by Kathryn Moon
“I think…” I hesitated over my answer as I walked to the car. Home sounded good, but there were alphas in my apartment building because for twenty-six years I’d been a beta, which meant that I was safe from being claimed.
Just normal. Kind of invisible. In a nice way.
“You really didn’t know?” Seth asked, but he wasn’t looking at me like I was stupid. He opened the driver’s side door for me and a wave of warmth from the heaters spilled out. Damn. The Jeep smelled like apple pie too. “Shit,” he said, eyes widening. “I didn’t think of that. I’m sorry.”
I swallowed the drool gathering at the corners of my mouth and forced my knees to lock. I was already wet, what was another hit? “It’s alright. I’ll manage. No, I really didn’t know.”
“You look…” He frowned and scuffed a hand over his face. “I don’t know of any way of talking about a young woman’s age without sounding like a pervert, so I’m just gonna stop there.”
“I’m twenty-six,” I offered. I slid into the driver’s side seat and pressed my lips together, eyes falling shut as Seth's alpha’s scent spun around me, nipping at my skin, licking at private places, coating my lungs. He didn’t look old enough to call me a “young woman,” mid-thirties at the most. Although he was probably assuming I was underage, given the whole ‘suddenly an omega’ thing.
“Damn,” he breathed, letting the cold air mix with the warmth in the car as he stood in shock outside. “Damn. That’s…”
“Not unheard of,” I said, because it was what betas who wanted to be omegas always told themselves and I’d heard it from so many of my friends. I’d always been content as a beta. Guess that showed me.
“That’s rare,” Seth settled on. He shut the door finally and I watched as he slowly rounded the car, brow furrowed in thought. I considered putting the key in the ignition and just driving off. Seth seemed so sweet, I wasn’t even sure he’d try to stop me. Instead, I waited for him. He had a slow rising smile curling his lips as he buckled his seatbelt. “For the record,” he said, leaning in but not crowding me. “Pretty sure my alpha would be hot and stupid for your scent too.”
Briefly. Very, very briefly, I opened my mouth to ask for directions to his alpha. Seth smiled at me, and I got that feeling again that he knew what I was thinking about.
“You’re coming in strong, precious. Think you should go to the Center,” he said.
I sighed and put the key in the ignition, fiddling around in the seat until I felt like I knew my way around the controls. “I think you’re right.”
The Omega Center in the heart of the city would at least know what to do with someone like me. And I would be safe there.
Everything changes now, Baby, I thought. The Omega Center would teach me about my perfume, my heat cycles, about alpha and omega courting. They would also set me up with interviews to find my alpha pack, probably sooner rather than later given my age and the apparent intensity of my perfume. A heat would be coming. And an omega was in for a rough ride if she ran a heat without a pack.
“Everything’s going to be okay, Baby,” Seth said, his voice all honey and gentle. I actually kind of believed him.
I wish you were an alpha, I thought. I didn’t say it out loud though. Just bit my tongue and put the car in gear, heading for downtown.
2
Baby
“Now, when you’ve chosen your pack it doesn’t mean you should feel obligated to bond all its members,” Director Tapp said. She was flanked on the other side of her desk with two other benign faced betas, the three older women smiling down at me.
“Some packs have ten or more alphas,” one of the women, I think her name was Yvonne, informed me.
My eyes widened, and Director Tapp’s throat cleared with a narrow glance at her employee. “Yes, like I said. You aren’t expected to take on the entire pack. However, we would discourage you from pursuing a pack where only one or two alphas are of interest to you, no matter how enticing. It may…irritate dynamics. Our goal here at the Center is to help make connections that are in the best interest to the omega and her future pack.”
I swallowed and nodded, hands twisting in my lap.
The Omega Center had taken me in three nights ago, Seth escorting me up to the door but barred from following me further. A part of me had been pretty tempted to turn around right then. I’d had relationships before with betas, why couldn’t I have one now that I was an omega? Except the reason was obvious. Seth had an alpha, and unless I wanted to be claimed by that alpha, I wasn’t going to get tangled up with their beta.
