Kneel, Alphas! Your Favorite Omega Has Rules

Look at him. He can't even hear us properly, and you still want to call him an Alpha?" The words cut through the noisy pack meeting, and I didn't need to turn my head to know who had spoken.

My uncle, my father's younger brother, the man who had been waiting for my father's grave to settle so he could climb into his chair.

I sat at the head of the long table with my hearing aid tucked behind my ear, and I felt every eye in the room slide toward me.

Everyone knew I was an Alpha. Everyone also knew I had been half deaf since the accident that killed my mother, and my uncle had decided that was reason enough to take everything from me.

An elder named Corwin shifted in his seat, "He can still hear."

My uncle let out a short laugh, "Some things. Take that little machine out of his ear and he's practically deaf. So tell me, Corwin, how is an Alpha like that supposed to protect this pack?"

My fingers tightened under the table until my knuckles ached. I lifted my chin and kept my voice level. "I'm still an Alpha."

"Then prove it." He smiled like a man who had already won, and he stepped back from the table so he was no longer in front of me.

Someone behind me called my name. I felt the air move, maybe a breath, maybe a word, but it broke apart before it reached me, so I stayed still and stared at the wall in front of me. A second voice asked me something from my left, and I turned a second too late, my brows pulling together while I tried to catch the shape of the question on his lips.

My uncle spread his hands wide, "You see this? Two people called him and he didn't answer either one. This is who we're supposed to follow?"

Tessa shot up from her seat near the wall, "He didn't hear you because you stood behind him on purpose! Everyone saw you do it!"

His head turned slowly toward her, and his smile thinned. "And what happens when an enemy stands behind him, little girl? Will you tell the enemy to please walk around to the front?"

I answered before she could. "Then I'll deal with the enemy when I see him." My voice came out low and hard, and for a moment the whole room went quiet. I had lost part of my hearing, but I hadn't lost my instincts, and a few of them looked away from my stare.

My uncle noticed that, and it made him angry. He walked around the table until he stood right in front of me, "You're defective, boy."

My jaw locked so hard my teeth hurt. I wanted to grab him by the collar and show him exactly what kind of Alpha I was, but my uncle kept pushing, and I could see what he wanted. He wanted me to swing first.

He leaned closer, and his voice dropped, but I heard every word. "Maybe you're not just defective. Maybe you're a curse."

The room erupted and people began whispering.

"Think about it," he told them, "The Moon Goddess does not make mistakes. If she took his hearing, maybe she meant to tell us he was never meant to lead. Why else would his mother die and his father fall so fast?"

I watched fear spread across the faces of people who had bowed to me my whole life. Then a man near the door shouted, "Lash him and throw him out!" and others began to agree.

"Don't touch my brother!" Tessa scrambled toward me, but two guards caught her arms and dragged her back, and she kicked at their shins and screamed my name. I turned toward her, ready to tear through them, and then I saw my uncle watching me with a calm little smile. If I fought, he would call it proof, and Tessa would be the one to pay for it.

So I let my hands fall open. "Let her go. I won't fight."

"Smart." My uncle nodded to the guards. "Take him to the square."

The whole pack followed us like a slow, hungry tide. One of the guards ripped my hearing aid out of my ear and threw it.

Everything turned to a dull hum and I saw mouths moving and fists rising without any sound at all. I understood then that this part was on purpose, because they wanted me to feel every second of it without knowing what was coming.

The first lash hit my back like fire. My whole body jerked against the ropes, and I bit down on my tongue until I tasted blood, because I refused to scream. The second lash landed across the first, and the third, and by the fifth I was shaking so hard my forehead scraped the post.

At the tenth, my uncle stepped into my sight and crouched down so I could read his lips. He said it slowly, so I would not miss a word. "This pack belongs to me now."

Later, someone threw my hearing aid into the dirt beside me. The casing was cracked, but when I pushed it back into my ear, sound came back in a rush, and the first thing I heard was Tessa sobbing from somewhere behind the crowd.

“Either you leave this pack forever, or I lock you up as a prisoner, you can't keep putting a curse on us!” My uncle screamed at me before walking away.

After the crowd had left Tessa found me behind the old stable an hour later, her shoulders shook once, and then the words came out in a rush. "We have to be out of the estate by morning. They're taking the house, Auden. They're taking everything."

"Okay," I said. I lifted her chin so she would look at me. "Then we'll survive."

Her lip trembled. "How? We have nothing."

"I'm going to make so much money that nobody will ever get to decide whether we're worth keeping again." She stared at me like she wanted to argue, and she didn't, and I pulled her into my arms and held her until she stopped shaking.

The days after that were worse than I expected. I walked into shops and offices with my chin up and my hearing aid showing, and people took one look at it and their faces changed. Some of them turned me down before I'd finished talking, and others spoke to me slowly and loudly, like I was a child.

I came home each night with my pride bleeding a little more, and Tessa pretended not to notice. One evening she burst into our cramped rented room waving her phone, her cheeks pink and her eyes bright in a way I hadn't seen in weeks. "Auden, listen. I found something. It's a job."

I looked up from the table where I'd been counting the last of our money for the fifth time. "What kind of job?"

She hesitated, biting the inside of her cheek, and that made me suspicious. "A rich Alpha, a billionaire, is looking for someone. It's not an employee or a business partner. It's more like a companion."

My eyebrows pulled together. "A companion."

"Someone who looks almost exactly like a man from his past." She held out the phone, and I didn't take it. "He's ready to pay a lot for a private arrangement."

I leaned back in my chair, and my mouth curled in disgust. "No. I'm not pretending to be somebody's dead lover. Find something else."

"He's not dead, I think he just left." She sat across from me and slid the phone onto the table anyway. "Auden, just look at the payment."

I didn't want to look, and I looked anyway. It was more than I could make in years of working in a shop, and it was enough to get Tessa into a real school and keep a real roof over our heads.

Tessa leaned forward, watching my face with her chin on her fist. "Still not interested?"

I stared at the screen for a long moment, and then I closed my eyes, when I opened them, I'd already made up my mind, and I hated myself a little for how fast it happened. "How soon can I meet him?"

The meeting took place two days later in a small, quiet office on the top floor of a glass building. The billionaire himself didn't come. A man in a gray suit sat across the table from me, his hands folded and his eyes sharp.

He reached into his jacket and set a photograph on the table between us. I looked down, and my breath caught in my throat. The man in the photograph had my face, my jaw, my eyes, even the same small crease beside the mouth, as if someone had taken me and made me softer.

My fingers went cold against the table. "Who is he?"

"That doesn't matter right now." The man tapped the edge of the photo once. "What matters is that you understand what this arrangement truly is before you sign anything."

I raised my eyes to his and kept my voice steady, though my pulse was racing in my ears. "Then tell me."

He pushed the photograph a little closer to me. "Our employer isn't looking for someone to love." He paused, long enough that I felt it settle into my bones. "He wants someone who can make him forget the man he lost."

I couldn't look away from the photograph, and I felt something tight and sour twist in my stomach. He waited until I finally lifted my head, and then he delivered the last blow without any hint of apology.

"If you agree, you'll become his substitute.”