Page 1 of The Alpha's Fake Mate
Chapter One
Holland
The water in the old pool with the chipped tiles at the edges made lapping sounds as the filter turned on. I sat in a lounge chair pressed up against the chain link fence and watched the sky turn purple beyond the farm’s Children’s Wing.
All the familiar night sounds hadn’t changed: the wind in the pines that said summer was ending, the clatter and voices from the dining hall as dinner was prepared, and far-off, the ghostly voice of an owl calling its mate.
Nothing had changed, really. The concrete at my feet was pock-marked from too many seasons. The chlorine scent stung my nose. And I was still an Omega through and through with no right to speak of what had happened to me, and no recourse to receive justice in any definition of that word.
I shut my eyes tight in an effort to block it all out. But that only made sensations and images spark clearer in my memory.
Mean hands clenched to fists spinning all around.
A laughing growl of a voice: “You can’t run away.”
The clash of teeth everywhere tender that could be reached.
The Alpha didn’t want to just fuck me, he wanted to tear me apart. His Burn made him want to see me bleed and scream. He liked that sound. It took him into euphoria.
“The way the blood looks purple against your skin,” he’d said to me. “So beautiful.”
With him, my moments of consciousness grew fewer.
I knew I would die, my screams unheard, no one coming to help.
Alphas in the Burn might lose their minds. We’d been taught this. But here on Zilly’s chattel farm the Alphas they brought in for the eighteens and older weren’t labeled dangerous. There were other private establishments for that crazy-Alpha kind of behavior. We serviced the Alphas who just needed to get through their Burns with an easy companion.
It was safe for us here. We were raised to be with them in their Burns, built for it. It was our duty.
That was what my teachers said. What they taught.
My friends who turned eighteen before me and had their first times said it wasn’t terrible. Most liked it. Most got off on it.
My best friend Harly had a great first time. He came back from the mating hall all flushed and contented, wearing a sliver-moon smile. “I’m ready to go again, now,” he had said. “Holland, you have nothing to be scared of. It’s natural, after all. What we’re born to do.”
But I was the nervous type. Kids laughed when I jumped at a sudden sound or recoiled at an unexpected touch. Unlike my friends, I didn’t partake in certain physical acts my peers did at puberty, sneaking around with each other after lights out, making each other sigh and moan.
It was against the rules and I was sort of a nerd about the rules. Besides, if you were caught fucking around, or if the contraceptives didn’t work and you got pregnant, they sent you off somewhere Omegas got punished. Maybe to the farms where the dangerous Alphas went. Or maybe even to prison.
Omegas weren’t supposed to fuck each other. Ever. If the contraceptives didn’t work and you got pregnant, you’d give birth to a monster. A Sylph. No one wanted that. Sylphs were abominations, raised in institutions to keep the population safe from them. They were crazy, wild beings, and if they lived through puberty they suffered the Burn all the time with no relief. They had to be shut away in isolation forever.
“At least we have it better than a Sylph,” Harly always said. “We get our needs taken care of here, we get to have hot sex, and maybe one day a rich nice Alpha will mate-bond us and we can go off our contraceptives and have a family.”
When I turned eighteen, six months after Harly, it should have been an exciting day for me. I was finally an adult. We were trained it was a gift to lose our virginity to an Alpha, which was why we must remain pure and not be tempted by each other.
I listened. Most did not. But I did. I tried to believe. I was a virgin when my birthday arrived.
But that day, though it started out sunny with a cake baked for me by Nod, our old Omega house-dad, soon became a nightmare.
Now I watched the sky darken. I heard the bell for supper. But I didn’t want any.
I raised my bandaged arm to my face, flexing my fingers. My wrist was broken, and two knuckles on my other hand were fractured. I pushed my dark bangs back and blinked upward, looking for the first star.
Six days I had not seen the stars. I’d spent one half hour servicing the violent Alpha that had been trying to kill me until an Omega mating hall monitor heard my faint screams through the walls and checked in on us. The six nights afterward I had spent in the hospital.
The monitor had had to gas the room to get the Alpha to stop strangling me. The gas was part of an emergency system in place if an Alpha ever got out of control. I’d never heard of it being used. During the Burn, most Alphas, even if they got a little rambunctious, could still be reasoned with.
I swallowed roughly, the bruises on my neck pressing my shirt collar.