The Center was nice enough if I’d been in the mood for a retreat. It was clean, designed to be cozy, with close rooms and soft colors and lots of gentle textures. Each day, I’d practiced making a nest in small, bright rooms that smelled too sterile to really feel like home. I’d had my blood levels checked. Filled out forms about my sexual habits and preferences. I was even given options on birth control and ended up covered for the next two years. Just like that.
Finally, I’d been brought here to meet the Director, and all too soon the subject of a pack arrived in my lap.
“Normally you’d have years of visiting us before a heat was on the horizon,” Director Tapp said, her sympathetic smile a little robotic. “But given the…delay in your perfume’s development, and the rate at which your hormones are trying to compensate, the timeline will be considerably accelerated. We could help you medically, numb you through the heat, but we’ve yet to find a way to make the experience…”
“Tolerable,” Yvonne finished for Tapp, earning herself another glare.
Come to think of it, Yvonne was growing on me. At least she was straight forward.
“So I have to find a pack and…bond,” I said, blush rising again as I remembered the order of the words delivered by the old omega.
Sex. Knot. Bite. Sleep. Repeat with every alpha I wanted to be bonded to, a permanent emotional and physical connection.
“You don’t have to bond,” Tapp said leaning forward. “It’s very important you know that. And if you choose a pack, they will be informed as such. A bond should never be rushed, and above all, never forced. Mating isn’t even necessary to see you through the heat,” Tapp said.
Yvonne’s dark eyes rolled at that and she gave me a look that might as well have shouted ‘Yeah, but you’ll beg for it.’ I believed her. I’d been ready to beg Seth for it and he wasn’t even an alpha. Just smelled like one. A perfect one.
Cool it, Baby.
“Any self-respecting alpha has the good sense to restrain his basest urges for that consent,” Tapp continued, and with a lift of her chin, she added. “And we only take on the ones who have that good sense. If you find yourself in heat sooner than ideal, the right pack can keep you comfortable and cared for during a heat without sex.”
“Penetrative, at least,” Yvonne said.
And this time Tapp nodded her head in agreement.
I blinked. I knew omegas were pampered, that they received gifts in courting from their alphas and even afterward. But no one had said anything about an alpha keeping a lid on his knot for the sake of an omega. That was…promising.
And appealing. I loved foreplay.
“Okay so… do I meet them here, or…?”
“No, that would be a feeding frenzy,” Yvonne scoffed.
“If you would please bring us the binders,” Tapp snapped, reaching a hand up and smoothing back gray-streaked, black hair.
The women at either side of her jumped to obey, crossing to a bookshelf and pulling down two identical binders.
“Scent cards,” Tapp explained. “We’ll narrow down who you meet in this way. It’s…expedient.”
My eyes grew wide as one of the black binders thunked down in front of me. I opened it and found plastic sealed pages with white cards. The first page was labeled Pack 28026 .
No information about the men. Just numbers and scents.
“It seems impersonal, I know. But science guarantees that if you
don’t enjoy the scent, you certainly won’t enjoy the alpha,” Tapp said.
“Okay. Right, so I just…get sniffing then?” I asked.
The three women nodded in confirmation.
I snapped the second binder shut and raised my fingertips to my temples, rubbing the pinching headache that had settled in about halfway through the first collection of packs.
One. I’d found one pack. I’d only marked them because they were manageable, and that was the best I’d found of all four hundred pack scent card collections.
One pack.
Maybe I wasn’t an omega. Or maybe, since I was so late to it, I was just broken.
You liked apple pie, I reminded myself.
I wish I’d thought to get Seth's number. Right now, not a single other alpha in Tapp’s massive collection even compared to Seth's.
“Well… we have one,” Tapp said frowning.
I debated telling her how not gung-ho I was about the pack. Their scents weren’t abrasive, but they reminded me of air fresheners. Pleasant, but synthetic.
