The Omega's Prey

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‎Isolde

‎The Ashveil estate smelled like old money and power.

‎I had worked within its walls for four years and I felt it every single time I walked through the service entrance, that heavy, suffocating feeling that came with places like this. Places built by people who had never once been told no. Four years of threading needles in the basement room, four years of pressing seams until they were perfect and delivering finished garments to rooms I was not allowed to linger in. Four years of keeping my head down and my mouth shut and making myself as small and as forgettable as possible.

‎As an omega in a house like this one, forgettable was the point and been forgettable kept you safe.

‎My name is Isolde and I was twenty four years old and I was very good at disappearing into the background.

‎The night my life ended started the way most of my nights did. Me, alone in the basement two floors below the main hall, working by lamplight on a gown that cost more than I made in six months. Ivory silk with hand beaded detailing along the neckline. It belonged to Celeste Vorne, daughter of Alpha Vorne of the Eastern territories. She was here because in three days she was going to be formally mated to Zander Ashveil in a ceremony the entire pack world had been watching and waiting for.

‎I knew this the way I knew everything that happened in this house, not because anyone told me, but because people like me were invisible, and invisible people heard everything. We moved through rooms while conversations carried on around us like we were furnitures.

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‎I finished the gown just after nine and carried it upstairs myself because the house was short staffed that evening. I kept to the servants corridor, moving quickly, the dress draped carefully over both arms.

‎I took a wrong turn.

‎The east and north corridors looked nearly identical and I had only been on the upper floor a handful of times. I caught my mistake within seconds and stopped and turned to go back.

‎That was when the door at the end of the corridor opened and Zander Ashveil walked out.

‎I had seen him before the way you saw someone when you worked in their family home, crossing the courtyard from a window below, arriving in expensive cars, a glimpse through a doorway at the end of a long hall but I had never been in the same room as him.

‎Omegas who worked in the basement and Alpha heirs of great pack families did not share rooms.

‎He was taller than I had realized from a distance. Dark haired and broad shouldered with that particular quality that very powerful alphas had. He was dressed for the evening, jacket on, looking down at his phone, not paying attention to where he was walking.

‎We almost walked straight into each other, then he looked up.

‎And everything stopped.

‎I felt the bond the way you felt the ground shift under your feet. It hit me all at once, through my chest and down into my bones, my wolf came alive so suddenly it almost knocked the breath out of me.

‎Zander Ashveil had gone completely still.

‎He was staring at me,his jaw was tight and his phone had dropped to his side. His eyes were dark grey and they were moving over my face with an expression I could not read. Something that looked like a man staring at a problem he had not expected and did not want.

‎"Who are you," he said. More like a demand.

‎"Isolde. I work in the sewing room. I took the wrong corridor, I was just delivering—" I held up the gown. "I'll go back."

‎"Stay where you are."

‎I stayed.

‎He walked toward me slowly and stopped close enough that I could smell him and I had to grip the gown tighter to keep my hands from shaking because that scent did something to me that I had no defense against. My wolf was pressing forward, straining toward him, and I was using every bit of control I had to hold her back.

‎He looked at me for a long moment without speaking.

‎"You felt it," he said.

‎"Yes," I said. Because lying would have been pointless.

‎He reached out and touched my wrist, just briefly, and the bond cracked open between us like thunder, so loud inside me I was certain everyone in the house could feel it.

‎He pulled his hand back immediately.

‎Stepped away from me and I watched his face close. Watched him look at me the way men like him looked at complications they had already decided how to handle.

‎"Come with me," he said.

‎"I don't think—"

‎"That wasn't a suggestion."

‎He turned and walked and I followed because my body had not yet caught up with what my mind was starting to understand.

‎He took me downstairs straight into the main hall, there were over two hundred people there. The most powerful wolves in the region dressed in their finest, glasses in hand, conversations flowing. Every head turning as the heir of the house walked in.

‎And then every eye finding me, behind him, in my work clothes, hair loose.

‎Celeste Vorne stood across the room in the ivory silk I had spent forty hours on. Her father stood beside her, his expression already turning into something cold.

‎Zander Ashveil walked me to the center of the room and stopped and I understood what was about to happen, it took the air straight out of my lungs.

‎"Listen up," he said, and his voice filled the room.

‎The room went quiet.

‎He turned and looked at me and his face was cold, whatever had been in his eyes in that corridor upstairs was gone.

‎"This omega," he said, "is my fated mate."

‎The gasps moved through the crowd like a wave.

‎"An omega?" someone said. "With you?"

‎He held up one hand and the room went silent again immediately.

‎Then he looked at me and what was in his eyes was filled with hatred that I physically recoiled before he even opened his mouth again.

‎"I reject you," he said, his voice ringing through the hall like a death sentence. "You are no mate of mine. You are nothing, less than nothing. You are a mistake so big that the universe itself made an error in creating this bond."

‎He stepped closer and I stepped back as the crowd tightened around us like a wall.

‎"You are disgusting," he continued, his voice dripping with contempt as he circled me like I was prey. "Your scent makes me sick, the thought of being tied to you, an omega, a seamstress, a piece of trash, is the most repulsive thing I have ever experienced."

‎Someone laughed. Then someone else.

‎"I reject this bond completely," he said, raising his voice so every single person in that room could hear every single word. "Before all witnesses I declare you unworthy, rejected and cast out. No pack will take you, no Alpha will touch you. You will die alone as you should have lived."

‎The rejection hit me like lightning.

‎I locked my knees, kept my eyes open and did not make a sound even though the mark was burning itself into my skin like a brand and the crowd was laughing openly now and phones were out with people recording and I standing in the center of all of it completely alone.

‎Zander Ashveil turned and walked toward Celeste Vorne without looking back at me once.

‎Alpha Vorne began to applaud.

‎The room followed.

‎The head of house staff appeared at my side. Dara. A woman who had been kind to me for four years and who now couldn't quite meet my eyes.

‎"You have until morning to collect your things," she said quietly.

‎I nodded.

‎My voice was gone there was nothing left to say anyway.

‎I walked out of that hall through the service door and into the cold stone stairwell and I sat down on the steps in the dark with the rejection mark burning across my skin while two hundred people were applauding on the other side of the wall.

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