16

johannes

SHE WAS A radiant bride.

Her dress was beautiful, and when she floated down the aisle in the St. Peters Cathedral on the arm of her father, she looked like the most beautiful woman in the history of the entire world. I might have been biased, I supposed, but I didn't think so.

The dress left her shoulders bare, but she had puffy white-lace sleeves that began at her upper arms and fell in diaphanous waves around her arms. The bodice cut low to show off half of Dmitri's bite mark, and it cinched around her tiny, tiny waist. Then the skirt of the dress was voluminous layers and layers of lace, with a long and intricate train. She wore a circle of pink flowers around her head and her gauzy, barely-there veil flowed out behind her.

She had eyes for no one but Dmitri, and he didn't look anywhere except at her.

Dmitri looked good, too.

Had I always been attracted to Dmitri? I thought I must have been.

But there was something about Dmitri that rubbed me the wrong way, and that had always been the case. My alpha chafed against his. I didn't want to submit to him, but I couldn't stop myself. He was simply too strong for me, I supposed.

I didn't know exactly what I thought about packs themselves.

Once, I'd been to a party in Nilthin where other alphas from other countries had been present, and I got into a conversation with a prince from Angleford. His name was Rohan, and we were both the second in line to the throne, and our names were kind of similar. We had a lot in common except for the fact that he was pretty much far and away gone for the heir to the throne there, Devlin Byrne, who seemed to pay exactly zero attention to him, even though Rohan was pretty obviously lovesick.

I liked to think that I was mostly smarter about things than Rohan Gallagher.

Of course, they had an omega now, I understood. We'd even been invited to her formal ball where they crowned her a duchess of something or whatever they did, because she wasn't actually born into the peerage, which…

Well, neither was Nikolai, and neither was this Corentin person.

Who, by the way, I really thought would be here, but I hadn't seen or heard anything else about him. Maybe he'd just disappeared. Maybe Dmitri was wrong about him.

But back to the party with Rohan and the packs.

Rohan had done some reading about scientific studies on people with designations—of which there weren't many, because most royals wouldn't submit to something like that—and he said that packs were a fiction created by tabloid journalists. He said that there was no basis anywhere to think that it was "natural" for alphas to run in packs with a "pack leader" or anything like that.

And the truth was, this was all predicated on a faulty understanding of wolves, really. Wolves in captivity tended to organize themselves into "packs," with a dominant alpha leader and other wolves that deferred to him. But in the wild, these packs were family groups, with the male and female parents being dominant over the pups. In the wild, wolf pups stayed with the family until they mated with someone and started their own pack or decided to leave and become lone wolves for whatever reason.

At some point in time, a very long time ago, designations got caught up in a metaphor for wolf packs, probably because of the knot similarity, I guessed, I didn't know. Anyway, we weren't wolves.

There was no creature on earth where the animals naturally formed themselves into packs like this—with multiple males and one female. Even though that wasn't even the way it often worked, because there were probably as many male omegas as female omegas. Omegas were really rare.

But, just from the perspective of mating, it obviously didn't make sense for there to be one woman and a bunch of men. Anyone could see that was a stupid way to allocate resources for the purpose of making babies. One woman could only have one baby every year. (maybe twins, okay, maybe triplets, but the point stands.) If me, Dmitri, and Nikoali went out and fucked a bunch of women all year long, we could… I mean… that's a lot of babies. Just saying.

So, Rohan was like, "This pack thing is unnatural. It has no evolutionary advantage, and it's just done because of omega scarcity. And also because omegas tend to need multiple partners for sexual satisfaction."

And if that was true, which seemed to make sense, then it only made sense that I was chafing against being dominated by Dmitri. There was no natural basis for me to be dominated by this guy or for me to share an omega. It was just the best way to organize ourselves if we were doing it, I guessed.

Best or not, it was the way it was done.

Pack leader was a common way of thinking about it. In Valhn, the pack leader was the heir, and traditionally, the only one allowed to actually bite the omega. I'd grown up knowing this, and I wasn't sure why it was so hard to accept it now.

Seeing as I was an alpha prince, I was part of the ceremony. So was Ilse. We stood up with Dmitri, his groomsmen. Well, groomsman and groomswoman. I wore a tux and she wore a formal black gown.

So, from my vantage point, I got to watch Aurelie come down the aisle in that dress of hers, clutching her father's arm, basically beaming at Dmitri like she was lit from within with an ethereal light.

She was so obviously in love with him.

