by Jordan Reece
Ruvya had noticed the tattoos as well. She frowned.
Jayle’s mind took the snapshot. Perturbed, he stood.
The kid lunged forward as the alpha got down from the dais. A warrior knocked the feet out from under him. Taken down to the floor, the boy growled and struggled on his knees, but got nowhere. The warriors hadn’t released his arms.
“Jayle,” Ruvya said. “These are Seeling royal wedding symbols he has, only given to one marrying a pack leader. Therwin told me about their traditions once.”
That flew in the face of everything Jayle had been taught of Seeling ways. They considered the Seven Valleys pack beneath them. None would have taken a captive as a partner, let alone the alpha! This could only be a Seeling in front of him. Yet the boy’s scent was the familiar scent of someone who had grown up in the Seven Valleys, who had the blood of the pack flowing in his veins. He was no Seeling.
There was something else familiar about that scent. Something that bothered Jayle intensely. Everything about this was bothering him.
Gently, he said, “My name is Commander Jayle Struth, the alpha of the Seven Valleys pack. You’re home now. What’s your name, boy? Who are your people?”
The answer was a snarl.
“Has he said anything intelligible since you caught him?” Jayle queried of the warriors bracing the boy.
“Nothing, sir,” one responded. “Just grunts and growls, and at times he shrieks. He never shifted into his wolf either.”
Jayle’s face fell.
“What is it?” Ruvya asked.
The problem had abruptly come clear to Jayle with all the impact of a kick to the groin. “The Seeling alpha tried to imprint on him within the last few days. Against his will. He isn’t crazy, or delayed. It’s made him feral.”
There was no masking the appall on every face. There were things one simply didn’t do, and to force an imprinting . . . There was no code or law against it, because it didn’t happen in the Seven Valleys. It didn’t happen anywhere. The most backwards, regressive packs of wolves, and there were a number of them, would cringe at the very idea. To have a resisting mind on one end of the bond interfered with the process, and judging by exactly how feral it had made him, this young man resisted that despicable Godwin Cleakley for all he was worth.
“That means he’s an . . .” Ruvya trailed off. A Seven Valleys omega. When there weren’t any, not now. How had this one escaped notice? There hadn’t been an omega since . . .
Jayle reached down and took a fistful of that awful, stringy hair. A wig came off in his hand, and a net beneath it. Sweaty locks of rich mahogany hair spilled out over those tattooed shoulders and down the boy’s back.
This was impossible. Absolutely absurd.
Jayle’s heart thumped painfully against his ribs. “Willow?” he whispered, trying to see his betrothed hidden under all of the ridiculous cosmetics and the swollen nose. “Will?”
It couldn’t be.
It was.
He was dead.
He was alive, and still struggling to free himself.
“Let him go!” Jayle roared at the top of his lungs. The Elite obeyed at once, so startled at his ferocity that they both dropped Willow’s arms and stepped back. Rather than scrambling up to his feet to flee, Willow sank in on himself wearily.
Willow. That sweet, stubborn, defiant, beautiful boy at the Promise riverside celebration . . . The two of them had only spoken for a couple of minutes, but he was never far from Jayle’s thoughts after that.
Hollowly, Jayle said, “His name is Willowmark Augustine, son of Oliver and Noreen Augustine, and he’s twenty-three.” It was clear to him why they had mistaken Willow for younger than he truly was; age could only be guessed at in this bizarre get-up, and the years of captivity had thinned him to near gauntness. He also had the typically smaller omega frame. There was nothing curvy or in any way womanish about him; he was just built to a different scale. Five-eight to Jayle’s six-three, compact, wiry muscles to Jayle’s larger ones. Less body hair, too.
Jayle was going to wash off every trace of the makeup and give him a hot bath personally, and have a servant toss these insulting, clownish garments in the fire where they belonged. He wanted food and water brought from the kitchen to his living quarters, and the best doctors from Clouharrow Hospital to be arriving at the Star within thirty minutes, their other patients be damned. Shouting one order after another, his warriors scurried out of the chambers to fulfill them.
