Page 1

Chapter One

Sloane

S o this was a very, very bad idea.

“C’mon, Sloane,” Emma, my younger sister, insisted, grabbing my arm and tugging me forward. She was only a tiny thing, wearing stilt-like heels and a little sequinned dress, but she was strong as a bloody ox.

Why was I here again? Yeah, that was right—Emma’s birthday.

She’d been in my ear for weeks and had finally worn me down.

Once I’d shown signs of weakening, it had been full steam ahead.

I’d lost track of how many people she had texted over the intervening days.

It was only now, as I stood on the threshold of the alpha controlled territory, that the enormity hit me slap bang between the eyes.

I had a comfort zone… I couldn’t even see the bloody thing from here.

“Cut it out, Em! You might be able to walk on these shoes, but I’m about to fall on my face,” I shot back, trying to pull free and keep my balance at the same time.

“Hurry up!” Jewel, my sister’s best friend, insisted, waving us over frantically as it felt like half the beta community of our fair city converged on a far from salubrious gate.

With chain link fencing, razor wire on the top, and both parts beginning to rust, it wasn’t the kind of place that screamed enter and be welcome!

Yet as I looked across the crowds, having wrenched my arm back from Em, I saw that plenty of people were willing to risk it.

This was Desparion, aka the Desparion, where the biggest, baddest, least controllable members of the community lived.

You’d think with all those qualities they’d be running the world, but their notorious inability to act rationally disqualified that.

Anyway, there were way more of us betas than there were of them.

We also had guns and an army to back us up, whereas they only had muscle and extreme strength.

We funnelled the weakest of us, the omegas, into Desparion, and that kept them happy.

In the end, that was what alphas wanted the most—their mates.

* * *

Entering alpha territory was dangerous, we’d had the message pounded into our heads at school, at home, and by the media every damn day, yet for some people, that proved to contain a perverse kind of attraction.

People like me.

“You’re eager tonight,” a man, an alpha, said on the other side of the fence.

He grinned as he went to unlock the gate, seemingly conscious that every beta eye was trained on him, and why not?

He was so damn different as to seem like a whole other species.

Massively tall, getting close to seven feet, shoulders that were so broad, the artificial lights of Desparion beyond were momentarily blocked.

And muscles, so many muscles as he worked the key in the lock until it popped open, pulling the chain free.

I wasn’t alone in following the flex of those muscular forearms as he wrapped the metal links around his fist.

“Mummy, I would like one of those very much, because I have been a very good boy.”

My head jerked up to see the speaker was standing beside me, a man wearing a pair of bespoke jeans, personally beaten up to look like they’d been worn by several generations, and a white linen shirt open at the neck.

He turned and grinned at me, flashing those bright white teeth, tossing his loose dark curls, until I punched him in the arm.

“Where the hell have you been? It doesn’t take that long to park a car,” I said.

He’d dropped us off because Em was wearing high heels, and while she could dance all night in them, walking the small distance from the carparks to the gate was beyond a birthday girl.

“Jesus, Jude, I’ve been trying to keep a lid on those two…

” My voice trailed away as we both turned back to the gate and saw that amongst the people stumbling through were Em and Jewel. “Oh crap…”

Jude’s hand slapped down on my arm when I sucked a breath in, right about to call their names across the crowd.

“So the Mummy thing was supposed to be funny and kinda kinky,” he said in a low tone, “not the way you’re going to act tonight. Your sister is a big girl.”

“Are you serious?”

“And perfectly capable of looking after herself,” Jude insisted.

“Really? Like that time she managed to get an invite to a poker game with those bikers? Or when she was hanging out with those guys who turned out to be human traffickers?”

His face fell, a small frown forming.

“Shit, I forgot about that. But, Sloane, you can’t be your sister’s keeper for the rest of her life. Just because…”

His words faltered as I stared at him, both of us seeing it—the moment my parents had been lowered into the ground, victims of a horrific car crash.

There were no open caskets, no final goodbyes, just the police at our door, informing us of ‘our loss,’ endless lawyers and discussions about who got what, and me fighting my family to take control of my parent’s very lucrative estate.