And the way I felt about her? It seemed weird to call it love, because I felt like she and I hadn't been given the chance to really get to know each other yet. But I did care about her.

Seeing her happy like that didn't hurt me, not the way you think it might. It made me want Dmitri for her. It made me want to accommodate this. For her. Because she deserved everything she wanted, and I would never knowingly take anything from her.

Did I wonder what it would be like to have her look at me that way, though?

Did that hurt?

Yeah, I guess it did.

I would never ask her for it, of course. That would cheapen it. I would never act as if I was owed it from her. I wouldn't want it if she didn't feel it genuinely.

But I wished that I could feel that kind of love and adoration, I did.

And then I remembered Nikolai, who hadn't been allowed to be a groomsman, because of the stupid tradition, and I felt that like a punch to my gut, because Nikolai loved me like that, and I knew it.

Wasn't that enough?

It should be, really. Most people were happy enough with one significant other. But having a designation made things more intense, and maybe it was harder to be satisfied as an alpha.

I stood at the front of the cathedral, watching the wedding ceremony, until it was my turn to intervene. As one of the groomsmen, I had to bring forward Dimitri's pelt.

Back in the day, this would have been an animal he'd killed and skinned himself just for this occasion, but nowadays, it was a very old bearskin that had been in the family for ages.

I brought it to him, folded up.

The attendant told Dimtri to wrap it around his bride and put her under his protection.

Then they both put their hands on the pommel of a sword and stabbed it down into a hole in the altar together, while there were vows in ancient Valhnish that they repeated.

Then they did the traditional wedding vows, her still wrapped in the pelt, and the kiss, and then I came forward to take it off her shoulders because it wouldn't look nice in the pictures if they walked up the aisle like that. It was kind of an ugly bearskin.

Traditionally, she would wear it until the wedding night, when the groom would remove it, but that tradition had been waved long ago.

We went back up the aisle, then. Ilse went first, and then I followed. The bride and groom would come behind us. I stood on the steps outside the cathedral, and then Nikolai was there, nimbly making his way to stand next to me.

Nikolai's voice was soft. "He's here."

"Who is?" I said.

"Corentin," he said.

I looked around. "Where?"

Nikolai nodded at the other side of the street, behind the police barrier. There were all sorts of people out here, watching the prince and princess as they came out of the cathedral. I was standing here next to Ilse on the groom's side (Aurelie's sisters, the bridesmaids, were on the other side in matching pink dresses) and they'd be coming out at any minute.

Aurelie and Dmitri were going to get into a gilded horse-drawn carriage at the bottom of the steps, where they'd be taken back to the castle, where the reception was taking place on the castle grounds.

I couldn't make him out, Corentin. There were too many people.

"I just wanted to tell you that I'm going to tail him," said Nikolai. "So, don't wait for me in the car. Just go."

"Okay," I said. "Do you think he's… dangerous?"

"Well," said Nikolai, "he supposedly owns Euphoric Wheels—"

"The skateboard company?'

"They have a ton of ties to organized crime," said Nikolai.

"Do they?" I said.

"And no one understands how the hell it is that he somehow turned himself into an alpha," said Nikolai. "So, I don't know if he's dangerous, but I don't think we should trust him."

"Okay, good point," I said.

Nikolai patted me on the shoulder and then disappeared, melting between people in the crowd until I couldn't see him anymore. It was eerie how good he was at that.

At that moment, Aurelie and Dmitri burst out of the doors, and everyone cheered. Aurelie was glowing, smiling and waving, and I got a lungful of their combined scents, and it was powerful. They mingled nicely. She did something to the intensity of Dmitri's scent, mellowing it in a way that brought it down, and he made her scent more intense in a way. Together, they gave me the craziest damned knot.

Ilse elbowed me. "They scent like that? "

"I know," I muttered.

"Geez, that's almost as good as Cole and the King together," she said. "I'm not even attracted to either of them and… geez."

I chuckled.

"You're a lucky man," she told me.

Was this luck?

Why did it feel more like a curse, then?

nikolai

HE SHOULDN'T HAVE spotted me, this Corentin person.

I'd been trained to be undetectable. Sure, I was a little out of practice, but I hadn't been conspicuous at all. I'd stayed hidden, making my movements look random most of the time, but keeping him in sight.

I'd followed him down three streets now, and then I noted him looking at a car, and pointedly not getting into it, and that was when I knew he knew he was being followed.

Shit.

I had two options. I could show myself or I could give up.