Willow sat there on his folded legs, blinking heavily. The grass skirt rustled.
Forcing him to imprint! Jayle swallowed down on the rising tide of his fury as he knelt in front of Willow. This was the stuff of nightmares, tall tales, myths. Nobody did these things! Though he had seen the nearly unfathomable depths to which Seeling ugliness and cruelty ran, still, still he had never dreamed it could go this far.
They had stolen Jayle’s omega. Stolen him, worked him and starved him, and once they found out what he was, their alpha Godwin married him and tried to make Willow his. His mate. His lover. His bearer of a child. Jayle had killed that grizzly old alpha in the last battle, but wished to go back in time and do it again.
The feral state would subside, or it did in the stories, but it took time. Time and care, peace and quiet. Having the war camp attacked, being pursued through the woods, none of that had helped Willow’s mental state improve. It probably made it a lot worse.
Tears suddenly stung in Jayle’s eyes. He didn’t rub them away. Alone, or with his betrothed omega, were the only times he did not have to hold back what he was feeling. “Willow?” he tried again. “It’s me, Jayle. Do you remember me?”
There was no response. There was no sign that Willow heard.
Jayle would do anything under the sun to bring Willow back. To fix this. No one was ever going to hurt him again.
He touched the omega’s dirty, bloody hand.
It had been too much. All of it had been too much. Willow unfolded at that touch like a crumpling house of cards, and Jayle caught him as he collapsed.
Chapter Two
What’s your name, boy? Who are your people?
When I come back here, boy, I’m going to rip your ass apart!
He remembered the proud house in Treboro beside the rushing river, tall white columns and bending willows, the fretwork patterns on the front doors and the flickering silver fish who swam deep in the water. His bed on the second floor had a canopy arched like a wave rolling to shore, and as he grew, he stretched up his feet in the night and kicked free the slats that held up the canopy.
His mother fixed the slats in the morning, and her scolding was a dove’s gentle coo. Willow, for shame! Don’t you like beautiful things?
He did. He didn’t.
He did not want to be an omega.
His father hadn’t known until Willow’s scent changed, a temporary flood of hormones spurring him at the age of six onto a different track from his classroom of beta peers. His mother claimed she had always known since she carried him in her womb. Though he was her first and only child and she had nothing for comparison, she’d sensed what he would be. It was why he was born into softness, why she battled his father to name him Willowmark as a squalling infant instead of just plain old Mark. She knew. Somehow.
An omega boy’s name in the Seven Valleys traditionally reflected his two sides. He was born male, yet when he was all grown up, he would have some abilities of a female. And so it was with the name of an omega boy once his nature was known. At times as a child he padded after his mother spouting other combined names that his young, naughty mind had sewn together. Why was he named Willowmark? Why not Isabert? Abigerald? Declair? Ameliam? She just laughed, especially at the awful name of Isabert and the surprisingly mellifluous Ameliam, and sent him on his way. Back to dance practice or his nanny, back to his books and tutors, back to the stylist so his long hair could be combed and plaited.
Although his memories of his kindergarten class grew foggy, he miss
ed going to school. An omega was traditionally taught at home with a curriculum and tutors supplied by the Star. Willow needed to learn different things from the beta boys and girls. To read and to figure, that was the same, but comportment and etiquette, carriage and posture, how to mingle at parties and which fork to use when, the basics of pack law so he could support the alpha one day in his judgments . . . It was a strict regimen of lessons and appointments and practices and worksheets until he was sick clean through of omegas and alphas and pack rule and everything else.
He wanted to be a racecar driver. Or a garbage man. Or to serve on the alpha’s Elite Guard! Joining the Elite was what all of the children in his kindergarten dreamed of doing one day, or had dreamed of doing at the time Willow was taken out of school. Elite meant you were strong and fast, and that your wolf was super scary. It meant you wore shiny armor and people got out of your way when they saw it gleaming in the sunlight.
