Page 2 of Rogue If You Want To (Fur-Ever Mountain Pack #2)

OTTO

“Otto,” Beta James called out the door. “Otto.”

I knew that sitting on the balcony, ignoring my father’s Beta, wasn’t going to get me very far. Still, I closed my eyes, pretending I was in tune with nature. Listening to the sounds of our bevy lands, just soaking it all in.

I wasn’t. I was hiding.

Most days everyone left me alone when I was like this.

One of the greatest Alphas of our bevy, from many generations ago, the majority of his rule outside like this…

listening to the world around him. My father believed that meant maybe I’d one day be on the same path.

Either that or I thought it would be my fail, and he was down with that too.

“Otto, Alpha says that you are to meet Lutris now in the garden.”

I opened my eyes. “Understood. I’ll be there momentarily.”

“You want me to tell the Alpha that you’re going to be a minute? Is that what you just meant?”

That had been neither what I said, nor what I meant, and he knew it.

No one would call my father, our Alpha, a kind, gentle, or wise leader.

He suffered from predator envy and tried to rule in the way of wolf packs from years gone by.

He was the reason so many of us now referred to the bevy as pack.

If he caught us using a “weak” name such as bevy, we were punished. He was pretty messed up.

I jumped up. The last thing I needed to do was piss off my father. “No, I’m coming with you.”

My father was cruel to my twin and me on a good day. Pissing him off was the last thing I should be doing, especially when it was so easily avoidable.

Lutris, my twin brother, and I were the only children of our pack Alpha, and as such, one of us would eventually take his place. Fate had been cruel to us like that.

In our pack histories, there had often been multiples born of the Alpha pair, first one born, then a few minutes later the other, making it easy to know who was the next heir apparent.

But in our case, our omega father was unable to give birth…

his heart not able to handle labor. When he took his last breath, the doctors removed us via C-section, making it impossible to determine who was “supposed to be” born first. And in otter bevies, it went to first born, no matter the designation.

How nice it would’ve been to have been born a wolf, where my being an omega meant my alpha twin was next in line by default.

Fate stole both our omega father and our childhood that day.

It would’ve been so much easier if our Alpha father had just declared one of us first. The healer would’ve stayed quiet or lost his life. And it wasn’t that my father was against lying. He used it as a political tactic often. Lutris and I wouldn’t have had to know.

Instead, we’d been raised to be rivals, preparing for the day when we will fight to the death for his job… a job I do not want.

I followed the Beta downstairs and into the garden, where my brother was already standing, his clothes off, his eyes already showing his beast.

This entire thing was ridiculous.

We were otters, for goodness’ sake. It wasn’t like we were natural predators who lived for the kill. Our beasts were opportunistic predators… aka lazy predators. We weren’t craving the hunt.

But no, somewhere in our history, they decided this was the way to go, that we would act like wolves or bears or lions. Such bullshit.

“You wish to see me, Father?”

“I ordered to see you, Otto. I ordered to see you ten minutes ago. Now hurry up and get in the center.”

His mood was worse than I feared. Fabulous.

I threw my clothes off and got in the ring he had laid out in stone for us when we were barely toddling. I wasn’t in the mood for this, but I had to be careful. If my father saw me throwing it, the repercussions would be grim.

All I needed to do was buy time. Buy time until I could figure a way for us to get out of this mess. I refused to fight my brother to the death, and the only way to prevent it was to get out before that day came.

My brother wanted to be Alpha more than he wanted a mate, more than he wanted riches, more than he even wanted his prized motorcycle. To him, power was a drug. He wanted it so badly that it impacted every single aspect of his life. It was sad more than anything.

I often wondered what he would’ve been like if we had been raised like normal siblings.

Would we have been best friends? Would we have been opposites?

One of us all about schooling and the other all about sports?

Would we have been those twins who were so in tune with each other they knew when the other was hurt?

We’d never know.

All of my earliest memories involved my father teaching us how to be leaders. When we were very young, too young to shift, it was memorizing from our law books. We didn’t have a single idea what any of those words meant, but every day, we had a new passage to recite. And now I knew it all verbatim.

All those hours I could’ve been playing as a child, studying as a teen, making something of my life as an adult—wasted on memorizing a stupid book that meant nothing to me. The only benefit was that I might find a passage that could get me out of this mess. So far, that hadn’t happened.

“Today, you’re racing to the river and back.” My father looked oh-so-pleased with himself.

The “contest” was so deceptive. True, my father’s words were exactly what was happening…

we would race. But what he didn’t say, what he didn’t need to say, was that the race had no rules.

It wasn’t me running as fast as I could to get to the river, dunk in, and run back.

It was me doing that while trying to thwart my brother’s attempt to harm me along the way.

And worse than that, I had to pretend to try to harm him.

“Lutris, please stand next to your brother.”

He came over and accidentally on purpose shoulder-slammed me on the way.

“Daydreaming again, Otto?” He spoke low, but not too low for my father not to hear.

My father ignored it.

“Something like that.” Or rather nothing like that.

One thing I had going for me was that I was fast. I would get to the river first. It was the coming back that would be a problem. I had half a plan to go in, swim down fifty or so yards, and then run back from there, possibly avoiding anything that he set in my path.

But my brother was smart. He might already be two steps ahead of me. I’d find out soon enough.

My father shouted for us to shift, marking the beginning of this test.

My shift was faster than my brother’s, and I bolted as fast as I could. I wove through bushes, around trees, running as fast as my stubby little legs could carry me.

We couldn’t keep doing this. I needed to figure a way to get my brother and me out of this fight for power, a way where we both survived and I didn’t need to stay here anymore.

Because this place, it might’ve been pretty, but it was so toxic.

As horribly as my father treated us, he treated the other members of our pack worse. He was awful.

I didn’t hear my brother hot on my heels, which was scarier than if he’d been right behind me. A few minutes later, I could scent the water. I was so close. I needed to decide whether to go left or right, and how far to travel by water before hitting land again and there was no more time.

I dove into the water and picked right.

It was a fucking mistake. I got caught in a net, and by the time I got out and back to my father, my brother was not only there, he was dressed, drinking some of my father’s berry wine that he made from the bush my omega dad had planted before he passed.

“I see we’re lazy today,” Father sneered.

I could have argued, but there was no point. The more I said, the worse it would be on me. “I’ll try harder next time, Father.”

“On your knees. Hands on your thighs.”

I dropped, a movement that had become automatic over the years, and I waited for the whipping to start. The sadistic bastard of a father I had… sometimes it began right away and sometimes he’d let me wait for hours in that position. You never knew which.

Today was in the middle. I needed to wait for him while he enjoyed drinking with my brother, telling him how proud he was and what a disappointment I was, first.

And the thing about it was that sometimes that was me drinking with him, and my brother was in my place. In that way, my father didn’t play favorites.

I half wondered if he was ever gonna retire and pass it down, or if he was just gonna watch us destroy each other piece by fucking piece.

I needed a way out of this pack that allowed me to still be breathing and didn’t ruin my brother’s chance to get what he needed, which apparently was being Alpha.

Half of an idea started to form in my head just as the first whack came down. And then the second. And then the third. And then I lost all track of how many there were.

I woke up the next morning on my stomach, my wounds still raw; my father made sure of it with a special ointment from the “healer” that made us suffer, unable to shift for a full twenty-four hours.

I needed to get out of here.

Time was running out.