I watched with confusion as Sadie got punched in the stomach for the fifth time.
Cobra shook his head at her and yelled at her to move quicker.
He was pulling his punches and was moving embarrassingly slow. Yet somehow, his fist still landed on Sadie.
Every time he touched her, my annoyance spiked higher.
It enraged me that she wasn’t defending herself.
In the opening ceremony, Sadie had been a killing machine. She’d dodged and kicked like she was weightless and built to fight.
Now she couldn’t dodge a slow punch that Cobra telegraphed. If she didn’t take this seriously, she was going to get destroyed in the games.
I shook my head to clear my thoughts and breathed calmly to center myself because my head was scrambled, and it shouldn’t be.
I was here on behalf of the fae queen to keep an eye on the alphas.
They were the enemy.
It didn’t matter if they got hurt in the games.
Sadie dodged too slowly, and Cobra’s leg sent her to the ground. She gasped and chuckled as she struggled to get up.
I fought the urge to march over and yell at her. A completely irrational response.
“You’re an alpha shifter. Fight like it!” Cobra yelled at her as she failed to dodge yet another blow.
For some reason, they referred to themselves as shifters. Where I was from, we were called beasts. A more fitting name.
From what I had overheard, their entire realm was a prison for beasts. Bizarre. The whole situation stunk of the High Court.
Since my mother was a beta, I’d attended elite ABO schools growing up. Since ABOs lived longer than nulls, we were privy to certain information that they weren’t.
The key information being that the High Court secretly ruled over all the realms.
They gave us just enough information about them so we could identify who they were if we got in trouble or needed their help.
I swallowed down a reprimand as Sadie’s legs were swept out from beneath her. Cobra stood over her gasping body and glared down at her with annoyance.
To an outsider who didn’t know them, it would appear that the large, gorgeous alpha hated her.
His emerald eyes stared at her with a frightening intensity.
I didn’t know what he felt toward her, but it wasn’t hate. That was for sure.
In some ways, none of the alphas I was in charge of acted like traditional alphas. They were just as large and violent, but they didn’t have the cruel edge.
No, they are all monsters.
They were getting to me.
I twirled my blades in my hands to calm my racing thoughts.
Instead of obsessing over the alphas, specifically the little alpha that smelled like cranberries and sunshine, I focused on why I hated them.
Why I sprayed scent blockers constantly all over my body. Why my skin crawled with wariness every time an alpha used their alpha bark.
I needed to remain vigilant.
I couldn’t let the past repeat itself.
At fifty years old, I was young for an immortal omega beast, but my soul was old and heavy.
Decades had passed, but the trauma of my youth still defined me.
Even though the fae queen was a ruthless leader, she was still miles better than the alpha leaders of the beast realm, who coveted omegas above all else.
Unfortunately, male omegas were the rarest of them all.
Discovering my identity had been so much worse because I’d grown up thinking I was a beta. Hell, even now I looked more like a beta than an omega.
Since I was a young boy, I was larger and stronger than other children.
My life had been planned out: I was going to be a soldier.
My mother was a beta, and my father had died before I was born. We never talked about him. Sun god knew we should have.
She’d forgotten to mention he was an omega.
If she had, maybe I would have had a chance to escape.
We’d grown up in Serpentes City, where neon skyscrapers housed a population of fifty million beasts and growing.
Like most cities in the beast realm, it was a glitzy den of depravity and violence.
The alpha Mafia ruled it. The Don was in charge, and his iron fist was the only thing that kept order among violent beasts.
The High Court might rule over all worlds, but in the beast realm, the strongest and most ruthless citizens ruled the cities.
The only laws, the only structure, were the ones the Mafia imposed on Serpentes City.
As a result, alphas ruled and kept order in society.
But not all alphas were in the Mafia. Not all of them wanted order and structure, and not all of them wanted peace.
The few thousand “independent” alphas were apex predators living among the millions of null sheep. Since they were usually rich, immortal beings, it was nearly impossible to control them.
Betas were the enforcers of alphas. Omegas were their highly coveted breeders.
Since Serpentes City held the realm’s financial district, it was the home of billionaires, luxury cars, high-end exchange markets, and the best designer clothes the realm offered.
With such exuberant wealth, controlling the drug, arms, and skin trades were not easy jobs.
Unsurprisingly, because they had centuries to amass their fortunes, alphas ruled over all these sectors. Within the rules of the Mafia or outside them.
That was where the don’s alpha and beta enforcers came into play—peace enforced through violence.
Since I’d enjoyed training, physical combat, and weapons, as a child, I thought becoming an enforcer was the perfect fit for me.
When I’d gotten tested at a sacred lake on my twentieth birthday, my life had gone to hell.
Instead of getting trained in combat, they had expected me to attend omega school and learn my “role” in the city.
Nulls worshipped us, betas were jealous of us, and alphas wanted to possess us.
If there were millions of nulls, thousands of betas, and about three thousand alphas, then there were a few dozen omegas.
Alphas formed packs of four-to-seven men and the occasional women and competed desperately for omegas. A completed pack, alphas who had bonded with an omega, was a status symbol in the beast realm.
Bonded packs with omegas were celebrities.
After all, they were the only ones that could birth alphas. And they always birthed ABOs, never nulls.
Also, omega bonds were said to tame alphas. They kept alphas from going feral over the centuries.
I knew better from personal experience.
It was all bullshit.
Alphas would always be vicious creatures, and omegas were nothing more than their breeding toys and tickets to greater wealth and fame.
It was all fucked up, and a rare male omega was the greatest status symbol of all. Female alphas would fiend over me for biological purposes. Male alphas just wanted to brag.
