Born to Be Bound (3 page)

It could not have been long before she woke, as his knot was still binding their bodies together. But he had shifted them. He lay below her, her body sprawled on top, Claire's ear to his heart. The serenity from the mating was fading and the impulse to fuck was back again. The urge, the only thing that defined her at that moment, grew beyond her when her tongue darted out to lick the salt of sweat from his chest, to entice the tattooed male to begin again.

The instant the knot began to diminish she registered the loss of precious fluid, felt his seed leaking out of her, and whined. As if knowing her thoughts, Shepherd dragged his fingers in the little river and brought his ejaculate to her mouth. The smell alone drove her wild, the taste a thousand times more.

"They would have broken an Omega so small." Shepherd watched, fascinated, as she greedily sucked his fingers, explaining quietly as if educating a female who should have known better, "Not shown restraint at a scent so overpowering."

She didn't want him to talk; she wanted him to fuck her again. A large hand came to her hair, rubbing at the scalp of the female, soothing her with pets and purrs while the knot slowly abated so he could thrust against her jerking hips.

The second mating was much less frantic, far more fulfilling, and when he had filled her again, Claire began to lose the edge that was making her so ferocious. It was his hands, maybe, lifting and lowering her at the tempo that made her cunt sing, or the look in his eyes, the unabashed lustful pleasure.

So that's what it was like to mate an Alpha
.

He seemed to know her thoughts, and by the crinkles at the corner of Shepherd's eyes, she could tell he was amused with her. He cupped her face, tender and gentle, and she didn't feel overpowered or forced... She felt mistakenly safe in the delirium.

It was not until a day later, when he took her from behind at the peak of estrous, his full weight on her back, that she sensed trouble. The high had not faded, the slow building fervor of her heat nowhere near breaking... but he roared, began to squeeze and bruise; to restrain her. Fighting the hold, writhing, Claire had a sobering fear the tyrant might bite her so savagely it would scar—that he intended to leave claiming marks.

Worst of all, instinctively, she wanted him to. Her estrous-high mind wanted to bond to the monster that had destroyed Thólos and made her life hell, simply because he was the one who was fucking her.

"And you will!" he growled in her ear.

She told him no, panting it over the sound of his skin slapping against the fleshy mounds of her ass. Sharp teeth came to her shoulder, Shepherd's knot growing bulbous until the Alpha could no longer thrust and she could not squirm away. She screamed in pain and pleasure, sobbing as his teeth ripped into her skin, Shepherd growling long and low with her flesh torn from his bite.

She climaxed from the claiming, rhythmically squeezing, drawing the jets of fluid from his dick while he crooned at her and lapped up the blood.

Claire cried even as he purred and petted, wept from the hazy recognition of the total loss of control she'd so carefully cultivated in her life. When ten minutes later her body sent out signals it was time for Shepherd to fuck her again, he pulled her beneath him and was gentle; caressing the woman he'd stolen even though her tears fell throughout the whole coupling.

When it was over, when he had wrung out another explosion that chased away the urge of chemical madness, a calm descended on them both. Claire briefly slept against a man she did not know, pressing as close as she could, in the exact place the brute expected her to rest.

#

In the end, it took three days to break the starving Omega's heat. She was sleeping, nesting deep into the blankets covered in his semen and her slick—blissed out. Toying with a strand of her sooty black hair, Shepherd mulled over just what to do with what was now his possession, impressed that the little female was plucky enough to dress in corpses' clothes and parade into a pack of Alphas just to speak to him. And she would have died if he had not found her scent worth killing for.

Claire would also be sore now that estrous had ended and her mind was not clouded with the insatiable drive to mate. He was certain she would also be resentful of the binding he'd forced. But that was the lot for Omegas, the way of nature. He wanted her, he took. End of story.

Silver eyes ran over the lithe dancer's body she possessed, the Alpha growling at the obvious fact his Omega was underfed. It was getting him into such a mood that when a knock came to the door, he covetously grabbed what was his and roared.

