Page 1 of Tending Our Omega (Saved by the Alpha Pack #1)

Romi

From the time I was small, everyone assumed I was going to be an alpha.

I had always been determined, fearless, strong, and they equated that with the qualities they had decided a good alpha held.

I never understood determining what a person should be like based on their designation, but, to my parents, it was everything.

As a young child, I never fully believed I was going to be an alpha. How could I not? They were my parents and knew everything, or at least I thought they did. But, over the years, things changed. I began to see my parents were just as flawed as anyone else and started to learn about myself.

Something told me the alpha life wasn’t for me, that I didn’t fit with the other alphas.

As I reached the age my friends started presenting, I took that to mean I was going to wind up a beta.

I was fine with that. I’d make a life for myself, one far less stressful than either an alpha or an omega.

To most people, beta was the worst thing you could be.

I’d never taken that stance. To me, there was something special about being able to blend in, and I blamed that 100 percent on my parents.

My parents held too much power in our pack. And worse than that, they thrived on it, considering power a currency. It mattered more than anything else. But I hated it. Power was too easily misused even by those with good intentions. The best blessing the goddess could give me was making me a beta.

Presenting as beta was the only way out of their games. I would become useless to them, giving me the freedom to live however I wanted. Not that I’d ever hint to them I was feeling that way. They would see it as a sign of rebellion, something they detested.

When my eighteenth birthday came and went and I didn’t present, they got antsy, going so far as to bring me to multiple healers.

They were sure there was something they could do to fix it because everyone on both my parents’ sides presented young.

The healers told them what I had already known: people present when they present. It wasn’t good enough.

Next, they dragged me to someone with the sight, begging him to let them know when I would finally blossom into the young alpha they assumed I would be.

The look in his eyes told me he lied when he said he couldn’t see anything and gave them back their money.

He said the goddess was blocking me from his sight.

I took that as him protecting me; they took that as him seeing me as a powerful alpha.

I’d wanted to sneak back to him to beg him to give me the information, but I was under my parents’ watchful eyes, and that wasn’t going to happen. He didn’t look scared, and I took that as a good sign. I lived in fear and I wasn’t about to do that.

My parents were pissed. They had plans. They were going to have me mate for power.

The alpha of a neighboring pack had only one child, an omega.

He was slightly older than me, and, according to my parents, our mating was exactly what our pack needed.

Not both packs, mind you, just ours. My parents were nothing if not consistently selfish.

I was a tool to gain power, in this case over an entire pack.

I hadn’t met the omega in question yet, but even if I had, mating outside my pack strictly to give my parents what they wanted filled me with dread.

So, each night, when I went to bed, I talked to the Goddess and pleaded with her not to let me present at all.

I’d rather be stuck in the standstill that was my current life than be forced to mate for power, or worse.

If my parents were willing to force an alpha to mate, I couldn’t imagine what they’d be willing to do if I presented as omega.

I discovered soon enough.

My nineteenth birthday came and went with no sign of presentation. It had been the worst birthday ever, my parents using it to remind me what a horrible daughter I was.

Three weeks later, the night of our monthly pack run, they finally let me leave my room.

I refused to let the fever I’d spiked get in the way of taking my fur.

I could rest later. Rarely sick, I assumed being lock fever, they’d call me weak, their favorite insult.

If I wasn’t weak, I would’ve presented by now.

At least that’s what they whispered when they thought I couldn’t hear.

Pushing through my illness, I stood with my pack, waiting for the alpha to give the command to run and, when he did, I bolted.

My wolf needed to hunt, and it wasn’t long before I found my prey, a fast and wily rabbit.

I preferred to earn my kills, unlike some of the wolves who were hoping to catch a squirrel unawares. I thrived in the hunt.

The rabbit zigzagged under a bush. He was going to be fun, only before I could pounce toward him, all the unmated alphas of the pack encircled me. Fuck.

I’d never been fearful of my pack mates before, but they eyed me like prey. I was in trouble.

I could’ve run. I could’ve fought. Instead, I remembered my teachers always told us if we ever needed saving, to howl and help would come find us. I wasn’t a pup anymore, but I definitely needed the help.

I’d only had to use this once before, when my foot got stuck in a trap set for a rabbit. Maybe that was I liked to hunt them best.

I tipped my head and, with nose in the air, I howled as loud as I could.

The wolves all stood there surrounding me, none of them making a move. What were they waiting for? I understood none of this.

My father’s growl filled the clearing just before everything went black.

I hadn’t been getting sick. The fever was my body’s way of pushing my presentation forward.

It wasn’t common to have it happen that way, but it wasn’t common for me to be so much later than the other wolves in my family, either.

I woke with a pounding headache and my scent thick and heavy.

“You’re an omega,” my father said, as if my son alone couldn’t have told me that.

I closed my eyes, willing it to be a bad dream.

It wasn’t.

From waking up back in my room to standing in a hallway talking to my arranged mate, took an entire twenty minutes.

My parents had wasted no time. I knew the plan to mate me to the neighboring pack alpha.

They never told me that they had backup plans for if I was beta or omega; that didn’t mean I shouldn’t have known. It was so on brand for them.

My soon-to-be mate and I had barely five minutes to talk together before we were brought out in front of the pack and mated: first by ceremony and then by, well….the physical way. We had no choice. They demanded proof by morning.

I didn’t hate my mate. I didn’t love him, either, but he was kind to me, and I found out early on in our relationship that he’d sought me out.

He’d gone to my parents and asked to be the backup plan.

I never wanted to be anybody’s backup plan, but life could have been a whole lot worse.

At least, that’s what I kept telling myself.