Page 1 of Abel's Omega
CHAPTER ONE
I slipped out of bed as the first light of pre-dawn turned the horizon to gray, careful not to wake my mate Patrick, still sleeping the sleep of the just Alpha. I stepped into my loose maternity pants, and pulled an old t-shirt on over them, smoothing it down over the five-and-a-half month bulge of my belly. The skin around my bellybutton was itchy again and I scratched at it as I bent over the cradle tucked in the corner. Beatrice was still asleep, but I needed to get her out of the bedroom before she woke up and started making noise. Patrick hated having the babies in the bedroom, but it was the one situation that I—a powerless omega—stood my ground on. They were quieter if I could get to them right away and after three babies in three years, the smallest sound woke me so it was even less inconvenience for him.
I gathered Beatrice carefully up from the cradle and took her to the kitchen with me. She never woke, even when I laid her in a clothes basket on the floor, cushioned with towels and an old blanket that was too shabby even for a shifter enclave. It worked pretty well for a baby mattress and if there were any accidents I didn’t need to worry about it staining.
One of her dark curls, so much like mine, lay across her eyes and I carefully twitched it away before the tickle woke her. I’d been lucky with Beatrice. She’d started sleeping regularly through the night at one month, and now that she was coming up on her first birthday, I rarely heard a peep out of her from bedtime to morning.
My other two pups were still asleep; I usually took this quiet part of the day to catch up on chores that were hard to do with their ‘help’. It was a perfect time to do a load of laundry and then start breakfast for the family. Patrick would be up soon—or rather, I would go and carefully wake him, when the time was right.
It only took a few minutes to gather a load of dark clothing and put it in a bag, then I picked up the baby again and started the walk down to Central, where all the pack's communal resources resided. As the Alpha’s mate, I had keys to most of the buildings—courtesy of Patrick, who liked me to get these sorts of things done without pestering him, and preferred that I do chores that took me out of the house only when he wasn’t around and therefore wouldn’t need me. I used my key to open the door to the laundromat, signed the book so Patrick's account would be debited for the use of the washer and dryer, and loaded everything up.
Time to go start breakfast.
Beatrice woke up on the walk home, burbling happily in my ear. "Da da da da da," she repeated over and over, grabbing for my ears and my nose, her little fingers getting tangled in my dark curls.
"Yes, Dabi," I said, and rubbed my nose against hers. She squealed with laughter, so I did it again, then blew a raspberry against her cheek, because I loved her so much.
Back at the house, I laid the ratty blanket out on the floor and set her down in the middle of it, before I started about making breakfast. Eggs, sausage, four slices of toast for Patrick. As soon as I had the sausage cooking, I walked pad-foot down the hall to Patrick's bedroom. I never thought of it as mine—Patrick owned the house and I only got to use it because Patrick had seen me once while visiting my original pack, and had made a deal with them to mate me. I was no more to Patrick than something else to show off—his pretty, randy, fertile omega mate.
I hated him.
It wasn't a violent hate. Not anymore. That heat had burned out after the first year, after the first pup and the six months that followed of trying to raise a young alpha, keep a house, and anticipate the needs of a man who made my skin crawl. But a baby—my baby—oh, that had taken a lot of the sting out of the mating.
I just wished my pack had considered my feelings when they agreed to it.
A curl of anxiety made my heart speed up as I put a hand on Patrick's shoulder and shook him gently. "Patrick, it's morning." I never knew how he’d react—some mornings he woke up and went about his day like normal, others he was snappish and I walked on eggshells until left.
Patrick growled and shook my hand off. "I'm awake." He didn't look awake, and I’d been on the receiving end of his ‘corrections' before, when I'd taken him at his word and Patrick had slept in. So I began moving about the room, tidying here, folding there, making small noises until Patrick finally sat up and said, "Fuck, Baxter, I'm up. Go make noise somewhere else." And that gave me leave to return to the kitchen.