The commotion—being jerked against a mountain of heat—woke Claire, and she hissed in discomfort. Everything felt sticky, a male pawing over bruises that did not appreciate the attention. The words he spat were in another language—an outskirts' lost tongues, she assumed. Remembering who he was and what he'd done to her, she pushed away from Shepherd's chest, only to feel his arms grow impossibly constrictive. The conversation between the Follower on the other side of the door and her captor stretched on, Shepherd tightening his grip each time she squirmed.

When it was over, Shepherd swung his skull her way, barking, "You need to sleep more." It was not a suggestion and she could clearly sense he was provoked.

"The Omegas." That was the reason she had come to him... not to have him knot her for three full days.

Mercurial eyes diminished between narrowed lids. Shepherd sniffed her once, then he growled, "Your assumption it would be plausible to have a private distribution of provisions is flawed. It would only draw attention to your group. All Omegas will be delivered into my care and segregated from the population in the Undercroft. Should any come into heat, an Alpha will be chosen from amongst my followers. Most will be bonded at their next estrous."

"What? No!" Claire's voice was pure horror. "That's not what we want. They need food, not to be made into slaves."

"This is best. You are Omegas, fragile, and it is not your place to decide such things."

Everything about the male was suddenly repulsive. Claire wanted him off of her and tried to scoot away. "I won't tell you where they are."

As he smirked, a scar across his lips made the expression sinister. "Then they will starve and be picked off one by one. That is your decision, little one. If given to me they would be protected."

"From whom? The very men who are raping and knotting girls who have not reached maturity are the same you surround yourself with."

Shepherd was petting her, touching her hair as if she were not upset, as if she didn't loathe him in that moment, and it was setting her into a temper. When she tried to bat his hand away, he snarled and pinned her beneath him. His teeth went to the crook of her neck and he smelled, growling at the sweetness while using his thigh to pry her legs apart.

Claire felt his cock pulsing against her belly and grew frightened. There was no estrous, no abundant slick, and she was sore. Shepherd didn't care. He reminded her who was dominant in one sharp thrust, taking his Omega with no purrs or caresses; knotting without her climax to urge his seed forth. When the powerful spurts bathed her womb, there was no settling peace, only frustration and tears.

When he seemed to have caught his breath, the unwelcome press of his mouth came to her ear. "You will sleep more."

His fingers went back to toying with her hair while Claire cried herself beyond exhaustion, embraced by a man who lived up to his reputation as a monster.

Chapter 2

It was dark the next time she woke. Though Shepherd was not physically there, he was still humming inside her. The new bond stuck like a greasy string to her ribcage, burrowing steadily. Claire had only heard descriptions of the pair-bond and read about it in the Archives. Each Omega experienced the link differently. Some compared it to a wellspring; an endless offering of cool water—others to a knife wound that tore and twisted their insides. Hers felt like a worm, writhing and going deeper; a subjugation and a leash. She already hated it. It was unwelcome, invasive, and something she could not ignore.

At that moment, it hummed in an off-putting, out of tune twang. Like a bad note on a violin.

Feeling her way around the walls in search of a switch, Claire stumbled into unfamiliar furniture and cursed. The feeling of the bathroom door came under her fingers. She went inside and flicked on the light.

Her reflection stared back at her.

Naked and so covered in Shepherd's semen it was caked in her hair, she looked shattered. In the hazy, blissful high of their frenzy, he'd fed it to her, rubbed it into her skin—saturated her inside and out with that viscous liquid. If he had not spent so much time running his fingers through her hair, she was certain it would have been a matted mess.

Disgusted, Claire approached the stranger in the mirror. In the months since she'd last seen her body reflected back at her, she had become so thin. Her ribs protruded, the bones of her hips stuck out. She'd grown skeletal. But it was not the emaciation that won her attention; it was the inflamed bite mark on her shoulder, the swollen red scabs throbbing.

Shepherd had bitten her so deeply she would carry the scar of his claiming forever.

Tracing a finger over the two crescent wounds, Claire felt shame in her ignorance. She didn't fully understand how the bond was formed; a lifetime of concealing her nature had made it dangerous to ask too many questions. All she'd known was that it involved marking and an Alpha's initiation of the act.

