I, Omega

I, Omega

By

Kari Gregg

Copyright 2011 Kari Gregg

Editor: Judith David

Cover: Lou Harper

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

After one mind-shattering night with a stranger at a local leather bar leaves him forever changed, Gabriel lives on the streets as a vagrant to elude the master who hunts him, but the shifter is a fierce, stubborn predator who reclaims him soon enough. Gabriel is carried away to the pack’s home territory where his instruction on what it means to be the pet of an alpha begins. Gabriel isn’t just any pet, though. He is the rarest among their kind: a human omega.

Treasured? Or cursed?

As Gabriel’s father, the Distinguished Gentleman from Pennsylvania and stalwart of the conservative party, pushes the considerable resources at his disposal to locate his missing son, Gabriel explores who and what he is under his master’s careful protection. Gabriel falls for the shifter who is lover and destroyer, owner and...friend?

Content Warnings: Dubious consent, lotsa kink, and an embarrassment of riches in hormonal anarchy – RAWR!

NOTE: This is a previously published work.

Chapter One

He wasn’t always like this.

Once upon a time, Gabriel had crunched numbers as a payroll accountant for Smith, Wheeler and Hayes, with his own office and—more significantly—an off-network printer he didn’t have to share. He’d driven a blue Taurus. He’d contributed five percent of gross to his Roth IRA and planned to pay off the mortgage on his loft apartment a decade ahead of schedule.

Shoulders hunched as he scurried along the trash-strewn alley, he blinked rain from his eyes and pushed sopping clumps of hair from his face.

Once upon a time, he’d been normal.

Human anyway.

Not anymore.

Gabriel swept the street with an assessing glance before he turned down another narrow back street partially blocked by overflowing garbage cans. Darker there, but his newly preternatural eyes saw better in the dark. Scents were sharper too. His nose wrinkled at the reek of rotten food and God only knew what else from the Chinese takeout place across the alley from his current bolt-hole. The stench worried at his overstimulated senses like a sore tooth, so much so that he’d nearly abandoned his newest sanctuary his first night there. But if his stomach lurched at the eye-watering aromas, it’d be worse for the others. They wouldn’t linger here.

His master wouldn’t find him.

Gabriel ducked into a gap between a mound of graying produce pallets and the stripped shell of a dead delivery truck. Bending in the tight space, he nudged aside sodden cardboard he’d used to hide the broken window. Gabriel was a small guy, only a couple of inches above five and a half feet, and he’d lost any fat he’d managed to glue onto his lean body within weeks of living on the streets. But squeezing through the window of the abandoned building still wasn’t easy. Pushing the air from his lungs, he twisted his shoulders, wriggled his hips…

He tucked his body for a softer landing on the basement floor inside. He rolled to a crouch and froze. Listened. Restaurant trash negated scent as an early-warning system so Gabriel relied more heavily on his hearing since moving to this hellhole. But the downpour masked everything.

Cold, wet, he shivered as he waited for a telltale sign.

No hope for it. In these conditions, he was as good as blind.

It was almost like being human again.

He shuddered in remembered fear, but, scowling, he pushed to his feet. He couldn’t let his fear rule him. If he thought about what had happened, what was still happening to him… No, it was better not to think. Keep moving. He had to keep moving.

He crept to the furnace room he’d staked out as his shelter. A flash of fur the size of a house cat to his left would’ve revolted him a couple of months ago, but now he noted how readily he’d find fresh meat. Only if he had to. Most nights, he’d rather starve. He used up more of his body’s precious stores of energy chasing the little bastards than he gained when—if—he cornered one. Hunting made him weaker, not stronger. Just another item to add to his You Suck As A Werewolf list.

God, he was tired of being hungry.

He reached for the plywood he’d cannibalized for a door. Gabriel slid inside before he scrambled for the damned rat.

His scent washed over Gabriel first.

Earthy, male. Gabriel’s mouth watered at the acrid tang of sweat. Nothing smelled as good as his master. Nothing. That scent sent shivers up and down Gabriel’s spine and pooled heat in his suddenly knotted gut.

He had to stop. Breathing through his mouth had made his arousal bearable when the shifter had drawn near before. This close though? Gabriel couldn’t resist. His nostrils flared in gluttonous rebellion. He inhaled lustily, bringing that intoxicating scent into his lungs.

Close the door, Gabriel.

He shuddered in equal parts fear and need.

The shifter knew his name.

Of course he knew it. By now, he probably knew more about Gabriel than Gabriel did. Gabriel’s heartbeat still stuttered.

Boy, his master growled in warning.

Gabriel pulled the makeshift door shut. The scrape of it closing split the darkness like a thunder clap. His fingers dug into the sheet of disintegrating wood. His forehead kissed its rough surface as he leaned into it to brace his shaking knees.

