glanced at Colin and dismissed him in the same motion. He laughed. “Oh, of course someone who can’t spell tortured would need his omega daddy to bring him to his therapy appointment.”
Colin’s hand didn’t move from the back of Tala’s head.
“I am someone who will absolutely stuff my daughter’s dummy down your throat to get that notebook back,” he said. “She’s an eight-month-old, who still isn’t sleeping well, so you’d want to factor my worryingly sleep-deprived state into your decision about what you do next, lad.”
The notebook landed in Cassian’s lap.
“Thank you,” Cassian snatched it up, and pressed it flat against his chest with both palms.
The omega sat down three seats away without another word. His knee was bouncing as Colin’s eyes stayed on him.
The other man in the waiting room had been watching the whole exchange without any reaction crossing his face.
He was sitting against the far wall, almost completely hidden behind a lush plant whose top leaves scraped the clinic’s ceiling, with his legs crossed at the ankle.
He was pale and blond and so still that Cassian hadn’t noticed him until he’d spoken.
His hair was even lighter than Cassian’s own, cropped close at the sides and falling forward over his forehead, in a deliberately careless way.
“English is a very stupid language,” the blond said.
He had an accent that lifted the end of each word, turning even a flat statement into something musical.
“English has o-u-g-h that makes six different sounds and a k in front of knife that you are supposed to pretend is not there.” He shook his head.
“It is a language designed by very drunk people.”
Cassian risked a glance at the blond. “What languages do you speak?”
“V?stervikska. Nordiska. English, as you can hear, badly. Deutsch.” He counted them off on his fingers, four taps against his knee, and looked at Cassian with polite expectation. “And you?”
“English,” Cassian said, quietly enough that the dark-haired omega shouldn’t be able to hear. “And there are some words in Australian that are different from the usual.”
Even with the mention of his Australianness, his list sounded very thin next to the blond’s four languages.
The blond nodded. “It is very hard, English,” he said again. “Really, it counts for two languages, because of its nonsense spelling.”
Cassian’s shoulders dropped from where they’d climbed up around his ears. This one he liked.
He was tucking his notebook into Colin’s nappy bag when the door at the end of the corridor opened and a woman stepped through.
She was tall, with close-cropped dark hair and tortoiseshell glasses pushed up on top of her head.
Her lanyard read Dr Emma Carlisle, Specialist Registrar — Male Omega Services.
She held a manila folder in one hand and a takeaway coffee in the other, and she took a long sip before she looked at any of them.
Her gaze moved across all three of them. “Right,” Dr Carlisle said, lowering the coffee. “Felix, Ivar, and Cassian. Shall we start?”
Colin caught his eye as Cassian stood. He gave a small nod as Cassian turned to follow Dr Carlisle down the corridor. He reached down as he passed and touched Tala’s fist for luck.
Dr Carlisle held a door open at the end of the hall.
The walls of this room were a soothing sage green, the armchairs and low sofa upholstered in oatmeal linen.
A diffuser on the windowsill smelled faintly of eucalyptus, and a monstera in the corner had leaves so glossy they looked hand-polished.
The window faced a courtyard garden, walled in old brick, where someone had planted lavender along a gravel path.
He chose the armchair nearest the monstera and tucked his legs underneath him. The cushion was deep enough that his whole body sank into it. Felix took the other armchair while Ivar folded himself onto the sofa, one ankle crossed over the other.
There were two other male omegas in the room with him.
Cassian’s gaze moved between them, because in his twenty-two years inside the Family of Light he had been the only one, trotted out at gatherings like a holy artefact as proof that the Universe still made miracles.
Meeting the Huxleys had felt like being hit by lightning three times.
Colin and his identical twin sons were all male omegas, and so Cassian had thought that the Universe had spent its entire supply of miracles on that one family.
Now Dr Carlisle had put two more in a room with him, and the maths of his life had stopped making any kind of sense to him.
The Lumineer would have said his Light was drawing like to like. A Calyx’s radiance called to others of his kind across vast distances, the way a flame called moths. It was nonsense, obviously. Lysander had explained statistics to him.
Male omegas were one in three hundred thousand male births, which came out at about a hundred in the whole country. Most of them would end up in London, because London was where you went when you wanted to stop being looked at, Colin had explained.
Dr Carlisle settled into the remaining chair by the window and set her coffee on the side table without a coaster. If Colin had been with them, he would have said something about rings on wood and made her move it.
“I’ve spoken with each of you about what this is individually, but with how tense you’re all looking, I think you could all do with a bit of reminding as to why the three of you are here today,” Dr Carlisle said.
“This isn’t group therapy. I’m not going to ask you to share anything, or try to process anything. ”
Cassian smiled. He had a good smile, and he deployed it now at full force because he wanted Dr Carlisle to like him.
“What this is,” she continued, “is an introduction. There are very few male omegas in this country. You three are living in greater London, you’re roughly the same age, and I thought you might benefit from knowing each other.