At first, being an omega hadn’t been all that bad. As I’d learned more about my specific omega needs, the anxiety I‘d always suffered from had become more manageable.
Before omega school, insomnia had been a nightly occurrence.
It was silly in hindsight; all it took was a pile of a dozen pillows and three fuzzy blankets sprayed with chemically tailored alpha scents and I slept like a baby.
For a time after I’d perfumed, I’d put aside my blades and committed to embracing my new reality.
But then the alphas had happened.
Day and night, I’d been stalked.
Alpha men, and a few alpha women, had followed me everywhere I went. The armed guards that the Don granted all omegas had been on high alert at all hours.
I’d been cornered in bars, elevators, and the grocery store.
Paparazzi had photographed me wherever I went, and screaming null fans had tried to reach out and touch me.
No matter how many scent blockers I sprayed on myself, people had still screamed when they sniffed cinnamon and chased after me.
That had been the least of my problems.
As an omega in the school, you were introduced to interested alpha packs. Omegas were supposed to have the ability to choose.
Like with everything in Serpentes City, money and power corrupted.
An “independent” alpha pack who lived outside the Mafia’s rules but had an exorbitant amount of wealth had paid a small fortune to buy me.
The omega school had handed me over like I was chattel.
I was never given a choice.
The alphas who’d bought me were four men. Four rough, abusive men who wanted to possess the rare male omega.
Four wolves.
Wolves were the most violent of all the beasts; everyone knew to avoid them because they were ruled by their baser urges.
Fueled by sex, money, violence, and terror.
From a young age, all Serpentes City children were taught to run if they encountered a wolf shifter on the streets, put their heads down and fucking sprint in the opposite direction.
Every single wolf alpha was on the don’s most wanted list.
They ran the deadliest skin trades.
My alphas were no different, and they’d wanted to break me so they could brag about it to their friends.
The problem was, even though I was an omega and had subservient inclinations, I’d grown up training to be a warrior.
Most omegas were trapped by their own instincts.
My new alphas had learned quickly that my response was to fight. Violently.
It was a match made in the bowels of the hell realm.
Four wolves and a kitten.
I’d refused to break, and they liked it when I fought back.
One night, after a particularly brutal encounter with the lead alpha, I’d shifted into my omega form to protect myself.
Unlike betas, omegas shifted into a secondary animal form. However, our forms were usually small and innocent. Nothing like an alpha’s.
My form—a fluffy white kitten.
The lead alpha had laughed uproariously, with his bloody cock still hanging between his legs, as I’d shifted into my small cat form for self-protection.
He’d chased me around the room, laughing like a lunatic.
The ritzy town house they lived in was locked tight with security. I knew because I’d tried numerous times to escape but failed time and again. Guards were stationed at all the doors, and the windows were barred.
As the alpha had chased me, he’d laughed because he’d known I was trapped.
My terror was a game to him.
However, he hadn’t factored in that my kitten form was small enough to slip through a small mouse hole in the back of the closet.
On four tiny legs, I’d run through the tunnel while mewling with fear that one of the wolves would find me.
When the tunnel had led me out into the dark alley behind the town house, I’d been stunned to find myself free for the first time in months.
Sanity had quickly returned, and still in my kitten form, I’d slipped through the rainy city streets.
Puddles of water had reflected the bright neon lights from the towering skyscrapers. Supercars had hummed by, and businessmen and women had run to avoid the rain.
No one had noticed the shivering fluffy kitten that slipped through the shadows.
Finally, after hours of running down city streets, I’d sneaked under the secure barrier that blocked the general populace from the underground subway system.
Everyone knew the subways connected the beast realm to other realms. And only the most elite ABOs, the ones with upper-level clearance, could access the trains.
I’d stayed in my small form because there were security cameras everywhere in the subways.
Hiding behind posts, I’d managed to leap onto a subway train and hide underneath one of the plush reclining seats.
Luckily, there’d been no one else in the train car because I’d meant to stay alert, but I’d been exhausted, and my little head had fallen forward against my will.
I’d woken up from my nap when the train had jerked to a stop and a female had announced, “Fae realm.”
I’d never heard of the realm before, and the realms I had known about weren’t appealing.
Everyone knew the angel and demon realm was full of overpowered psychopaths.
The hell realm, monster, and titan realms were also known to be violent, bloodthirsty places.
With a deep kitten breath, I’d taken a chance.
As fast as possible, I’d sprinted off the train and leaped with all my might up the long stairs that led out of the subway.
At the top of the subway stairs, a swirling black void sucked away the fluorescent lights.
The portal was so dark it hurt to look at it.
It was like looking at the sun, but instead of blinding bright light, it was impossibly dark shadows.
I’d never felt anything like it.
Before I could question my sanity, I’d thrown my little body into the darkness.
I’d landed on a bed of flowers and picked my head up to look around.
The world had been impossibly hot and bright. Two suns had hung heavy and bloated in the glittery turquoise sky.
I’d been lying in a field of vibrant flowers.
Soft pink petals had floated in the air on a cool breeze.
The beast realm was a rainy concrete jungle that was perpetually overcast with artificial, glowing neon colors.
I’d never known the world could be so bright and pastel. There was no other word to describe it.
The shock of my new surroundings had worn off, and I’d transformed back into my much larger form.
No longer at eye level with the flowers, I’d admired the lush landscape as I cracked my neck with relief and stretched my biceps.
The only problem—I’d been naked without any knives for defense.
Suddenly, guards in strange uniforms had appeared out of nowhere and demanded I come with them. They’d said I lacked proper identification to enter the realm.
At first, I’d fought them.
Months of abuse, and the stress of fleeing the only home I’d ever known, had been a heavy weight on my chest. What was the point?
I’d given up and allowed myself to be captured.
