by Isoellen
Once a stunning beauty, many alphas had competed for Maura's attention. Sasha's father had wanted Maura long before he was able to arrange to get her. His obsession was the reason Maura became clinically broken. Kane’s own feelings for Sasha made him understand her father's obsession with Maura. He'd seen photos in Sasha's file.
More than just the tempting hourglass of an omega breeder, Sasha had inherited a body made for fucking, made for lust and pleasure. Her luscious tits defied gravity and her tiny waist demanded to be spanned by the hands of a worthy male. That bitable ass of hers was a heavenly sight from behind. Her slit was wonderfully puffy, with a clit that swelled and begged for attention. Her core fit him tight and was always hungry for him. She was the perfect cradle for his hardness, with soft, glowing skin and deliciously sweet pink nipples.
He had nearly gone mad waiting for her.
After she’d survived her first heat, the biological catalyst between childhood and adulthood, Kane had to escape her. The smell of her, the way she had boldly taken ownership of him, the soul-annihilating trill of her feminine purr—it had all threatened to rob him of his self-control.
He’d left the compound and thrown himself into finding Merrick and settling every work crisis he could. Want and worry for her kept him awake late at night, so he used the time to plow through his calendar, knowing that her second estrous was coming. This time, he'd be ready.
He'd been handling it.
Until he’d had her taken to Holding One for punishment after she’d tried to leave him.
He'd not meant to touch her. Before walking into that room, he had taken a sense inhibitor to dull his instincts and a dose of shine to calm his nerves so he didn't inadvertently hurt her. He'd whip her, leaving red marks only, just to teach her who she was and how their relationship would go.
But then he saw her, hanging there without any fear at all, displaying such complete trust in him. He’d cut her clothes off and seen her scars, and he’d been unable to do anything but pleasure her. The overnight changes to her body brought him to his knees.
After he’d destroyed the image she’d had of her father, she’d fallen asleep in his arms. Snuggling close to him, branding him—setting him on fire.
Leaving her had been a torture like no other. Muscles quaking, his eyes wild, he’d forced himself away from her, dick hurting like a bitch. He’d crawled out of bed, but this time, he couldn’t bring himself to leave the compound. He couldn’t be that far away.
He wasn’t able to function after that. Sleep only came when he was highly medicated. Food wouldn’t stay down. All he wanted was to fuck Sasha or to kill something.
Since he couldn't have her, he'd thrown himself into the arena, using the rut to his advantage.
Calling an open challenge, Kane invited every alpha and enemy to come and take their shot at him by fist or by sword. Men who'd long been waiting for a chance at his throat arrived from all the 12 Sectors in response to the challenge.
He’d hoped that his brothers, the two who still gave him the most trouble, might come. He’d take them down, force them to submit, settle the old issues once and for all, and bring unity to the Sectors.
But the stubborn asses ignored him.
The rest thought his offer was made out of weakness, that his ripening age meant he was ready to step down. He fought all comers and shared the videos to every data pad in the area. He wanted the world to see the warlord predator in his element. He was no weak man.
His instincts played tricks on him, made him think the challengers wanted Sasha when they didn't even know about her. He attacked them with a savage passion, cracking open skulls and removing limbs. Let them see the killer who could not be defeated even after countless battles in the ring. Might makes right, and he’d proved himself on a pile of bodies as a worthy mate just as he had proved himself a worthy alpha in his youth.
And when Sasha was ready, they'd understand the power and value of the breeder who had tamed the hundred-and-eighty-eight-year-old untouchable alpha. There was no better way to demonstrate the value of the breeder laws by showing his people the breeder's blessing in effect. He'd never doubted that Sasha would give everything of herself to him.
Clever, empathetic and loyal, there was no chance that she was a manipulator only after a position as wife of First Administrator. She wanted him, and him alone, with nothing to do with his position or linage. The alphas would see what a willing relationship with a female could be. They'd covet it. He hoped they would finally get some self-control and learn it was better to seduce a wife than force her.
His beast was in full control when Sasha claimed him. Just as he had known she would, she had taken all of him. He gave her his monster, and she accepted him. He used her heat to work out weeks of waking dreams and fantasies on her delicious, perfect body.
She was marked up good when they stood before the 12 Sectors to finalize the claim and show the world. He'd saturated her in his smell and left evidence of his touch all over her body, lest anyone doubt who she belonged to.
He'd kept her away from the mirrors so she couldn’t see how much of a mess he'd made of her. When she faced the crowd and staked her claim, not one person would think she had been coerced or that she was afraid.
Breathtaking, fuckable beauty that she was, Kane knew he was envied, not because she was a breeder, but because she was a woman who enjoyed the attention of her alpha. She gave all the males hard dicks with her territorial hissing, and every unmated male who saw her do it would now want the same.