Christ, he was hard. His dick rubbed painfully against the teeth of his zipper.

That scent was making him crazy.

Turn around.

He smothered hopeless laughter.

Had he the strength, Gabriel would’ve leaped at him and begged his master to take him. That was the bliss and the horror of it. Starved and empty no matter how much he ate, hormones ping-ponging inside him as new instincts took hold, Gabriel was helplessly drawn to the shifter. The human part of Gabriel wanted to run. Gabriel had invested two months living like a vagrant to escape him, for fuck’s sake. But a growing part of him—the part his master had given him—wept in relief.

Swallowing down terror and longing, Gabriel slowly pivoted to face him.

He sprawled on the bed Gabriel had made of foam packing sheets overlaid by a quilt with a busted seam at one corner that some fool had tossed into the Dumpster outside. The thick shock of blond hair still surprised him. Gabriel expected werewolves to have dark hair and eyes, but his master’s hair was golden with streaks of lighter strands the color of sunshine. It smelled of sunshine too and verdant forest. Crisp, pure, and clean.

The shifter twisted the knob of the camp lantern so it flared bright, though his eyes never strayed from Gabriel. He wondered if his master’s gaze held some sort of hypnotic power over him. Why not, when the rest of him did? He wondered that those eyes could be such a pale shade of blue. Shouldn’t a werewolf’s eyes be feral yellow? Or black? Gabriel wondered why his master had bothered to hunt him, why he’d been allowed to survive in the first place, and if he would kill Gabriel quickly once he realized Gabriel’s transformation had taken root so poorly.

Come here.

Gabriel’s mouth went dry. Glance lowering, he shuffled forward. He could not hold that stare. Meeting it felt too much like a challenge, one he couldn’t and didn’t want to issue.

The game was over. His master had found him.

Gabriel was his to do with as he pleased.

Again.

Gabriel didn’t even know his name.

Without being bade to do so, Gabriel dropped to his knees when he reached his bed and jerked both hands to the small of his back. His eyes focused on gray cement. His spine straightened. His shoulders squared. His knees spread on the gritty floor to widen his stance.

He moved into the position his master had taught him with disturbing ease. Kneeling for him comforted Gabriel—though not just the new wildness that had been bred inside him, but also the human sub he’d been before. Weeks and months of worry, fear and pain dissolved at the ritual of offering himself to his dom—to this dom. Gabriel’s galloping heart slowed. The tightness in his chest released. His hands stopped shaking. The terror that had gripped him these past months abruptly loosed.

The shifter would keep him or kill him. Or fuck him.

Gabriel no longer had any say in what happened to him. If he ever had.

Good boy, he said on a low rumble, sliding toward Gabriel on the pallet of his bed. When fingers briefly skated over his hair, Gabriel trembled and wished he could blame the quivering response on fear. God knows terror had made him shake in his shoes more than he cared to recall these past weeks, but he leaned toward his master’s hand, craving the affection and husky approval in his voice. With that scent wrapped around him and a soft caress twisting Gabriel’s gut, he needed to please his master more than he needed his next breath.

Pity you aren’t always so biddable. He threaded his fingers into Gabriel’s hair and palmed his scalp. You ran from me.

Gabriel gulped, but he didn’t reply. He knew from that one mind-shattering night with the shifter that he wasn’t to speak until invited to do so. When a hand fisted in Gabriel’s hair to yank his gaze up, Gabriel didn’t utter a word, though an anxious whine fell from his lips no matter how he tried to contain it.

We know how much you like to be punished, though. Don’t we, pet? One corner of his master’s mouth curved at the evidence of Gabriel’s distress. And we both know I’ll always give you what you need.

Gabriel’s pulse thundered in his ears. Always? he whispered then cringed at his audacity.

Always, Gabriel.

He stared into Gabriel’s eyes. Wholly captivating. Enthralling. Though nerves ate at his spine, Gabriel would not—could not—look away.

Strip your jeans down your thighs.

His stomach clenched. As he fumbled with his zipper, Gabriel’s gaze darted to his master’s nose, the thick blond hair that brushed his brow, to the pale scruff of stubble that roughened his jaw—everywhere the shifter’s grasp would allow. But it was the eyes that commanded him. Beckoned him. Gabriel licked his lips and shuddered at the cold blankness in the unwavering stare. Whatever the shifter intended to do with Gabriel, this was the real punishment—forcing Gabriel to look into his eyes. Gabriel knew it. His master knew it too.

Shoving wet denim down his hips, Gabriel bared his ass and jutting cock.

His master smiled. Hands, pet.

Gabriel yanked them to the base of his spine again.

Humming in satisfaction, the shifter tugged at his hair so that he stumbled off