Willow had velvets to wear instead. His wardrobe overflowed with velvets and silks, vests with brocade and linen undershirts, fur-trimmed coats, belts tooled in silver, breeches and moccasins and more. Once he swiped a pair of jeans and a rude T-shirt off a neighbor’s laundry line and nearly gave his parents a heart attack when he wore them around the house.
They were proud of their son being an omega. It was an honor. When he turned twenty-one, he would marry the Seven Valleys alpha and bear his children, and there was a much greater possibility of Willow producing an alpha son than there was in leaving it to chance among the betas. Kamden Delario was the alpha commander back then, and his omega, Lord Annstone Rainger, had been infertile. It was a tragedy beyond compare. For some time after learning this, Willow lived in horror that he was marrying a man almost four decades his senior, but he was reassured that no, no, there was a young alpha now, a boy only three years older than Willow who had been born by luck to betas, and it was to him that Willow would one day be given.
Willow had a tantrum anyway. He wanted to be an Elite. But omegas were not eligible to serve in the military, not in the Elite, nor in the enlisted ranks. They weren’t suited to fighting. They had one role.
One. He felt it closing around his neck at night like a noose.
He wasn’t going to like this alpha boy, whose face in Willow’s imaginings took on the features of a homely bully from his kindergarten year. A mocking, ferret-faced snot who stole the cookies out of lunchboxes and shoved girls on the playground, a jackal who teased and sneered and made life a misery for everyone, that was Willow’s future husband. And Willow would love him regardless, coaxed to do so because of the imprint, and the alpha would love him back for the same reason. Willow was going to follow two steps behind his alpha apologizing for his rudeness for the rest of his life, and feel ashamed beneath his love, and for it.
Kneel here on the pillow. I said KNEEL, you little he-bitch!
Willow sat up with a gasp.
He was in a bed. There were so many blankets piled atop him that he was coated in sweat, which dampened the thin fabric of the nightshirt he wore. The nightshirt was not his, nor did the bed have a canopy. Dazed, he looked around the room in bewilderment.
It was a luxurious yet off-kilter space, filled with beautifully crafted wooden furniture and the floor strewn with Turkish rugs. From the walls hung tapestries of medieval hunting scenes, gardens and villas, intricate patterns, and ships abreast of stormy seas. There were so many tapestries along three of the walls that they overlapped at the edges, and one hung partially in the way of the closed door. Two other doors were open and unimpeded, one to a bathroom, and another to a side room.
The differing styles of the tapestries were jarring when put all together. The random color scheme on the walls also conflicted with the rugs, all of which conflicted with one another. Every piece was stunning individually, yet combined it was enough to make one flinch.
The room overflowed in small statuary, everything from bronze elephants and fawns at rest to reproductions of the classics. Michelangelo’s David stood in a corner, squaring off with the stalking wolves of Romulus and Remus upon a side table; a chariot drew Roman warriors on the dresser accompanied by depictions of Rodin’s Thinker and Da Vinci’s Universal Man. Upon the nightstand to Willow’s left was an eight-inch-tall marble Venus rising from an alabaster bath.
Whose room was this? Feeling his spine weaken and his muscles turn to jelly, he slipped back into the pillows. The sole place in this room not crowded with statues and tapestries was the ceiling.
Oh God.
Fear spiked through him. This had to be Godwin’s room in the alpha commander’s estate within Nicoro. The last battle was over, and they had carried Willow here insensible.
They had been chasing him in the mountains . . . A dim memory came to mind of the faceless ones who pursued Willow through the trees. He could not say if the chase had lasted five hours or five minutes or five days. The memory contained only countless swells of green trees beyond innumerable rocky ridges, and when he looked back to his hunters for their faces, he lost sight of the trees and ground. When he looked too long at the trees ahead, his hearing muted to the emptiness of outer space; smell too deeply for scents and his vision blacked to nothingness.
It was madness. Utter madness. Cold and heat, noise and silence, light and dark all were trading places nonsensically within him and outside of him. This kaleidoscope of insanity had Willow trapped at its center as a fly in a spider’s web. He didn’t know why he was running or who was chasing him, where he had come from or where he was going, but he ran with the fires of hell swallowing up the land at his back.
