Bind Me in Steel

  Table of Contents

  WARNING

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  EPILOGUE

  MORE BY BEAST

  ABOUT BEAST

  FREE BOOKS FROM BEAST AND MORE

  ABOUT GLISSANDO PUBLISHING GROUP

  BIND ME

  IN STEEL

  AN ALPHA/OMEGA M/M POST-APOCALYPTIC SHIFTER ROMANCE

  BIND ME BOOK I

  BEAST

  -

  GLISSANDO

  PUBLISHING GROUP

  Copyright © 2018 by BEAST

  Kindle Edition

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  First Edition 2018

  BEAST

  beast@thebeast.mobi

  www.thebeast.mobi

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  The author acknowledges the copyrighted or trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:

  Jeep Cherokee

  WARNING

  This story contains content that may be triggering to some readers.

  Potential triggers include sex between a cisgender male werewolf and an intersex omega/male werewolf, including vaginal penetration; pain as part of intercourse; blood as part of intercourse; unprotected sex and potential pregnancy; omega/male pregnancy and childbirth; knotting; sex with a partner in lycanthrope/half-shifted form; violence and force as part of sexual intercourse; implications of cervical penetration; implications of underage sex taking place in a character’s past; implications of sexual slavery and coerced mating; graphic on-page violence.

  Please use this warning wisely to determine if this story is appropriate reading for you.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Ero Wake stretched out next to his campfire, listened to the voices of the dryads, and watched the dark shadowed disc of the new moon rise into the sky.

  The dryads spoke in sighs of leaves whispering together, the faint low groan of branches twining as they grew into each other and around each other, and tangled roots to roots and trunks to trunks and limbs to limbs with the curves of their beloveds.

  Sometimes, as their leaf-calls blended into the crackle and bite and pop of the flames, their voices almost sounded human. Almost like words in tongues long forgotten, bled away into the soil. Maybe, deep down, the dryads remembered who they had once been. Perhaps, over the eons that the dryads had existed, they had managed to keep the words they had once known, stamped into the concentric woody rings their flesh had become.

  But they lacked the human tongues to speak, and so Ero could only wonder at what they said in breaths and shudders and creaking twig-groans as he listened to them murmur and let their hush distract him from the buzzing, itching pull under his skin.

  Most nights, the call of the moon drowned that pull out—the lunar siren-song tugging on him as if its gravity made tides of his blood, begging him to change, to hunt, to run, to rut, to mate, to raise his voice in howling tribute to the sky. That magnetism waxed and waned as the moon waxed and waned, until some nights it was all he could do to stay inside his skin.

  But when the moon was a luminous spot of black against darker black, flanked by quiet stars, then moonsong dimmed enough for something else to find its way through. Something darker, deeper, a living thing like thorned and twisting feelers trying to crawl under his skin. Trying to snare him, trying to change him, trying to pull him north into the great blackness that whispered to them all.

  Tonight, all of the Impure would be feeling it—across every mountain and every plain, over every sea and every forest, throughout every den and every ruin. That living voice was pure shadow. And if Ero had to give it a name…

  He would call it the voice of despair.

  Someone would give in, before dawn. Some lost soul, unable to endure another new moon with that unclean and insidious thing whispering formless dreads between their ears. They would stumble out into the night, walk north and north and north until their shoes turned to tatters and their feet became ragged bloody shreds of flesh. Ero had seen it happen more than once, and every last time the Touched would fight and claw and scream themselves into sheer madness if they were chained, bound, barred from their goal. If they weren’t let free, they would be dead by morning, pulling their own bodies to pieces.

  A mercy, likely.

  When worse than death waited for them in the north.

  For a moment, Ero let himself wonder what it would be like if he gave in. If he stopped resisting until his body ached with the strain; if he let himself just…go.

  Then he rolled over, drew his worn and tattered layers of furs and blankets around himself, and willed himself to sleep. He was halfway there, just past the sign that said he had crossed a place called Tennessee. He should have been on the road again hours ago, with the setting of the sun, but in the span of centuries…it was hard to care about a few lost hours, even if the seasons continued with the urgency of small and frantic things living small and frantic lives day after day, uncaring of the endless creatures watching over them with no sense of time, of life, of death, of meaning. The hours that meant nothing to him brought every small thing around him closer and closer to death, while he was so distant from that ghostly spectre that he had nearly forgotten its face.

  He would take to the road again by midnight.

  While for now, he shut out the call of the dead and let himself drift away.

  T

  Wren Striker lay silent, listening to the song from the north, when the stranger came.

  He had lain this way on many nights, as the moon rose and fell, as it swelled and shrank, and with it the song grew louder and quieter, stronger and weaker, but never silent. Some of the Striker pack claimed they couldn’t hear it at all, as pure and innocent as humans in their ignorance.

  But for Wren, it was never silent.