If I kept tailing him, he'd probably find a way to lose me, I figured. If he was good enough to spot me, he was probably also good enough to lose me. Giving up or his shaking me off came to the same thing, that I wouldn't know where he was.

So, I broke out into the open and stood in the middle of the sidewalk.

I waited several moments as he sauntered away.

And then he slowed. Stopped. Turned.

I thought maybe he'd come to me, but he didn't. He folded his arms over his chest and stood there, waiting.

I approached. He was an attractive man, but then I'd never met an alpha I wasn't attracted to, regardless of how they looked. I'd met old-man alphas in their late sixties with balding heads and paunches, and one whiff of their scent and something within me rose.

Still, I liked the look of him, his tattoos, his short hair, the way his upper lip curved into something like a sneer. He was… different.

No, not different, that wasn't it.

He was the same as me.

Johannes and Dmitri, they were princes and they were nothing like me. This man, there was something about him, some sort of kinship, something that spoke to a shared history of struggle. He'd fought to get where he was and so had I. He'd been hurt. So had I. He was hard in a way that neither Dmitri nor Johannes was, hard in a way like I was hard.

I stopped two feet away from him. "I'm Nikolai," he said.

"I know," he said. The wind changed and I caught a whiff of his scent and it all slammed together in my brain. I'd scented this scent last night, in Johannes's room, but I hadn't noted it because I was all loopy after licking up their co-mingled come. Corentin had been there.

I licked my lips. "You're good, aren't you?"

"You people are just idiots," he said. "No eye to security. Rich people always think they're invincible."

He wasn't wrong. Maybe I'd gotten soft. I was usually on high alert in strange places, but in the castle, maybe I'd gotten too complacent.

Of course, this was always the way it was with danger.

It surprised you.

You tried and tried and tried to always be aware of it, but you never could be. It sneaked in when you were exhausted or happy or stupidly trusting. You couldn't be safe, and I knew that.

"But it doesn't matter," he said. "I don't want to hurt anyone."

"What do you want?" I said.

"Her," he said. "Just her. She's mine."

I shook my head. "She's not. She's ours."

"Yeah, I heard how that went last night. She's Dmitri's is more like it."

"But we all belong to him," I said.

Something in his scent shifted when I said that, and he flinched.

I stepped closer. "You want to be his, too."

"No," he said, too quickly.

I didn't even need to respond to that. I smiled at him. "He feels it, too." I knew this was true because of how fiercely Dmitri had insisted that we close ranks against Corentin.

Corentin's nostrils flared. "Thought you were going to tell me to stay away from her."

"I did, too," I said, thoughtful. "Here's a problem we have, Corentin Sejour. Your company's board is controlled by a majority stake owned by the Bannino family from Arenze. Deny that?"

"Check that again," said Corentin. "They don't have the majority of the stocks anymore."

"So, you don't owe them any favors?"

"No," he said flatly. "Paid in full."

"How did you become an alpha?" I said.

"How did you?" he said.

"I presented in puberty. It was just the natural order of things for me."

"Was it really?" He lifted his chin.

I furrowed my brow, confused. "What do you know?"

"Doesn't matter."

But it did matter, and I didn't like the fact that he was hiding things.

He relaxed, letting his arms go uncrossed. "What do you want with me, then?"

"We're going to Heirastein Castle for the honeymoon," I said.

"I know," he said.

Right, he'd been eavesdropping.

"You get yourself there," I said. "And I'll get you in. For the wedding night."

He licked his lips. "No, you think I want to watch her—"

"Yes," I said. "I do."

He touched his chest. "I took her virginity for real."

"Really," I whispered, tucking this bit of information away. "Interesting."

"I won't submit to him," said Corentin, but his voice was scratchy in a way that let me know he wanted to submit. And my scent rose in response to his desire.

He reacted to the smell of me, letting out a low groan. He rolled his head on his shoulders. "Why do all of you scent like…?"

"Like what?" I whispered.

"Belonging," he said, voice cracking.

"Maybe because we all belong together," I said.

"No," he said. "No way." He backed away. "I'll be there, though. Tonight. Heirastein Castle."

"You want my phone number so you can text me?"

"Not necessary," he said. "I've already got that."

I smiled. Yeah, he was good. He was good, and he was still sharp in the way I used to be sharp. I'd been dulled by love and safety and the luxury of royal life. But he…

He turned his back on me.

I watched him walk down the sidewalk to his car.

Corentin. Hmm.

He had a nice ass.