” She glanced between them. “That’s it. Whatever you do with the introduction is your business.
If you leave this room and never speak again, fine.
If you swap numbers and end up meeting for coffee every month, that’s also fine. ”
Felix crossed his arms. “Are we meant to go around and say our names, age, and a fun fact about ourselves?”
“Great suggestion, Felix. That’ll work. Why don’t you kick us off?”
Felix rolled his eyes up at the ceiling.
“I’m Felix, obviously,” he said. “I’m twenty-three.
I’m from London. I was kidnapped and forcibly mate-bonded to a disgruntled employee of my father’s when I was eighteen.
I haven’t been outside the house in five years, except for my therapy sessions and walks around our block. ”
Ivar turned to face Felix. “Those are two very unfun facts.”
“Perfect. This isn’t a very fun conversation.” Felix’s smile was all teeth and no warmth. “Your turn.”
“I am Ivar. I am twenty-four. I am from V?stervik, which is a small island nation in the North Sea.” He smiled serenely. “I was the sacred virgin of Skalavik, a traditional island enclave. And then I was not so sacred anymore, when I was not so virginal.”
Felix snorted.
“I came to London with my alpha, Toby, who does not mind so much that I am not a virgin, because it benefits him.”
Felix was rapid blinking now. “What the fuck? Are you serious?”
“My people would stop me in the streets to press their foreheads to my feet. It gave them luck.” Ivar’s shoulders lifted in a shrug. “It was a whole thing.”
Dr Carlisle cleared her throat. “Cassian,” she prompted.
“My name’s Cassian,” he said. “I’m twenty-two.
I’m from Australia, and I live with Colin who was with me in the waiting room.
He’s the one who threatened you with the dummy,” he added, for Felix’s benefit.
“And there’s also his partner Diwa and their baby Tala.
I’m getting paid eighteen pounds an hour to play with Tala, and I’m learning to read properly while I help them out at home. ”
“You’re learning to read,” Felix repeated. “At twenty-two?”
The small hairs lifted at the back of Cassian’s neck.
“Yes,” he said. He kept his voice steady and sweet because that was what you did when someone’s tone had teeth in it. “I didn’t get to learn when I was young. So I’m learning now.”
Ivar was watching Felix with half-lidded eyes. “In Skalavik we have a word, taskig, for people like you. It means — well. It means what you might imagine it means.”
Felix turned to Dr Carlisle. “Is he allowed to call me taskig? I don’t know what that is, but it really sounds like he shouldn’t be?”
“It is the soft underside of a squid’s excrement hole. It is the only part of the squid we do not eat, so we throw it to the feral cats.”
Felix grabbed the nearest cushion and hurled it at Ivar’s head.
Ivar didn’t move. The cushion sailed past his left ear and hit the monstera, which shuddered but held its ground.
“Right,” Dr Carlisle said. Her eyes had slipped closed. “Right.”
Cassian turned his hands over. His thumb found the wrist scar again. He wasn’t going to come out of this with a friend; Felix’s energy scraped against his like steel wool.
“I lived in a high-control group,” Cassian said. “Until about a year ago. That’s why I can’t read. They didn’t teach me. I was in the Family of Light, in Australia. You might have seen the documentary about it by my friend Hamish McNally.”
Felix, who had been gearing up for another volley at Ivar, went still. His eyes moved to Dr Carlisle. “You’ve lumped me in,” he said, his voice climbing, “with a cult survivor and an ex-holy virgin.”
“You do have quite a lot in common when you look beneath the surface,” Dr Carlisle said.
“We have nothing in common.”
Ivar’s mouth curved into a small smirk. Cassian pressed a hand over his mouth, but his shoulders shook.
Ivar glanced at him sideways. “We have a tiny bit in common,” he said, setting Cassian off completely.
Felix watched them both as though he’d been placed in an enclosure full of lethal zoo animals.
? ? ?
Colin was reading something on his mobile when Cassian emerged into the waiting room, Tala asleep in the wrap against Colin’s chest. “How was it?” he asked.
“Someone threw a cushion,” Cassian said.
Colin’s eyebrows rose.
“Not me,” Cassian added quickly. “Felix. The mean one. He threw it at Ivar, who is the nice one from Skalavik. But don’t worry, it just hit a plant.”
Colin looked as though he had several follow-up questions, but Cassian’s mobile buzzed in his pocket before he could ask any of them.
He pulled it out. A WhatsApp notification sat on the screen telling him that Felix had added him to a group!
The group was called Male Omega Alliance Network. Cassian stared at it, grinning. “I think I might have made two friends,” he said.
Colin reached over, squeezed his shoulder, and they walked out into the corridor together. Cassian’s mobile buzzed again with a message from Felix: Ivar you Kv?ssig.
Cassian made the mistake of googling Kv?ssig+Skulvik+Mening, and when Colin caught a glimpse of the image on his screen, he clucked his tongue and snatched Cassian’s mobile from his hands.