Feral Omega: A Dark Reverse Harem Omegaverse Romance (Ghost Alpha Unit Book 1)

‘That fucking freak is gonna get us all killed, Thane!’

Whiskey’s voice echoes through the Chateau as we settle back in from our latest mission. Blood is still dripping from his broken nose.

He’s the one who first coined that term. The Chateau. Makes it sound like we live somewhere nice and not a crumbling collection of outbuildings nestled in the mountains on the edge of the Wastelands. Guess it’s better than when Plague used to call it Misfit Manor.Exclusive © content by N(ô)ve/l/Drama.Org.

Whiskey is our resident comic relief, and as the youngest member of the Ghosts—our pack bonded in blood and brotherhood—he’s usually the more laid back out of the five of us. He isn’t jaded yet.

But he’s in rare form today, and I can’t say I blame him.

He’s shed the latest mask he took from the battlefield as a tasteless trophy, revealing the shiner that’s beginning to form over one of his light brown eyes. His swollen and bloody broken nose is the only thing about his face that isn’t obnoxiously symmetrical. Even his short yet somehow still messy brown hair has streaks of blood in it.

Not from the mission itself, but the fallout of our latest victory.

I’m not sure if he needed to take his damn shirt off. His mask, sure. But his shirt? He’s always been proud of his abs, even though his are the least visible out of the group. The missions over the past few months have been relatively easy, and there’s been an abundance of unusually greasy food he doesn’t bother rationing. Sometimes I think rationing goes against his morals.

Actually, it’s probably the only moral he has.

Plague, our resident medic, steps forward. ‘Sit down and let me snap that nose back into place,’ he says, his voice stern despite being muffled by his mask. ‘Unless, of course, you enjoy looking like a Picasso painting.’

Plague looks nothing like a real doctor, at least not one you’d want to visit, and his bedside manner isn’t any better. But he’s the closest thing to it out here in the wastes. His namesake, a black leather plague doctor’s mask sloped down beneath a black hood that fades into the same Kevlar-and-leather tactical gear all five of us wear, conceals long black hair and a pale face with angular features that don’t make him look any less foreboding.

Other than Wraith, Plague is the only one in our pack who wears his mask even when we’re off mission. But it’s not for the same reason as my brother, the only one of us who really has a reason to wear one outside of uniform.

Plague is just terrified of contamination.

Not death, though. I’ve seen him staring down the barrel of an enemy gun without so much as breaking a sweat.

Just contamination.

Valek chuckles darkly from the corner. He usually wears an executioner-style hood over a featureless brown leather mask with two holes for eyes that reveal nothing but shadows underneath. Right now, it’s sitting in his lap, leaving his unnecessarily chiseled face uncovered.

‘Let it heal broken,’ he says in his thick Vrissian accent. He gives Plague a wolfishly wry grin and scratches at the light scrape of blond stubble on his jawline that matches the hair falling into his pale blue eyes. ‘Our pretty boy from across the pond needs to be taken down a few pegs.’

‘Fuck off, Valek,’ Whiskey spits back. ‘You know I’m right. You all do. And you won’t be laughing when it’s you on the other end of Wraith’s nuclear meltdown next time.’

I sigh. Wraith, my brother in all but blood, the wild card in our lethal deck. His episodes are becoming more frequent, more uncontrollable. In my mind’s eye, I can still see the carnage he left in his wake today, the terror in the eyes of our enemies as he tore through them like the devil unleashed.

It’s nothing new. His uncanny ability to kill is the very the reason my father spared his life so many years ago. But like the atomic bombs that destroyed everything beyond the carefully protected boundaries of Reinmich, he’s a remarkably effective weapon whose impact is difficult to control.

To me, he’s more than a weapon. He’s family.

But to the others…

‘He wasn’t trying to hurt you,’ I say, launching into damage control once more. Lately, I feel more like Wraith’s personal PR assistant than the leader of the most lethal and sought-after spec-ops team in the Council’s command. ‘If he was, you’d be dead.’

‘Is that supposed to fucking make me feel better?’ Whiskey cries, his voice nasal from all the blood bubbling in his nostrils.

‘I don’t give a shit how you feel,’ I growl. ‘You know better than to get in his way when he’s like that.’

‘When he’s like that?’ Whiskey echoes in disbelief. ‘You make it sound like he’s a toddler throwing a temper tantrum and not a seven-foot-fucking-three monster juggernaut going on a murderous rampage!’

Valek cocks his head. ‘You know his exact height?’

‘What?’ Whiskey snaps, turning toward him. ‘The fuck does that have to do with anything?’

‘It’s just kind of weird,’ Valek says, kicking back on the couch and propping his muddy boot up on the wall, because apparently, we’re a den of complete and utter savages. ‘I know I’m six-nine and the big guy’s taller than me, but still, I could only give you a range.’

‘I’ve seen him standing by the refrigerator,’ Plague chimes in, having apparently given up on trying to get Whiskey to hold still so he can fix his damn nose. ‘The refrigerator is six feet tall, and there were coffee cans stacked on top that are about a foot tall each. I seem to recall him being roughly a coffee can and a half taller than the refrigerator. So if I had to guess, he’s closer to seven-foot-five, seven-six at the most.’

‘What is this, a fucking word problem?’ Whiskey demands.

‘See, even that wasn’t as weird as you just rattling off the guy’s exact height off the top of your head like that,’ Valek shoots back.

‘We don’t know what his exact height is,’ Plague says in his faint yet annoyingly posh northern accent, sounding slightly exasperated. ‘I don’t have anything in his chart except his blood type, and only that because I collected a sample.’

We all turn to stare at him.

