Page 1 of Jace

Chapter One

Sloane

So 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.

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