Born to be Bound (Alpha's Claim 1)

At that moment, it hummed in an off-putting, out of tune twang. Like a bad note on a violin.

Feeling her way around the walls in search of a switch, Claire stumbled into unfamiliar furniture and cursed. The feeling of the bathroom door came under her fingers. She went inside and flicked on the light.

Her reflection stared back at her.

Naked and so covered in Shepherd's semen it was caked in her hair, she looked shattered. In the hazy, blissful high of their frenzy, he'd fed it to her, rubbed it into her skin—saturated her inside and out with that viscous liquid. If he had not spent so much time running his fingers through her hair, she was certain it would have been a matted mess.

Disgusted, Claire approached the stranger in the mirror. In the months since she'd last seen her body reflected back at her, she had become so thin. Her ribs protruded, the bones of her hips stuck out. She'd grown skeletal. But it was not the emaciation that won her attention; it was the inflamed bite mark on her shoulder, the swollen red scabs throbbing.

Shepherd had bitten her so deeply she would carry the scar of his claiming forever.

Tracing a finger over the two crescent wounds, Claire felt shame in her ignorance. She didn't fully understand how the bond was formed; a lifetime of concealing her nature had made it dangerous to ask too many questions. All she'd known was that it involved marking and an Alpha's initiation of the act.

Maybe it was just instincts.

Only instincts...

A sinking despair grew in her belly, made worse by the still thrumming string her body was trying to reject. Claire pulled in a deep breath and scanned the rest of the simple lavatory. Either the man was fastidiously tidy or he had an underling clean for him. The sink was gleaming white, the mirror polished, not even a speck of toothpaste on it.

Opening the medicine cabinet, it was almost bizarre to find ordinary things such as a toothbrush and mouthwash. It was the Da'rin markings maybe, the fact he had lived long enough in the Undercroft to garner so many. She'd been taught they were all unwashed savages, less than human.

Wavering between using his toothbrush to get the fuzzy feeling out of her mouth and disgusted because it was his toothbrush, she finally just reached for the damn thing. A few minutes later her mouth no longer tasted like... things she didn't want to think about. Setting it on the shelf in the exact position she'd found it in, Claire turned towards the shower and cranked it on.

Stepping under a scalding spray, she invited the burn, wanting everything Shepherd off of her. Eyes closed, hair under the stream, she let water pour like lava over her body. The puncture wounds at her shoulder started to ooze, the scabs softening from the moisture.

There was only a basic bar of soap.

Every possible inch was scrubbed until her skin grew raw, every trace of that man and his smell stripped away. She soaped up her hair, dreaming of the days she'd had access to such simple things as shampoo. When it was done, she stepped out of the steam, looking at the man's towel, and chose not to use anything of his that might re-apply his scent to her body.

Skin bumped from the cold, she air-dried, wrung out her hair over the sink, trying her best to finger comb the black mess into order. Paranoid about punishment, she wiped down all traces of her time in that room, leaving it as close to how she'd found it as she could.

With the light from the bathroom streaming into the cell of Shepherd's den, Claire found a table lamp and switched it on. In estrous, her mind had not focused on such paltry things as furniture placement and decoration; all she'd seen was where she wanted to nest and the male waiting to mount her.

After all the years of careful seclusion, all the tortured heat cycles spent locked away to prevent such a thing, it felt like she'd lost a part of herself knowing she had been mated... and not by an Alpha she'd chosen.

Now, she was somehow less; a failure.

That humming little cord in her chest pulsed as if to suggest that she was more... that there was more now. It whispered that Shepherd had only done what was supposed to be done.

The plaguing vibration made her angry. Desperate, she grasped for any potential relief. The pair-bond was still new, it was fragile. Maybe she could break it?

How often had every other forcefully bonded Omega wished for the same thing?

It was almost laughable how quickly the little cord in her chest hummed, tempting her to accept her position, to submit to such a strong Alpha.

The feeling made her want to vomit.