  And not for the first time, he considered slipping out from beneath the heavy arm draped over him and walking out of the lair into the dark and into the dirt, bare feet on the broken road and carrying him toward that song that would never end. It was quietest near the dawn, and he closed his eyes, straining toward the fading whisper of sound, struggling to hear it past the deep, heavy breaths against his back.

  What he heard, instead, were the calls of alarm, cries of challenge, from the sentries posted at the gate.

  The body at his back moved. He held his breath, held still, kept his eyes closed. He didn’t want his alpha to know he was awake. If Connaught Striker knew, he would want to drag Wren out to face the intruder. Fighting always left Connaught hot and gasping, panting, needing to take his aggression out on Wren’s body—and he liked Wren to watch. Liked him to see his alpha flexing his prowess, as if one way or another Connaught would make Wren love him even if he had to defeat a thousand wolves to do it.

  That’s not love, Wren thought, as Connaught’s arm lifted off him and the alpha’s body heat pulled away. That’s just power.

  He thought he would get away unscathed, when he heard Connaught getting out of the thick pile of furs where they slept. Theirs was the only private room in the keep, afforded to the
alpha and his omega, but there was noise outside in the hall, milling feet that said the alpha’s seconds were only waiting to be allowed inside. Connaught grunted, followed by the sounds of his leathers sliding over his skin.

  “Get up,” he growled. “I want you clothed before anyone sees you.”

  Wren bit back his protest—there was no point, anyway, when Connaught would smell it on him, the resentment and reluctance and ache and weariness—and obediently rose, gathering his hair up against his neck to loop it around and around and around itself until it made a heavy knot at the base of his skull, before he wrapped himself in his robes of layered pale homespun fabric, draping himself from head to toe.

  He garbed himself, too, in his pride. If not pride as the alpha’s mate…

  Then pride, at least, enough to keep him from looking weak in front of those who would call him ungrateful for not thanking his lot with every day and every night.

  Connaught gave him a once-over, his dark brown eyes glinting, deep-set beneath a brooding brow and a thatch of chestnut brown hair. With a terse nod, the alpha jerked the drawstring of his patched-together leather trousers tight over his thick frame, his burly chest left bare, the barrel of his hardened abdomen almost leading like the buttress of a battleship as he crossed the lamp-lit stone room to its banded oak door, slipped the bolt, and beckoned his seconds inside with a toss of his head.

  The men who stepped into their chambers were of the same cut as Connaught—grizzled, scarred, rough, put together from stone pieces to make great lumbering golems of strength and bristling aggression, pheromones rising off them in choking clouds of battle-readiness. Not one omega among them, or even a stripling beta; in packs such as Connaught’s, omegas were kept under lock and key.

  And betas never survived.

  Not among these men who gave themselves fully over to the animal inside them just to be able to live in this broken and forsaken wilderness, where survival of the fittest had been replaced by survival of the cruelest.

  Connaught stood head and shoulders above them all, looking down at them with his jaw set tight and his arms folded over his chest. “Report,” he growled.

  The captain of the guard—Stewart—saluted briefly. “One interloper on the fringes of our territory,” he said. “Wolf. He must be able to smell our markers, but he’s not stopping.”

  “Passing through, or coming for us?” Connaught asked.

  “Not sure yet.”

  Connaught considered, rubbing at his beard, his eyes narrowing. In the dim torchlight filtering in from the hall, his eyes glinted, reflective and shining hot and yellow. “Bring him in,” he said.

  A chorus of salutes, of grunts, and the contingent of five wolves muscled their way out into the hall, jostling for position in a constant subtle interplay of power dynamics that Wren, quite honestly, found exhausting. But he forced it down, keeping his thoughts to himself, as Connaught caught his eye. That flinty yellow gaze penetrated into him, a promise in that stare:

  That this time, when Connaught took him, Wren would want him.

  Want him, willingly submit, instead of grudgingly giving his body out in helpless obedience.

  He said nothing, as he lifted his chin and strode past Connaught without a second glance, into the hall.

  Even if he knew he would be punished for his unspoken defiance later, as if Connaught could claw the scent of rebellion from his blood if only he dug deep enough.

  And Connaught’s growl was a warning at his back, as his alpha pulled the door closed and followed in his wake.

  Wren fell back as Connaught shouldered around him, taking his proper place one step behind and two steps to the right of his domineering mate and pack leader. They strode through the stone halls of the keep, the rough granite cool beneath Wren’s bare feet, and out into a night turned dark by the new moon, only the stars casting their glimmering glow over the blue-shadowed fortress, the high walls, the forest all around, the leaves just beginning to yellow with the onset of autumn. No torches, outside. In the dark, a wolf’s eyes were better than any light, and from the high parapet walls leading along the upper walkways of the compound’s walls, Wren could easily pick out the phalanx of four wolves darting through the trees and toward the north, half-shifted and loping on all fours with their tails lashing and sweeping at the earth.

