Sharon had thought she'd been happy, even content with that state. But as the years passed, the burden of the constant loneliness began to weigh in, and with it, the misery.
She thought it would be different when she was of age, when her initial heat finally settled.
She was wrong.
Luthor had only been Alpha for a few months when it came around, and even on a good day, she shunned him like the plague. Like his dad, however, Luthor was the cold efficiency type of pack leader. He was ruthless, emotionless, and the very kind of Alpha she didn't like being around. He wasn't openly cruel to her, though, but every bit of anger that he had showed in the way that he would look at her as if she was less than the filth on the bottom of his feet.
Everything changed, at least for the time being, when she first went through her first heat. She was twenty at the time, and her parents were out, so she was home alone, which was a blessing. The pain was almost debilitating, but the isolation made it worse. She needed an Alpha, as if her very existence depended on it, but no Alpha would stoop so low to be with her. She didn't want them anyway. She'd prefer to suffer than have an Alpha accompany her when she was in heat due to pity alone.
She was in the middle of her heat cycle when someone knocked on her door. She'd called in for four days straight from work at the pack-owned grocery store because she'd been too embarrassed to call in during her heat, and somehow, her missing time had finally been noticed.
She assumed her boss, or someone in the office, but never in a thousand years would she assume that when she yanked open her front door, she would see Luthor Michaels there.
She remembered the surprise and the frustration that her heat had induced her to be so focused on that she did not feel Luthor until her door was open. He stood there for seconds, and briefly, she was surprised by the way his eyes raked her from top to bottom. After that, his face hardened, and the moment was gone. She remembered him saying to her that he had to speak with her about her failure to appear and how she would be fired, but he did not leave and they both knew it was not going to happen.
After that, she'd let him in, and they were kissing. The feeling of his hands as he moved into her hips, his fingers pressing beneath her shirt and against her skin.
Luthor had been the first, and he'd been unexpectedly tender and kind to her. The brutally aggressive, icy Alpha she was used to was gone, replaced by someone who appeared to be concerned for her in general and wanted to make sure she got as much pleasure as she could.
He'd taken care of her, he'd prepared her for him, and as they'd lain together afterward, with him tied her up, he had held her so closely, so tightly, that she'd felt secure in the arms of his circle.
Then all hell broke loose.
Her heat had stopped abruptly, and the next morning, he was as cold and hard as ever. The memory of the way he had stood her off that morning her heat had stopped, the way he had looked into her eyes and told her he did not want anything to do with her, that it was a mistake, stood clear now as it had then.
Luthor had told her in so many words that he would never call an Omega like her his mate and she wasn't the female he had any thoughts of producing pups with. It didn't matter if she had been; whether or not they had spent a night of passion together, she had been nothing more than a dirty secret and a fling. She'd been lucky that he'd taken care of her when she'd needed him, and it was stupid of her to think otherwise.
She'd shut down, heartbroken and humiliated. She stopped reporting to work, stopped answering the few calls that she got, and tried to accept her lonely lifestyle. She'd been stupid to believe that an Alpha like Luthor would be concerned with her.
It hurt worse than anything had ever hurt, but at least she knew that she would live.
She never got to find out how things might have worked out, because a week or so later she was slapped in the face with a devastating shock—her period was late by two weeks. She'd been too miserable to really care, but now.
Her body was destroyed, and the idea of a pregnancy appalled her. The idea of her being a mother was unthinkable, particularly with the man she thought she may be having a baby with.
It didn't matter who the father was,.
She could only think of it in relation to her own parents as to how she had been raised with coldness, as if they did not wish to be around her. She'd sensed that they never wished for children and that she was little more than an accident. When she thought about her own baby, she knew that she wanted something far better.
Worse than deadbeat parents, and definitely worse than an asshole Alpha for a father. Alphas like Luthor used mates and children as property and ruled over them completely. To think the little sweet child she had been carrying ruled in that way, and by a father who thought of him as a means of enhancing his own standing? It was disgusting, and the idea that it would happen to her baby was unthinkable.
It needed to be enough to get her into action.
She understood that she was going to need to leave the Tenzclaw lands, and that she needed to do so immediately. There'd been a city not far away that was human, Portland, and if she was lucky she could find work and some kind of housing. Perhaps, if she were lucky, she'd be able to find someone who would help her and her unborn babe. It would not be easy to leave her entire world behind and start a life of her own, but the thought of staying where she was just brought a fundamental fear and panic.
She had vowed to herself, once Luthor rejected her, that she would skip town and start a better life for herself and for both of them. She'd worked for decades to do it, and as she did, she'd done everything in her power to put all the anger and hurt that Luthor had left her behind. It hadn't always worked, but it had worked enough.
But now it was over. The threat was ever present and right next to her. She might resist Luthor's advances and protect her child as best she could, but she knew what he was capable of. To Luthor, the fact that she carried his child meant she belonged to him, and by extension, that her child was his as well. He would probably use his power by taking control of the child as a means of taking control of her, as well.
Damn him. As the miles passed, it was becoming more and more hard to hold her tears within. The unfairness of it was so heavy it was all she could behold. She had everything, the freedom that she'd fought tooth and nail for, and Luthor could take it all away with the snap of his fingers.
She hated Alphas, every single one of them.the one in her car, worst of all.
As she glared at Luthor's face again, she noticed he was occasionally looking at her from the corner of his eye. There was a scowl on his handsome face, and he did not even have the decency to pretend he was not looking at her as though she was some sort of specimen under a microscope.
They didn't relent, Luthor happily piling miles upon miles between them and her home, and the tension inside her twisted tighter and tighter with each passing one. He didn't even try to talk to her, or ask if she might be able to do with a break as the first hour turned to the second, and then the third. She was starving, and she really had to pee, but Luthor predictably only cared about himself. Now that he had her held in his power, he didn't even bother to utter a word to her.
Well, touche. If he is going to keep her hostage here, handcuffed to her own damn truck, then they are going to talk.
"So.care to explain why you hauled me all this way just to kidnap me like some back-of-the-drawing-crude criminal?"
Luthor sneered, his head shaking in incredulity at how thick she was being, which, of course, just sent her temper further on the boil. "Don't play games with me. I am taking you home where you belong, where your family and pack are."
She laughed. "I haven't had a pack in years."
Luthor frowned. "I thought that once the shock had passed, you'd be happy. That's what you pleaded with me for all those years back, isn't it? To make you mine to keep?"
The flame in her body burned even hotter, her skin practically searing from his proximity. "I was a fool and naive."
"Can't argue with that. Running off with my son was foolish. More than foolish. Do you have any idea how long I looked for you, Sharon?"
"You.what?"
"As soon as I found out you'd gone, I looked for you." His knuckles were white around where his fingers gripped the steering wheel, his jaw strained from the pressure of his teeth being clenched together. "You were very well hidden. And I shouldn't have let you go. You should have been with me, you and the pup."
"He doesn't even know you. You just tore our entire lives apart on a whim."
"I'll take responsibility for having done the wrong things, but you ran, Sharon. I may not have opted to take you as my partner after a single night, but the pregnancy would have changed everything."