And somehow he’d ended up in this bizarre room. He had to get out of here.
His body ached. Had Godwin . . . no. Willow didn’t feel like he’d been used for sex. The ache was primarily in his legs and feet. Rolling onto his side to face the nightstand, the exertion it took left him out of breath.
There was a tiny button on the outside of the bath. This reproduction of Venus was not quite right in its depiction, though from what he recalled of his art history studies, there were multiple versions. She was looking straight out to the bed with a small, knowing smile as she covered her breasts, and he could not recall any version that included this shallow, bowl-like bathtub.
Curiosity getting the better of him, and unable to do much more than lay here for the moment, he touched the button. The tiny bowl instantly filled with blue goo, just enough to scrape out with a few fingers. It was lube.
Ugh. Clever, very clever to conceal it so, but revolting. It renewed his desire to get his strength back and find a way out of this place. Godwin had bragged about his royal home many times to Willow, how large it was and how well guarded even in peacetime. The finery in this room was surprising, as Willow had not taken the Seeling alpha for one with any knowledge of, or simply appreciation for, art. The man was interested in weaponry and battle strategies, and guzzling ale as he cheered on his betas scuffling in the dirt. He was loud and crude at the best of times, mean in his humor and meaner in his anger, and disgusting at a table over his meal. Forgoing the cutlery for his fingers and the napkin for his shirt sleeve, his mouth open as he chewed and talked, he belched and farted and interrupted conversations at his leisure. Wine was always slopping over his fingers from a carelessly held goblet, staining his clothes and the tablecloth. To watch him was to lose one’s appetite, and his warriors ate in exactly the same way. They were hogs at a trough, snorting and gulping and slurping and coming to blows over the last piece of meat in the serving dish.
But Godwin, Godwin was the worst of all. His eyes had crawled over Willow’s body in open lust the day the omega was brought to him, and he was wholly indifferent to the very obvious fact that Willow’s eyes did not do that upon him. The only opinion that mattered was the alpha’s. To rule the Seeling pack was to be relieved of all propriety and freed from criticism; as such, Godwin ate how he liked and fucked whoever he pleased and took advice from no one save himself.
Willow shou
ld have attended more keenly to Godwin’s bragging about this estate. Then he might know a way to escape it. He managed to get into a sitting position for a second time, and swung his legs over the side of the bed. Gingerly, he tested them to see if they would hold his weight.
They did. Aching fiercely, but they did. Using the numerous pieces of furniture for assistance, he made his way over to the one wall not layered in tapestries. Windows and a glass door were shielded in filmy curtains, one of which he edged aside. Then he sank back in disappointment.
Beyond the door was a balcony. Below it, square pillars framed a lush and fully enclosed courtyard of tropical plants and mosaic tiles. It was brilliant with sunlight. Most of the rooms on the first and second floors had their curtains drawn, blocking his view; one with open curtains straight across from Willow’s location was a study. A maid was at work within it, rubbing a rag over a glass lamp.
This was not a way out. He could haul himself up to the roof to get his bearings, but he did not think he had the strength. Just to stand took concentration.
What’s your name, boy? Who are your people?
Godwin had demanded his name, and scoffed at the answer. He had never asked the identity of Willow’s people. Willow heard the voice in his head, Godwin’s, Godwin’s and some other man’s, joining and splitting, joining and . . .
He caught himself on the handle of the door, which broke his fall. Pushing himself upright, he turned around. Again this room surprised him, the oddball assortment of statues, rugs, and tapestries, all of it costly and exquisite, yet none of it that belonged in the same space.
Out. Out!
Glancing into the side room, he determined that it as well was not a way out. No, this was a private sitting room with a desk covered in papers and a sofa with a pillow and rumpled blanket on it. A person had slept there recently. There might have been another door beneath the tapestries, which stretched from ceiling to floor, but he wasn’t going in to search. The statuary in there was jumbled up in a corner. Somebody had wanted it out of the way.