“I do have one more binder,” she mused.
I groaned and then slapped my hand over my mouth as her eyes flicked to mine. “Sorry. I know you’re trying to help.”
“Most of our current packs are young, newly formed, eager to find their omegas. However, I keep old files on hand, lapsed subscriptions and the like. And…being older than our usual omega in need of courting, you may appreciate a more mature pack.”
I sat up slightly. Mature sounded nice. “Lapsed subscriptions?” I asked.
Tapp’s lips pursed. “As I said, we don’t take on all packs in need of an omega. There are interviews and background checks and investigations. All those things require fees.”
Alphas paid, I realize. Alphas paid to be in those black binders. And when they stopped paying…
What a fucking system.
I sat up straighter and rolled my shoulders. “Alright. Bring it to me.”
Yvonne yawned and lazed her way out of an armchair in the corner of the room. She brought a red binder down from the shelf and passed it into my hands. The pages were identical for the most part to the black binders, just new numbers assigned to the packs. I stretched my arms over my head, twisted my torso as if I were getting ready to run a marathon, and Yvonne snorted softly.
Time to give these lapsed packs a chance.
Aggressive cinnamon.
Play-doh.
Freshly mown grass that made me want to sneeze.
On and on it went. Some scents were too floral, some too sweet, some too heavy.
Tobacco before it was smoked… I hesitated on that. It was natural, and while not a scent I might choose for myself, it wasn’t totally unpleasant. Another in the pack was yeasty like unbaked bread. Another smelled like the air after a storm. Nothing that made me squirm and blush and feel hot, but nothing that made my nose wrinkle. And there were only five alphas in the pack which sounded…less intimidating than most of the packs I’d gone through. I nodded to Tapp and she took the page out of the binder, a satisfied smile spreading across her lips.
I continued, flicking through the pages quickly. By now, I’d learned that if I really hated one scent in a pack, I didn’t really care for any of the others either. It made the work a little faster. I was almost to the end of the binder when it hit me.
Buttery pastry. Tart apples. Caramel. Cardamom and cinnamon. A whimper escaped my lips and my thighs squeezed together. Around the room, the betas tensed.
This was him. Seth's alpha. Oh fuck, he smelled just as good as he had on his beta. I wanted to eat the damn cardboard. I licked my lips and reached into the sleeve for the next card. There were a full thirteen cards which was intimidating until…
Fuck. Black coffee, sweet and bitter and rich. My mouth was watering.
Another was soapy but clean, not my favorite, but as good if not better than the other two packs I’d chosen.
The fourth actually made me wet, arousal blooming in my core in a way I couldn’t explain as I sucked down a deep whiff of a dark woods and something gingery in the background.
I wanted to surround myself with these men. I wanted these men to open the door of the office and proceed to bend me over Tapp’s desk. If they had, if they’d just appeared, I would’ve let them claim me in that instant. I grabbed another card and was relieved to find the comforting but not brain-melting scent of wool, like a blanket wrapping me in a hug.
“That is the look of an omega who has found a potential pack,” Tapp said, grinning with full sincerity finally as I released a moan at the scent of leather and sweet dark cherries.
“Yes,” I agreed breathless. Could I leave now? I needed… I needed some fucking alone time. I wanted to grab my favorites of this pack’s scent cards and carry them upstairs to my temporary bedroom with me and press them under my nose as I rubbed out however many orgasms were ready and simmering under my skin. It was almost terrifying.
“We’ll make the calls,” Tapp said.
I picked up the apple pie again and took another whiff. This was definitely Seth's alpha. I’d smelled freaking hundreds of alphas and not one of them was similar to the other. My heart flipped at the thought of seeing the beta again. I was less sure what I was more excited about. Finding a pack, finding alphas that drove me into a lust I’d never known before, or curling into the side of the beta who’d seen me to safety when I needed exactly that.