Our eyes shifted to where the two girls had wandered, drawn in closer by the tawdry glitz and exotic air of danger that The Strip, a long street of alpha run clubs and pubs within their zone, used to entice and intoxicate the more civilised beta population.

All around the world, betas were solid, dependable, rational people, focussed on building our economies and our civilisations. Keeping order, wealth, success, those were the cornerstones of beta society, and they were the enemies of it.

Alphas and omegas.

Jude made an appreciative little purr as we walked through the gate into the area cordoned off from the rest of the city, where the alphas were left to live whatever brand of lawless bullshit they claimed their instincts dictated.

The man at the entrance, the alpha, his brown eyes met Jude’s, my friend’s close regard pulling an amused snort from him as we passed, but then he saw me draw my clutch closer, my steps getting faster, and all humour was washed away.

Instead, deep brown eyes stared into mine, making it very clear he saw exactly what I’d done and why, as well as how he felt about that.

I felt a flush, at the attention, at his expression, at the fact I was acting like all the other bigoted arseholes in this city.

As I was about to yank my eyes away and walk past with my nose in the air, like any other over bred beta, something odd happened.

A heat pooled in his eyes, his nostrils flaring, that smile returning but in quite a different form.

This one was slow, sly, full of dark promises and even darker pleasures.

“Girl, Daddy’s got his eyes on you,” Jude said, leaning in close. “I came here to get my knot on, but damn if the hottest specimen in this cage ain’t looking at you.”

“Shut up,” I snarled, wresting my eyes away. “And how the hell are you getting a knot…?”

I didn’t finish the sentence because shit, I’d just realised exactly what I was asking, Jude grinning in response. He thought me a ridiculous prude, but that was mostly because he was an unmitigated slut. His words, not mine.

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way. And lube—lots of lube.

This boy I was seeing for a while had this alpha fetish, started ‘training’ me to take the knot of this freaking huge dildo.

” His expression grew lazy and well satisfied.

“First, I signed up because hey, you want to spend hours teasing my hole, I’m down. But then…”

His eyes roamed across what we could see of The Strip, bright lights and gaudy paint all designed to draw us here or there to drink, to spend all our hard-earned dollars, to step beyond the tight constraints of our little beta lives and walk on the wild side.

“But then it got weird and the role play was too involved and he was totally into the idea of me being an omega, which I’m not.

” A little humph in his tone. “But I figured while we’re down here, I could see about broadening my horizons somewhat.

Which it looks like those silly girls have a head start on. ”

I stiffened, saw three massive men towering over my sister and her friend, moving slowly and surely closer, hemming them in. And Em? She was twirling her hair, giggling, reaching out to put her hand?—

“Shit!” I yelped, striding forward, finding my way to her side in a matter of seconds. “Em, I’m dying for a vodka tonic. I found Jude, so let’s go?”

She took a few heartbeats to recognise me, her focus entirely captured by the alphas standing around her, and I understood why.

A quick glance up, and I felt like I’d been scalded by hot water.

We might be betas, but even we were susceptible to that alpha allure.

All that power, all that intensity, it radiated off them, pinning you to the spot, making you all too aware of them and their interest. It made you want more, I knew that, dragging my eyes down, even while feeling a burning need to preen, posture, try and capture their attention.

Just like Jude was doing right now.

He ambled up, placing a hand on the nearest guy, one with a ragged shock of dark blond hair.

“Well, hello there, handsome.”

The massive man’s lips twisted into a smile almost identical to the door alpha’s. He took in Jude’s trim form— “You could bounce a twenty-cent piece off this arse, love,” he’d told me—with a kind of feral hunger that grew and grew.

“And who are you, pretty?” the alpha asked in a low rumble.

“Going is what we are,” I insisted as I linked arms with Jude and Em, leaving Jewel to stumble after us, her eyes trained over her shoulder.

* * *

Jace

“Nice collection of victims—I mean, opportunities,” Ryder said as he joined me at the gate.

I cut him a glare, hardly noticing the sea of bodies rolling past, every one of them with their bug-eyes trained on Ryder and me.

Shock.

Speculation

And open lust.

Yeah, mostly the lust. They wanted to try out an alpha cock, see if it really was as big as those illegal videos they’d been watching.

It was.