Page 16 of His Stolen Omega

Did they get Shiloh after all?

Did—

Oh.

Elm figured it out a second before his body shut down.

He really, really wished he hadn’t.

* * *

“Done crying, omega?” A calm, almost emotionless voice spoke from the dark, and Elm blinked. “Awake?”

He was no longer on the table, and there was no longer anything shoved up his ass. That alone was enough for him to make a sound of relief, even as the aches in his muscles protested. The mattress he was lying on was on the ground in the corner of a dark room, the only source of light coming from somewhere to his right.

It took all of the energy he could muster to turn his head, mind scrambling to sort through what he was seeing once he had.

There were bars…

The light was coming from the other side of them, from a single low hanging light orb that cast the only other occupant in the room in partial shadow.

The man lifted a lit cigarette to his lips and took a slow drag. He was sitting in a cushioned, high back chair that looked incredibly out of place for what was clearly a prison of sorts. He was dressed in black, but Elm couldn’t make out any details, and his eyes—

Memory flashed of those eyes staring down at him, there and gone.

Elm sucked in a sharp breath, and a second later, a flood of soothing alpha pheromones trickled from that side of the room, cascading over his sore muscles.

The man with the silver eyes took another drag and then blew out a coil of smoke. “Do you remember anything?”

“Stop.” He inhaled and tried to focus, giving up on sitting up or making any big moves of any kind within seconds. “What did you do to me?”

“It depends on how you look at it, I suppose.” Another pull from the cigarette. Another slow exhale. “You could say I either broke you or put you back together.”

“Let me guess, you’re going with the latter?”

“No.” He didn’t hesitate. “If it’s up to me, I would say it was the first.”

That…was off-putting.

It meant he didn’t care about getting on Elm’s good side.

He didn’t want to ask it, but…

“Omega?” He hated the way it sounded, a little bit like a plea, filled with obvious fear.

The man, the alpha, released more pheromones, and Elm clenched his jaw and squeezed his eyes shut.

“Why are you resisting?” he sounded legitimately curious. “Soothing pheromones can help calm you.”

“I shouldn’t be able to sense any pheromones at all,” Elm whispered. Betas couldn’t. They were regular. Boring. Elm had never experienced anything like a heat or rut, hadn’t known what the feel or smell of pheromones were like.

This was all so overwhelming, it was tempting to start actually crying, but he somehow managed to hold himself together.

“Surely you learned what was happening when they—”

“I was unconscious,” he admitted. “I woke up with the needle in my skin and broke the guy’s nose for it.”

“But it was too late.”