If Seth was a part of this pack, then this was the pack I wanted. Those mouth-watering alpha scents would just be a bonus.
I resisted the urge to pick up the gray velvet settee pillow of the Center’s sitting room and hide behind it. Across the coffee table from me the elegant older omega, Rebecca, hid her smile behind her demitasse cup of sipping chocolate. The fist she’d just used to demonstrate the act of knotting lowered to her lap and smoothed at her elegant skirt.
“If you’re thinking of yourself in terms of being a beta, I’m sure it sounds uncomfortable. But it’s really very…pleasant,” she said, with a soft shrug of her shoulder.
Rebecca was my ‘omega mentor’ for the afternoon, here to answer any of my questions. Except I was discovering that the questions I had were far too embarrassing to bring to this stylish stranger. She had a sleek head of steel gray hair cropped at an angle along her jaw and warm brown skin and eyes. She was dressed in a silky wrap dress with a plush shawl wrapped around her and tall black boots. This was an omega that had found herself an extremely well off pack and was enjoying the benefits of that life.
“And…how long does the heat go on?” I asked
Rebecca’s head tilted and her eyes narrowed in thought, lips pursing. “Oh, it’s been a while. They were longer when I was younger, starting with just feeling over-sensitive and maybe a little extra… interested in my alphas.” She smiled faintly. “It was usually like that for a week or so. I wanted to nest, wanted affection. The real heat, the height of it, is only a few days. Maybe a week.”
My eyebrows ticked up. “Days of…”
“Insatiable sexual appetite, yes,” Rebecca said, and I got the feeling she was laughing at me a little.
Still. I was often down for a round two but never days of sex.
“I was almost nineteen when I finally started perfuming,” Rebecca mentioned. “I think that’s why they asked me to come speak with you specifically. Normally they bring someone closer to your age in.”
“So it was a surprise for you too?” I asked.
She hummed and glanced at her lap, fingers playing absently with her rings. “Well, it wasn’t unheard of in my family. I was waiting and… I suppose I was preparing not to be an omega. So more aware of the possibility than you. But I had… explored my sexuality some before it finally hit. Even knowing what to expect, my first heat was a shift in perspective. Just be open to what you’re feeling.”
I thought of my reaction to Seth and the alpha scent he’d carried, the ones I’d chosen from the red binder. “Did you have umm… like a he
ightened response to any alpha scents? Not just that you liked them, but that they made you…” I trailed off, cheeks blushing all over again.
Rebecca’s eyes widened slightly, drifting over my shoulder to gaze unseeing at the wall behind me. “I did, yes.”
“Your pack?”
There was no mistaking the startled expression on her face in response to my simple question and it took her several attempts, lips parting and then pressing shut again before she spoke. “No. No, I liked my packs scents. But they weren’t the most powerful attraction I encountered when I first perfumed.”
That surprised me. I’d only agreed to consider three packs because Director Tapp said it was protocol. “Why? What made you change your mind? Were the alphas awful?”
“No, they were wonderful,” Rebecca said, her voice shrinking and face falling. She took a deep breath, lifting a shaking hand to push her hair back from her face. “They were a young pack and… and there was no nest. No stability. We courted, I thought I was decided, but when my heat came it was just too crowded in their apartment. Too loud in the city. I was uncomfortable and feeling miserable and there was so little they could do for me. I’m sure it sounds silly, but our biology can be an incredible force in our happiness and I decided to let mine rule the decision.”
An ache echoed in her face and I regretted pushing the question. I wondered if she regretted her decision to leave the young pack. I cleared my throat and searched for a new topic so she could leave the painful one behind.
“And the bonds? What are they really?”
I thought for a moment she was still lost in old memories, but slowly her expression cleared and a soft smile spread over her lips. “They’re either the best or the worst of it. If you’ve found the right pack, it’s like all the comfort your alpha can give you in person suddenly becomes part of your DNA. If you choose wrong, I’ve heard it leaves you with a sense of being crowded or always having someone looking over your shoulder.”