“I have not heard you whine or whimper in days,” I say. “Are you feeling any other omega instincts?”
“You mean like the nesting instinct or the overpowering drive to fuck you and my alphas?”
I look at her with a twisted grin, unable to help the blush in my cheeks.
“Because if that’s what you’re asking, I swear I’ve never felt it this bad before. Even in heat.”
“Make a fist for me,” I order her. My voice comes out more commanding than it usually does, but Auryn doesn’t balk at it. She purrs, her pupils dilating.
She just had breakfast, but she looks at me like she’s starving, that lavender sunshine scent heavy between us. She makes her fist, and I tie the tourniquet around her arm.
“Yes, sir,” she teases me, and I can’t help but smile because we both know who’s actually in charge here.
Still, the way Auryn lets me feel like I am in charge, like I am an alpha in a sea of them, is not unnoticed.
“Just a pinch,” I tell her as she bites her lip.
That heavy lavender hits me again.
“You smell different,” I say as I slide the needle in her arm.
She wrinkles her nose. “I mean, I showered after—”
“No, your natural scent. Before it was a blend of lemongrass and cinnamon most days, thanks to your hybrid blood, but now—” I watch as the dark crimson blood fills the tube. Her blood is flowing fast today, and I have to be quick changing out the tubes. “Now you smell like lavender. The rest is still there, but the lavender is…overpowering.”
“My scent has changed?” she asks warily.
I nod. “It can happen when bonds are formed between an omega and an alpha. Especially if an omega is in heat. Sometimes during breeding they’ll take on the alpha’s scent. Among…”
My blood chills as years of research hits me with one fact I did not consider.
“Other things,” I say as the thought lands.
Omegas can change scents when they are pregnant.
I bite my tongue as I look at her, not wanting to get ahead of myself. Auryn is a hybrid so, realistically, this could be a hybrid thing. It could just be a reaction a hybrid has to bonding a pack.
She’s been here for a few weeks, tops.
But she came to us in heat.
And we all bred her at some point during that heat, and in the days after her heat cycle ended.
I know this. But alpha females also have a heat cycle, and there’s no information about whether or not hybrids experience one heat cycle, both, or some combination of the two.
Alpha females have higher sex drives and tend to seek out sex more during their heat than a typical omega to increase their chances of successful conception, but omegas…
An omega is most fertile during heat and in the week after it ends.
The alphas I could understand. Driven by their instinct to rut and breed, it makes sense they’d be clamoring to knot Auryn because it’s their primal instinct. Their alpha reacts to her omega on a cellular, basic level.
But me?
I have no excuse. I’m not an alpha with a primal need.
I’m a beta. I can’t even knot.I’ve never even had sex before I met Auryn, for God’s sakes!
I steel my resolve because I don’t want to alarm her, but also I’m feeling slightly alarmed because as I replay the last few weeks, hell the last few days in my brain, I realize the probability of Auryn being pregnant is high.