Back in the kitchen, Beatrice—silly pup—had crawled off the blanket, heading toward the hallway with the speed and determination of a racing snail. I put her back on her blanket, and cracked the eggs into the frying pan. Four slices of toast into the toaster, a pot of water onto the stove to boil for tea, and then I had to put Beatrice back on the blanket again. "You little crazy pup, stay still. Dabi has work to do." But I couldn't help smiling. She was going be busy once she got her legs underneath her.
Patrick strode up the hall just as the eggs were done. I’d had four years to perfect this timing, and I was just buttering the last slice of toast as Patrick pulled out his chair and sat down. It wasn't fifteen seconds later that I slid his breakfast in front of him.
My mate started eating, and when he made no comment on the quality of the food, I went back to making breakfast for the pups. Oatmeal, with a few of the berries I'd scavenged in late summer from a patch that had somehow escaped notice outside the walls of the Jackson-Jellystone Pack. Then again, very few of this pack ever ventured outside walls. In my old pack, it had been common to scavenge for grains and roots and fruit and berries in the land around their enclave, and I’d made it a practice once I’d moved here to befriend the guards so I didn’t have to get permits every time I went out the gates. It had made a huge difference to the food I had to work with and since I really wasn’t that great a cook—the bruises from my first year mated had been proof of that—the fruits of the land often made a difference between food being eaten, and a lecture or worse from Patrick.
Plus, a few frozen wild strawberries meant that Fan would eat his oatmeal, instead of playing with it and causing a fuss because he couldn’t have eggs and sausage like his father. But, while my mated pack was wealthier than my natal one, it wasn’t that wealthy. We couldn’t afford a protein-rich meal like that every day for the pups. Or for me, for that matter, thought I tried to make sure I got some every day. For the baby. I mostly ate whatever the pups didn’t finish, and leftovers from Patrick’s meals. I did have pre-natal vitamins—Stores got them in on a regular basis, but there were always a few bottles set aside with my name on them, since I spent so much time pregnant.
Not that I begrudged the pregnancies. It was the man who got the pups on me that I wanted gone.
While the oatmeal cooked, I put together Patrick’s morning tea and slid it in front of him, then started washing the frying pan. The laundry was probably done now and I wondered if I could slip out and back again before Patrick left.
Patrick took a sip and made a face. “Where’s the good tea?”
Oh, shit.“You drank the last of it yesterday evening. I was going to stop at Stores today for more.” It would mean waiting to buy new jeans for Fan, but he could make it through the next week on what still fit him. And I was grateful he would only have to wait a week—where I’d been born, it might have meant doing without. Jackson-Jellystone wasn’t rich, but it was miles ahead of Buffalo Gap.
“You should have gone yesterday.”
“I thought the other tin still had some. I’ll go as soon as they’re open.”
“Hmmph.” But when I tried to pass by him, intending to get Teca up and dressed before I tackled getting our strong-willed boy out of bed, Patrick grabbed my arm, squeezing to the edge of painful. “You need to pay more attention to your job. I picked you up out of the mud, gave you a home, gave you status, when you had nothing going for you but your looks. Don’t forget that. I can repudiate you at any time and send you back to that cardboard camp you call a pack. So if you want to stay here with your precious pups, you need to smarten up.”
I felt the blood drain from my face and I bowed my head, partly to show him how scared I was, partly to hide the anger that I could never quite squash. “I’m sorry, Patrick. I’ll do better.” The thought of losing my pups, of being forced back to Buffalo Gap, sent a painful surge of nausea through my body. It made me grateful I never got to eat until after everyone else was done, or I might have lost the contents of my stomach then and there, and thatwouldhave meant a beating. I waited there, the blood thumping painfully in my arm because of the pressure of Patrick’s hand, and hoped.
He sniffed, and threw my arm away from him. “I’m going to be outside walls today and I won’t be back until curfew. Make sure you pick up your slack while I’m gone.”
“Yes, Patrick,” I said, using the most submissive tone I could muster, and then I made my escape down the hall to Teca’s room.
CHAPTER TWO
