Page 71 of Choosing Her Alpha
Merrick
Several years later...
Merrick sat at a little table in the corner of the bar. The table was filthy, the chair was filthy—this whole place was filthy. He thought Sector 10 was bad, but he’d been wrong. Sector 2 was far worse.
The whole area was walled off from the rest of civilization with shock wire. It existed as the antithesis of order and control. His older brother, Nothonal, had created the perfect home for the condemned and the depraved.
He didn't know the name of this dirt floored, mold encrusted shack. It was owned and run by a lowlife alpha who oversaw some of the fights in the pits. The place's appeal was not in the rotgut alcohol it sold, but the show of a sad little woman sitting in an iron cage behind the makeshift bar.
Head shaved, likely because of lice, she was always naked and shivering with the cold. A half-starved, sterile omega breeder, she cowered in her cage, her head down and arms wrapped around her body. She wore a metal shock collar outfitted with a GPS system, as well as cuffs on her wrists and ankles.
Her owner rented her out by the hour. Any who wanted to use her had to leave weapons at the bar, not because she was dangerous—she leaked her slick for whoever growled at her—but because she was suicidal and had tried numerous times to end her own life.
Merrick thought about helping her do that.
It had been easy to get into Sector 2. No one cared if you went in. One just walked through a door and went through the tunnel from one world to the next. There was no law here. It was all might makes right, and every fight was to the death. Slum lords reigned like little vicious kings. Every vice was readily available, although the quality of those vices was often dubious.
All drones were slaves here. There was no charade of them working off their debts. Breed owned all the drone flesh. And without an Administration, there was no registry. People born here lacked tattoos.
Most of the women born in this sector were sterile. There was some kind of herbal concoction sold on the street that alphas could buy to give to babies that sometimes prevented the virus that caused female ovaries to shrivel and the womb to fill with cysts, but there was no vaccine, no proven medicine to address the issue.
There was no mandatory five year school for breed, nor a thirty year king's plan for alphas. There was also no electricity, no modern sewage system. The water had to be farmed, and there was very little decent food.
It was a sector for outlaws and the banished. Once you entered, it was said to be impossible to get back into the rest of the eleven sectors.
Merrick had been returning from his hunt for Sasha when he'd seen a full phalanx of Kane's enforcers walking down the street toward Dover's End. He’d always assumed his brother knew where he was and figured he had finally decided to execute him for his desertion of the King's Army. So, Merrick hid.
News that Kane had killed Maura and seized control of the pub spread quickly through the streets as the most interesting thing to happen in Sector 10 in years. Merrick thought he could stay in the sector, hiding in the warrens until Kane lost interest. But then his bastard brother had sent in hunters.
Merrick had to go where Kane couldn't follow. The enforcers would sniff him out otherwise.
Much later, he was thumbing through newsreels on a barely working data pad when he saw his exalted, perfect older brother had formally bonded with an omega breeder. There were photos of a beautiful woman with wild, just-from-bed-hair down to her waist, wrapped in a dirty looking sheet and standing in front of Kane, who held her shoulders in his hands. She was marked up good, black and blue from the bottom of her ears to where the sheet covered a magnificent pair of tits.
And she was proud. Head high, shoulders back, not ashamed or afraid. Fierce.
That was how Merrick recognized her, like a punch to his solar plexus. It was fierce little Sasha, who wasn't afraid of anything. He’d never known another female who could match that look.
Whenever Merrick had beat a drone for incompetence, Sasha had been there, always ready to take the blows in the drone's place, a hard glint of determination on her baby face.
Merrick had sisters who’d always used a pout and tears to get their way. They’d begged piteously at the most minor of threats. But Sasha only wept for others.
After her maturation, Sasha looked like pictures Merrick had seen of her mother before Edin Dover had ruined the woman. Wrapped in that sheet, he saw big night sky eyes, lips made for cock sucking, and curves that made his hands shake.
She should have been his. She no longer looked anything like the soft, innocent child that had been living and working at Dover's End. This wasn’t the little girl who gently coaxed and encouraged the entire staff into doing her bidding. But he knew. He knew it was the same omega breeder.
Kane had Sasha. He had bonded her. Vid headlines blared that people had witnessed her give him her breeder’s blessing, that it was real, that it could only come from a true bond, that Kane would live forever—long live the Warlord Constantine Kane and his Bride-Mate, Lady Sasha.
Mistakes plagued Merrick's life choices: Ignoring his father's advice, leaving the King’s Army, spending all his credits on whores and alcohol, and finally tormenting the little breeder girl who unknowingly tormented him.
Losing her.
He had done many bad things. Stupid shit. But he couldn't bring himself to rape a child. No matter what her smell did to his head. No matter that her attitude—defiant, proud—when it shouldn't have been, sang to his heart. No matter that she despised him.
His father had warned him that he'd never know true self-control if he didn't do his time in the King's Army. The whole point of the military was to train alphas to control their beasts so that they could work together and not destroy themselves or anyone else.
Even his father would be proud of Merrick for not sneaking into that little breeder girl's room and fucking her senseless. He deserved a damned reward. He deservedher.
He'd been unable to break her, to show her he was bigger and badder. And she had escaped him.