Maybe it was just instincts.

Only instincts...

A sinking despair grew in her belly, made worse by the still thrumming string her body was trying to reject. Claire pulled in a deep breath and scanned the rest of the simple lavatory. Either the man was fastidiously tidy or he had an underling clean for him. The sink was gleaming white, the mirror polished, not even a speck of toothpaste on it.

Opening the medicine cabinet, it was almost bizarre to find ordinary things such as a toothbrush and mouthwash. It was the Da'rin markings maybe, the fact he had lived long enough in the Undercroft to garner so many. She'd been taught they were all unwashed savages, less than human.

Wavering between using his toothbrush to get the fuzzy feeling out of her mouth and disgusted because it was
his
toothbrush, she finally just reached for the damn thing. A few minutes later her mouth no longer tasted like... things she didn't want to think about. Setting it on the shelf in the exact position she'd found it in, Claire turned towards the shower and cranked it on.

Stepping under a scalding spray, she invited the burn, wanting everything Shepherd off of her. Eyes closed, hair under the stream, she let water pour like lava over her body. The puncture wounds at her shoulder started to ooze, the scabs softening from the moisture.

There was only a basic bar of soap.

Every possible inch was scrubbed until her skin grew raw, every trace of that man and his smell stripped away. She soaped up her hair, dreaming of the days she'd had access to such simple things as shampoo. When it was done, she stepped out of the steam, looking at the man's towel, and chose not to use anything of his that might re-apply his scent to her body.

Skin bumped from the cold, she air-dried, wrung out her hair over the sink, trying her best to finger comb the black mess into order. Paranoid about punishment, she wiped down all traces of her time in that room, leaving it as close to how she'd found it as she could.

With the light from the bathroom streaming into the cell of Shepherd's den, Claire found a table lamp and switched it on. In estrous, her mind had not focused on such paltry things as furniture placement and decoration; all she'd seen was where she wanted to nest and the male waiting to mount her.

After all the years of careful seclusion, all the tortured heat cycles spent locked away to prevent such a thing, it felt like she'd lost a part of herself knowing she had been mated... and not by an Alpha she'd chosen.

Now, she was somehow less; a failure.

That humming little cord in her chest pulsed as if to suggest that she was more... that there was
more
now. It whispered that Shepherd had only done what was supposed to be done.

The plaguing vibration made her angry. Desperate, she grasped for any potential relief. The pair-bond was still new, it was fragile. Maybe she could break it?

How often had every other forcefully bonded Omega wished for the same thing?

It was almost laughable how quickly the little cord in her chest hummed, tempting her to accept her position, to submit to such a strong Alpha.

The feeling made her want to vomit.

It was unsettling; the change in Shepherd from the coercive beginning to the unquestioned authoritarian frightened her. He had forced a pair-bond, made a choice that would impact the rest of her life. Alphas and Omegas only bonded once, except for extreme cases when mates died. It was Betas that lived without the bond. It was Betas Claire had always envied. They had no estrous and could still bear children. Betas got to choose. They mated at will, some even with the same partner for a lifetime, not from some device of nature that forced a permanent pairing. To make the sting that much greater, unlike Omegas, Beta females were treated with the same respect as Beta males.

Betas were also second in the hierarchy of the three human dynamics; they had freedom to do as they pleased with their lives. Omegas, so rare and highly desired, had been relegated to a prestige of prized pet—a status symbol for powerful Alphas to claim. They were smaller, no less intelligent, but as their numbers were decreasing it was an easy minority for the rest of the colonies to force into some archaic ideal. The Alphas ruled the last bastions of civilization, were supreme in every Bio-Dome, every regulated quadrant, every powerful business, and there were a lot more of them than there were Omegas.

Looking over the dim room, ignoring the nest she'd built between sessions of being fucked, Claire wondered about the man. Spartan was not exactly the right word for what she saw... maybe utilitarian was better. Only the basics existed: a bed, desk, small table, and a few other useful pieces of furniture; all mismatching, none chosen for anything other than practicality.