He had waited two centuries to be chosen by an omega breeder.
She was worth the wait.
Epilogue – Part 2
Merrick
Several years later...
Merrick sat at a little table in the corner of the bar. The table was filthy, the chair was filthy—this whole place was filthy. He thought Sector 10 was bad, but he’d been wrong. Sector 2 was far worse.
The whole area was walled off from the rest of civilization with shock wire. It existed as the antithesis of order and control. His older brother, Nothonal, had created the perfect home for the condemned and the depraved.
He didn't know the name of this dirt floored, mold encrusted shack. It was owned and run by a lowlife alpha who oversaw some of the fights in the pits. The place's appeal was not in the rotgut alcohol it sold, but the show of a sad little woman sitting in an iron cage behind the makeshift bar.
Head shaved, likely because of lice, she was always naked and shivering with the cold. A half-starved, sterile omega breeder, she cowered in her cage, her head down and arms wrapped around her body. She wore a metal shock collar outfitted with a GPS system, as well as cuffs on her wrists and ankles.
Her owner rented her out by the hour. Any who wanted to use her had to leave weapons at the bar, not because she was dangerous—she leaked her slick for whoever growled at her—but because she was suicidal and had tried numerous times to end her own life.
Merrick thought about helping her do that.
It had been easy to get into Sector 2. No one cared if you went in. One just walked through a door and went through the tunnel from one world to the next. There was no law here. It was all might makes right, and every fight was to the death. Slum lords reigned like little vicious kings. Every vice was readily available, although the quality of those vices was often dubious.
All drones were slaves here. There was no charade of them working off their debts. Breed owned all the drone flesh. And without an Administration, there was no registry. People born here lacked tattoos.
Most of the women born in this sector were sterile. There was some kind of herbal concoction sold on the street that alphas could buy to give to babies that sometimes prevented the virus that caused female ovaries to shrivel and the womb to fill with cysts, but there was no vaccine, no proven medicine to address the issue.
There was no mandatory five year school for breed, nor a thirty year king's plan for alphas. There was also no electricity, no mode
rn sewage system. The water had to be farmed, and there was very little decent food.
It was a sector for outlaws and the banished. Once you entered, it was said to be impossible to get back into the rest of the eleven sectors.
Merrick had been returning from his hunt for Sasha when he'd seen a full phalanx of Kane's enforcers walking down the street toward Dover's End. He’d always assumed his brother knew where he was and figured he had finally decided to execute him for his desertion of the King's Army. So, Merrick hid.
News that Kane had killed Maura and seized control of the pub spread quickly through the streets as the most interesting thing to happen in Sector 10 in years. Merrick thought he could stay in the sector, hiding in the warrens until Kane lost interest. But then his bastard brother had sent in hunters.
Merrick had to go where Kane couldn't follow. The enforcers would sniff him out otherwise.
Much later, he was thumbing through newsreels on a barely working data pad when he saw his exalted, perfect older brother had formally bonded with an omega breeder. There were photos of a beautiful woman with wild, just-from-bed-hair down to her waist, wrapped in a dirty looking sheet and standing in front of Kane, who held her shoulders in his hands. She was marked up good, black and blue from the bottom of her ears to where the sheet covered a magnificent pair of tits.
And she was proud. Head high, shoulders back, not ashamed or afraid. Fierce.
That was how Merrick recognized her, like a punch to his solar plexus. It was fierce little Sasha, who wasn't afraid of anything. He’d never known another female who could match that look.
Whenever Merrick had beat a drone for incompetence, Sasha had been there, always ready to take the blows in the drone's place, a hard glint of determination on her baby face.
Merrick had sisters who’d always used a pout and tears to get their way. They’d begged piteously at the most minor of threats. But Sasha only wept for others.
After her maturation, Sasha looked like pictures Merrick had seen of her mother before Edin Dover had ruined the woman. Wrapped in that sheet, he saw big night sky eyes, lips made for cock sucking, and curves that made his hands shake.
She should have been his. She no longer looked anything like the soft, innocent child that had been living and working at Dover's End. This wasn’t the little girl who gently coaxed and encouraged the entire staff into doing her bidding. But he knew. He knew it was the same omega breeder.
Kane had Sasha. He had bonded her. Vid headlines blared that people had witnessed her give him her breeder’s blessing, that it was real, that it could only come from a true bond, that Kane would live forever—long live the Warlord Constantine Kane and his Bride-Mate, Lady Sasha.
Mistakes plagued Merrick's life choices: Ignoring his father's advice, leaving the King’s Army, spending all his credits on whores and alcohol, and finally tormenting the little breeder girl who unknowingly tormented him.
Losing her.
