A wash of cold dread chilled Brenya to the bone. She stumbled for an explanation, because he was watching, and he was calculating, and she had poorly tried to manipulate and failed. She made herself look at the child in the cradle. One conveniently positioned right beside her. Rosy, chubby cheeks, the tiny nose, and puckered lips. “Your son… is asleep.”
“Yes, sedated so he wouldn’t cry in your arms.” Looking down at her child, Annette reached out a hand to gently rock his cradle. “The tiny thing cries constantly, since he’s been denied my breast. I can’t risk it, you see.”
Because of the Beta rations.
Staring down at her son, Annette smiled. “I told you, wives find our purpose in our children. I have never seen anything more perfect than my son.”
Brenya couldn’t follow where this conversation had gone. “Jacques told me that your parents held important positions and—”
Still rocking the cradle, Annette confirmed what Jacques had said. “They have very important positions, positions that could petition parliament and be heard. Which is precisely why I have forbidden them from entering this room. Neither my mother nor father may touch my son. Because I know what they will say.” The cradle continued to sway, Annette’s focus completely on her sleeping child.
Something was very wrong here, Brenya wishing she understood the nuisance of conversation. “What will they say, Annette?”
“To forget. To allow my son to slip away. They would make promises that my marriage contract might be dissolved and a new husband provided. Yet Ancil would never bear an unwanted complication to restrict his Omega’s offspring’s legacy. If I leave this room, my son will die.”
This is what Annette had been trying to convey from the beginning, but Brenya was too stunted to understand. And now that she’d had to say it straight, there would be so many consequences for everyone who had sipped honey-laced tea. “So you are working within the confines of our station and situation, which is why you ate the Beta rations and told me not to interfere.”
“His name is Matthieu, and I refuse to forget him.”
8
Greth Dome
There was nothing that had ever existed or that might ever exist like the feel of his Omega’s cunt choking his cock for seed. Vocal—because it was safe to fully let go in this home he had prepared for them—Shepherd let out guttural groan, praising her, in harmony with her cries of pleasure.
Like the sucking kiss of the best-trained whore. The rippling grip of soft hands squeezing the life from the neck of their prey. A slick-drenched sleeve that had been shaped to accept a cock he knew was intimidating in size. The woman who possessed such powers drained his tightly drawn balls until there was not a drop left to wring out.
While she screamed his name. While she bit, scratched, undulated, and prayed.
Her body stripped him bare, forced his climax, drank his seed. Her body craved.
At long last, his little one craved.
The way they fucked in the mornings now, it wasn’t perfunctory, it wasn’t out of a sense of her fear or his duty to remind her of who she was. It wasn’t because he pressured her to enjoy sex. It was because his little one woke hungry. And Shepherd had the bite marks to prove it.
His mate was starved.
For him, for his company, for his affection, as if the cloud was finally lifting. She could see him, he could embrace her. They even… played.
He had never played before.
Men like him had not been designed for such things, yet he gave that experience to her, no matter how foreign or unlikely it might be. After all, he had not destroyed Thólos and conquered Greth—he had not carved out a new world—intending to sit on the side and watch others experience freedom while he did not.
Shepherd was going to take this life by the throat and know its pleasures, train himself to understand them. With the help of a rambunctious Omega. A healing female who had defeated her addiction to the flood of narcotics she had been given in Thólos—powerful drugs he had seen strong men fall to. And she had done it unaware of what she swallowed or why.
She wanted to feel normal, she had told him, so that she could feel his love. It was worth more to her than a perpetual high or the false safety of chemically induced apathy.
Claire O’Donnell, who fought daily to face her demons and gain ground against them.
Who was finding joy… with him.
Knowing that the Gods truly favored him—that beyond all likelihood, his Omega had been delivered to his lap on the brink of estrous. Never would Shepherd regret a single moment of forcing their bond, of taking what the world owed him.
He possessed the perfect woman because when the opportunity presented itself, he acted.