“You look lovely, Cyn, and Madam has outdone herself. But this is beta fashion, George. Shouldn’t she be wearing those little floaty things that all the other omegas wear?”
“She doesn’t need to. Her scent will announce to one and all what she is, and she’ll be all the more fascinating for her fashion choices. Madam is right—why be a sheep when you can be a wolf?”
A wolf. Yeah, right. Nothing could be further than the truth, but I could work with sheep in wolf’s clothing, if that was what it took.
“James Chadwick. Let’s do this. Go, go, go,” I said, waving my hand at the door.
“Choose some suitable pieces and let the dealer know, Cyn.”
“Really?” I paused there for a second, studying Mum’s face. “I… Of course, I’ll find some that fit your decor.”
“Goodnight, sweetheart.” She kissed me on the cheek and then disappeared into her office.
“Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod…” I hissed as the driver pulled up in front of the gallery, the lights blazing in the darkness, marking the way to the promised land.
“First rule of secret season is to act bored at all times,” George said when the car came to a stop. “Any sign of enthusiasm or interest is strictly verboten. Face serene, so as not to develop wrinkles, a little disdainful hauteur is even better. Now, show me your resting bitch face.”
He wouldn’t let me out of the car until I did, with cars backing up behind us, so I schooled my face to smoothness.
“Hmm…I can pass the shine in your eyes off as omega heat or something, but we’ll have to work on this. Bored face training begins tomorrow, my darling.”
“Of course.” I snickered, and he opened the door with a sigh, onto a whole other world.
My first and only season had been trotting from one of the official events to another, filled with academy omegas vying for alpha’s attention, proud mamas and papas looking on. But they were always deathly boring, consisting mainly of standing around making small talk, dancing, or dinners. But this? We stalked up the steps that led to the gallery, spied the silhouettes of people within, but I brushed past them all.
“Jesus Christ, Cyn. You’ve got the right background and the right look, but if you want more invitations like this, get some fucking chill,” George hissed, wrapping his arm in mine. “This is a game, a very old game, with rules no one talks about and yet everyone is aware of them. Everyone who stays.” He took me on a gentle stroll around the gallery, even as I wanted to stop and stare at the works on the wall. “Your James Chadwick is not a player, just a pawn picked up and put on a pedestal by the rich and powerful until they say otherwise. Now, here’s a good place to stop.”
“Why here?” I asked, but my eyes were drawn to the massive drawing in front of us.
Chadwick, to my mind, had done something terribly daring. Eschewing the weird minimalism of contemporary art, with its dog skulls and poorly rigged pieces of rope to illustrate the semiotic confusion of modern life, he drew things that people could recognise and appreciate. Unrepentantly romantic, a woman curled in on herself, a book in hand, despite the fact she looked much like a faerie princess herself. His lines were the flowing organic whips of Art Nouveau, yet with a contemporary twist. He hadn’t plumped for mere reproduction, but took the sensibility of the movement and made it his own.
Yeah, I know. I took some art history classes online when I worked out university would be near impossible. Some omegas chanced it, but I…
“This one, I think, George,” I said.
“What? Oh yes, it’s quite beautiful. And so it should be for thirty K. But it’s not the artwork that made me stop here.”
“It wasn’t?”
George looked at me like I looked at the artwork, like he got some sort of deep aesthetic pleasure from doing so.
“You were always one of the more beautiful, more accomplished omegas, and positioning ourselves under this spotlight, central to the room, it makes sure that every eligible alpha that walks in that door notices what I do. The light reflects off your skin, your hair, your pearls, and people can’t help but stare.”
His eyes slid sideways and mine followed, and from the corner of our eyes, we saw people pause to take a look. At us, not the works on the wall, which didn’t sit well for me, but he took my hand and squeezed it.
“You want to find your alpha?”
“Yes,” I replied, without hesitation this time, which my therapist would have called progress. I did. This afternoon, the dildo, getting myself off… Self-pleasure was an important part of an independent woman’s arsenal, but right now, I knew I needed more. I’d gotten into this to try and relieve Mum of her burden, but now… That frantic thrash of ecstasy in the car had awakened something in me, and I wanted more.
But I wanted the security of knowing the hand, the tongue, the cock inside me belonged to my mate. Mine. A tiny growl grew in my chest, quickly smothered. I wanted someone who would claim me as I would claim them.
“Well, sit tight, look at your precious art, and let people see the way that gold clasp bites ever so slightly into your skin,” he said, making me shiver, even when he ran his finger down the thin bar of metal joining the pearls together. “I’ll get us some champers.”
And so I did, feeling somewhat self-conscious, until my eyes were drawn back to the artwork. It would piss George off, but I stepped in closer, peering at it, at the almost seamless pencil strokes over the top of a base layer of watercolour. It was odd for such a large work to be so detailed, the thirty grand price tag actually seeming quite meagre.
“I’m sorry for interrupting. You seem to be looking at that artwork rather closely. Is there anything I can help you with?”
When I turned, there was a thirty-something man standing there dressed in what I would forever dub as hipster chic. Black stovepipe pants that were cut close to shapely thighs, heavy boots on his feet that had seen better days, the leather peeling a little over the steel caps. A thin grey turtle neck so dark as to almost look black, the grey relieved by tiny flecks of white. And then a shock of dark hair, a mobile mouth, and thick-rimmed glasses that tried to hide brown eyes that sparkled with a light that didn’t require artificial ones to illuminate them. There was something inside him that lit him from within, evident in the twist of his smile.