He had done many bad things. Stupid shit. But he couldn't bring himself to rape a child. No matter what her smell did to his head. No matter that her attitude—defiant, proud—when it shouldn't have been, sang to his heart. No matter that she despised him.
His father had warned him that he'd never know true self-control if he didn't do his time in the King's Army. The whole point of the military was to train alphas to control their beasts so that they could work together and not destroy themselves or anyone else.
Even his father would be proud of Merrick for not sneaking into that little breeder girl's room and fucking her senseless. He deserved a damned reward. He deserved her.
He'd been unable to break her, to show her he was bigger and badder. And she had escaped him.
His heart howled.
He threw himself into the madness of the loss. There were few ways for an alpha without affiliation or pack to make credits in Sector 2. Merrick soon found himself in the fighting pits, testing his strength against other alphas and creatures from the Un-lands. He came close to death many times, but always healed.
His mother's love still reached him, her blessing a boon other men lacked.
He fought until he was more animal than man. He fought to prove his strength to himself. He fought until no one would challenge him.
He fought until he’d earned his self-respect back.
The hulking shape of his friend, Bezeck, sat down in the chair across from him, interrupting his thoughts. It creaked under his weight.
While not fat, Bezeck was wide. Short for an alpha, he made up intimidation points with his frightening, powerful appearance.
They'd met in the fighting pits and had become friends after Merrick nearly killed himself winning the match. Bezeck, although having lost, had come out of it fairly unscathed after falling unconscious to a chokehold.
At such an insulting loss, he’d hunted Merrick down for a rematch. When he found the other man with a concussion and several broken bones, he'd laughed at the absurdity of it and declared them friends.
"Did you hear?" he asked, pulling a massive pack off his back and setting it beside him. Bezeck was big enough to carry a house on his back.
"Hear what?"
"The First Administrator's bond-mate has brought another omega into the world. Their third girl, I believe." Bezeck watched him carefully.
He knew Merrick's story. More than a few drunken nights together had loosened their tongues over the years. Merrick had spent a lot of time jealous, angry, and grieving the loss of something he had never had.
Time passed. He grew less emotional.
But his brother’s happiness still made him want to kill.
"I'll leave them to their happiness. We have our own destiny to make, my friend."
Bezeck’s smile showed his stained brown teeth. "Good answer."
"Are you ready to do this with me? You have made a life here. There is nothing where I'm going."
"Stop askin' me that, friend. I had a house and a couple of slaves. Sold the house, takin' the slaves. You got the transport. Let's go, already."
Cut off from the trade and prosperity of the rest of the eleven Sectors, Sector 2 had only one resource for survival: the Un-lands. The Unlivable, Unredeemable, Unlawful, Un-Lands.
The 12 Sectors, where King Rhineholth had established his regime over a hundred years ago, were a part of a larger continent. His King’s Army loosely patrolled the shattered cities and devastated lands around the sectors, taking out roving bands of wild drone cannibals, feral breed, and any other living thing that posed a threat. While the sectors were their own, self-sustaining environment, the Un was dangerous and full of unknowns.
Brave scavengers, or scabs, went out into the Un-lands and brought back resources for trade. They found things from before the great devastation, bringing back animal skins, fruit from ancient orchards no farmer had been able to propagate, and treasures from the past.
The scabs told stories of wild breed tribes that had children. They hadn't seen the children, but they had heard them, smelled them. Breed children.
It could be a myth.
But it was a treasure worth hunting. If there were breed children, there were breeders. Uninfected, healthy, wild breeders.
Merrick had lost his chance with Sasha.
He had screwed up his chance in the 12 Sectors.
But there was hope in the Un, and he was going to find it.
Merrick handed the keys for the transport to Bezeck. "You know where it is. Could you load your stuff, your drones, and keep it running? I need about twenty minutes." He considered, a sneer on his face. "Maybe fifteen."
Thinking of Sasha, Merrick had his eyes on the girl in the cage.
If Bezeck felt surprised, he didn't show it. He knew Merrick never paid for pussy.
"I'll be ready in ten," Bezeck said, heaving his bulk upward.
Ten minutes later, with all their bridges burned, they left the 12 Sectors.
Merrick made sure the breeder cage would stay empty.
Isoe
llen
Isoellen is just your average, aging child-care worker who drinks too much coffee. Her first romance story was written in 1977 at 8 years old after seeing the movie Star Wars. She knew even then that a rogue on the wrong side of the law was a better mate than the boy on the hero’s journey.
The worlds she creates are violent and sensual, but her characters always find beauty in the decay and romance with intimacy. True love and happily ever after’s are guaranteed.
She lives in the Northwest and can be found looking for the piece of paper she wrote her last Facebook password on.
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