  The night smelled loamy and cool, and he could scent the turning of the leaves coming soon, the chill on the air brisk enough to make him wrap his robes tighter around himself as he followed Connaught to the section of the upper wall topping the portcullis and the gate. Connaught took up a center position, standing tall and firm and challenging with his hands folded behind his back, while Wren just leaned against the parapet wall behind him.

  And hoped this would be over soon.

  They didn’t have to wait long, but it felt like an eternity as the three dozen wolves of the pack crowded into the front courtyard, practically panting for the scent of blood. Wren glanced over his shoulder; a few drawn, worried faces peered out of the windows of the keep, the lesser omegas huddled behind the stone walls, timid and small. Wren wondered what was wrong with him, that he found this neither frightening nor exciting.

  Just…just…

  Tedious.

  This posturing, this posing, this endless monotony following the same routine day after day without thought, acting only on instinct, as if this was the way things always had been and always would be.

  And this stranger…this stranger from beyond the walls.

  Would he be just like Connaught, only scented of different places, different roads, of the wilds beyond Neg Keep?

  He was scented of something, Wren realized as the faint sounds of footsteps rose from the north—four now turned into five, the guard returning with the stranger. He knew the scents of every wolf in the keep, but this one…this one was different, and not simply that of a stranger. He smelled of somewhere brisk and crisp and cool, like…salt? Something Wren couldn’t identify, something he’d never smelled before in his life, but that he recognized somewhere down in the pit of his stomach, somewhere ancient and primal. He smelled like salt, like earth, like wind, like a kind of leather Wren had never scented before, not rabbit or boar or fox or deer…and like warm, clean fur instead of dingy matted pelts greased with animal fat, blood, and grime.

  A spark of curiosity roused, and Wren pushed away from the rear parapet to drift forward to Connaught’s side, ignoring his alpha’s disapproving sidelong glance to rest his hands to the cool stone and watch the break in the trees that marked the path out into the world. A flash of movement—and then the stranger stepped out of the forest, flanked on all four corners by wolves of the pack. Next to the man, they were toys; small and fragile, these hefty lycanthropes reduced to pups by a bulk so formidable the man was a fortress all on his own.

  He was large enough to rival even Connaught, if not larger—a solid slab of muscle, his body weathered and worn to a rough tan, swathed in wrapped black leathers that clung to his frame in tattered-edged strips that defined a broad, hard-chiseled chest, thickly muscled thighs, corded arms; a large, faded gray cloth had been wrapped around his shoulders to form a shadowing hood, a strip masking the lower half of his face until only his eyes showed above. Pale blue, they glowed against the night with a wolf’s luminous light, the color of the shadows made when snow formed caverns as winter drifted through. They were subtly angled, set deep below thick black brows that drew into a thoughtful furrow, but Wren couldn’t make out anything else of his face behind the mask.

  What arrested Wren’s attention, though, wasn’t his intimidating bulk—or even those coolly unreadable eyes, his gaze utterly neutral and withdrawn, strange. It was the way he moved; he moved with a fluidity that belied his sheer size and his weight, calm and controlled and utterly graceful. Wren could almost see his wolf under his skin…and that, in itself, was strange. Most wolves who gave themselves so fully to their animal sides were jerky and tense and uncomfortable in their human skin—while t
he few Wren had seen who tried to hold on to their human side were awkward and stiff in their lupine forms. This man…this man moved as though he had married the two until there was no difference between them, all feral power and self-control and quietly composed strength.

  Wren had seen strangers, time and time again. Seen them pass through the lands of Neg Keep only to be chased away, even killed. Every last one of them had been haggard and tired, their movements twitchy and ragged, as if they were constantly fighting with themselves; many of the wolves of the keep were the same. Wren had always been taught to choose one or the other, and omegas like himself were always encouraged to focus on their human traits—on the softness, the beauty, the meekness, the fragility that would appeal to their alphas.

  He’d never seen a stranger like this one, and he wasn’t quite sure what to make of him.

  Neither, it seemed, was Connaught; even if Connaught stood resolute, his scent was thick and stinging with confusion, with wariness, his shoulders tense.

  And he seemed to puff himself up larger, swelling his muscles, as the guard escorted the stranger to stand before the lowered portcullis. The stranger lifted his head, looking up at Connaught, and then raised one broad hand in a neutral gesture of acknowledgment and greeting. He carried a leather pack on his back, stuffed to the brim, and both a pistol and a sword hung from his narrow hips, a low-slung belt dragged down to one side by their weight.

  Wren didn’t think it was a coincidence that he’d raised his dominant hand, keeping them away from his weapons.

  Connaught looked down at the stranger with narrowed eyes, holding his gaze; the stranger looked back at him in silence, pale blue eyes unreadable, and the longer the silence stretched the heavier Connaught’s scent grew with anger, aggression. There was no sign of deference from the stranger, no submission offered to an alpha on his own territory, and Wren felt the first cold pinch of fear on the back of his neck, in the center of his chest.