‘How the fuck did you get a sample from him?’ I ask, deciding I really don’t want to know the answer as soon as the question is out of my mouth. There’s no way in hell Wraith submitted to a blood test.

Come to think of it, I did catch Plague creeping around by the side of my bed a few months ago. Huh.

‘Look, this is all beside the fucking point!’ Whiskey says, holding his hands up. He turns to me, his eyes burning with a challenge I’d expect from Valek, but not him.

Maybe things have gone further than I thought.

‘And what is your point, Whiskey?’ I ask stiffly. ‘Because so far, all you’ve done is bitch and moan.’

His eyes narrow and he stalks forward, jabbing a finger in my face. My alpha rage immediately boils up to the surface, but I’m well practiced at simmering it down.

It’s getting harder lately, though. Probably the cabin fever. As vast as the grounds of the Chateau are, we’re still five alphas cooped up together with nothing but our never-ending missions to take the edge off.

‘My point,’ he says bitterly, ‘is that you’re the leader of this shitshow, which makes that freak your responsibility.’

‘Watch yourself,’ I say through my teeth, the edge of a bark coming into my words. It’s not something I use on my fellow alphas—especially not the ones who belong to my pack—lightly. ‘That ‘freak’ is my brother.’

‘All the more reason for you to keep him in line,’ he spits.

We stand there, toe to toe, staring each other down, neither willing to be the one who looks away first. A black-gloved hand shoots out of nowhere from my right and before I can react, Plague grabs Whiskey’s broken nose and snaps it back into place. Blood sprays the air and the younger soldier lets out a pained scream of indignation, gripping his face.

‘Fuck! That hurt, you psychopath!’ he howls.

‘It’s easier if you don’t see it coming,’ Plague says with the detached air of a serial killer, plucking a red handkerchief from his pocket like some old timey gentleman and methodically wiping the blood off his gloved hand. ‘By the way, you’ve put on weight, and it’s not all muscle,’ he adds, motioning to Whiskey’s bare torso.

‘What the fuck, dude! I’m bulking!’

Plague hums. ‘Well, it’s going to slow you down—and you’re already not our most agile alpha, as today has shown.’

Whiskey storms out of the main room, muttering a slew of bird-themed curses under his breath. Valek stalks after him, laughing his ass off. He loves pain. Prefers it when he’s the one inflicting it, though—and considering he was a literal serial killer on death row before the Council got their hands on him and shoved him into my collection of psychopaths, he’s caused his share of it.

But any kind will do, really.

Plague lingers, going over to gather the leftover supplies back into his leather doctor’s bag. It’s definitely not field issue. Guy has an aesthetic, I’ll give him that.

‘Thanks for that,’ I mutter.

‘For what?’ he asks innocently without looking up from his task of carefully placing the vials of antiseptic and other supplies back into his bag. The tinny clink of glass against glass is making my teeth ache.

‘For stopping me from kicking the kid’s ass.’

‘Is that what I was doing?’ he asks in a deadpan tone that always makes it impossible to tell if he’s being sarcastic or if he’s just a weirdo who sees the rest of us as science experiments.

I sigh, raking a hand through my shaggy brown hair. I’m due for a cut if not a shave, but who the fuck has time for that? It’s not like any of us have to worry about keeping military regulations out here.

‘He does have a point, though,’ Plague remarks, keeping his back turned. ‘Wraith’s behavior has been more… erratic lately.’

I clench my jaw, not welcoming the subject matter coming from him any more than I did coming from Whiskey, but I can’t exactly dismiss it as easily.

‘You think he’s dangerous.’

‘I wasn’t quite telling the truth earlier,’ he answers after a moment’s pause, zipping up his bag and turning to face me. ‘When I said there was nothing in his record. He hasn’t submitted to a physical the entire time he’s been enlisted in the Armed Forces, but I do have access to his personal history. At least as much of it as the Council has. If I recall correctly, he was found living alone in the Wastes at approximately the age of twelve, having killed thirteen heavily armed alphas from the infantry. In fact, he was going to be put down until your father intervened, wasn’t he?’

I clench my jaw, irritation welling up within me. Nothing he’s saying is untrue, but Wraith is one of the few topics I’m just not capable of being rational on.

‘That’s what I thought,’ Plague says. ‘In which case, him being dangerous is a foregone conclusion.’

‘Then what do you suggest?’ I demand. ‘Dangerous or not, he’s saved your ass out there more times than I can count. Mine, too.’

Plague nods thoughtfully. ‘He is a powerful weapon,’ he muses. ‘But a weapon is only as useful as your capacity to keep it from being used against you.’

I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror across the room and realize the expression on my face isn’t quite as calm as I’d hoped. My eyes look blacker than usual, my lips half-formed into a snarl. A few strands of my hair have clumped together with blood from the mission we just left, which really isn’t helping. I look like some feral caveman.

And that isn’t too far off from the truth.

‘It’s not just Wraith,’ Plague says, raising his hands in defense. ‘It’s all of us. We’re five male alphas cooped up in the middle of the mountains, and none of us has seen an omega in months. Tensions are to be expected.’

‘Yeah, I’ll get right on scheduling a field trip to the nearest brothel,’ I say in a flat tone.

Plague snorts. ‘Might not be the worst idea.’

With that, he turns and leaves the room, but I can’t help thinking about his smart-assed remark after he’s gone.

He’s not wrong. About Wraith, or the rest of us.

We’re like a box packed with dynamite, if each individual stick also had a habit of smoking that could set off anyone else’s fuse at any time.

Sooner or later, something’s gotta give.

And I’m not sure any of us—let alone any poor fuck who happens to be in range—is gonna survive when it does.