Page 1 of Alpha's Embrace
Chapter One
Misha
Thunk. Clunk. Bump.
That was Tracy on my right.
Shudder. Thud. Clank.
That was Cedric to my left.
I had lived with the sound of thumps on the walls for twenty years. That, and the howls.
I was used to it. I blocked them out when I wanted to. It was easy for me, having been raised here. This was normal. All of it in my white, weather-scratched castle by a green-slick pond I imagined was really an ocean full of pirates and serpents and mermen with seaweed hair.
My single, barred window, my ten by ten room, my very own metal sink and toilet, my narrow bed with the extra pillow I’d begged sweetly off a hall nurse named Donovan, all of it was my treasure by right, mine, owned and occupied by me.
I was rich. Lord of the beautiful and diamond-encrusted concrete lands protected by magic wire fences there to protect me and my realm. Of my lands, I knew all. I was able to survey them one hour each day and count the riches that sparkled in the hard ground.
It was a small kingdom, but it was mine.
Thunk. Rattle. Scrape.
Cedric moaned through the little hole in our wall, an aperture we’d spent a year creating when he was twelve and I was fourteen.
I ran to the hole. It was no bigger than my eye. I tried to peer into his room which was identical to my own except not as neat. Whatever belongings he had always ended up strewn on his floor: soap, toilet paper, toothbrush, pillow, sheets, mattress, his own white jumpsuit.
Once he told me, “The clothes, they hurt. They hurt, Misha. So bad.”
He preferred that no clothes ever touch his skin. He hated sleeping on a mattress and usually curled up under his window or beneath his TV wall screen to sleep on his floor, even on the coldest days.
Now, as I looked through the hole, a brown eye met mine.
“Oh, so you are home,” I heard him say.
I had not been out all day. My exercise hour was not until four p.m. Where else would I go but the showers in the mornings? But I answered him in careful measured tones.
“I am home, Sir Cedric. And the realm is at peace.”
“You’re always so quiet. Why are you always so quiet?”
It was true. I did not pound my walls like the others. I didn’t scream, or moan or groan, or redecorate my room with my belongings tossed to the floor.
Sometimes I wanted to yell a lot. Sometimes when the heat of my skin became fire and I thought it was blistering and falling off, and when my cock stuck straight up hard as if to burst from my body, I wanted to scream. I wanted to throw myself against a wall. I wanted to die.
But mostly I read. I read everything I could on the tablet that was a gift to me from my regent who kept this realm in check for me until I was of age to inherit the crown.
The tablet was a purveyor of knowledge. It was my oracle. It could find and produce answers to my many questions. It and my television told me everything I wanted to know about worlds that were alien to my own, the worlds “out there” that were kingdoms with people different from me, with people called Alphas and Omegas.
Mine was the Sylph kingdom. One day, when I was ready, and the people outside were ready, we would meet. But I didn’t worry about that too much. When or if it happened, the day would come. In my heart I knew it. But for the time being I was content to read all I could about them. About their lands and houses and cities, about their strange governments, their planes and cars and schools and stores, and their unusual matings.
“You’re being silent again!” Cedric interrupted my thoughts.
“I’m quiet because I am doing a lot of reading,” I told Cedric through the tiny hole.
“I don’t know how you read,” he said. “I tried once and it all mangled in my head. Words. So many words. I couldn’t line them up right.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s why sometimes I read to you.”
