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The gnarled pines of the northern woods groaned as the wind whipped through their branches, spraying needles down into the underbrush. Maekar grumbled as he felt them sink into his hair. He had just combed the tangles out of his tresses that very morning, and the thought of having to do it again so soon had him half considering whether he should just hack his long braid off and be done with it. Closely shorn hair would hardly be an oddity on him.
Found as a wailing pup abandoned in a hollow near the very edge of the territory, he had never truly belonged to this orderly lineage of wolves. Pale-faced and pale-eyed, he had grown into a surly, restless thing. All knobby elbows, bruised shins, and defiance that burned as hot as a midsummer hearth.
While the other omega pups sat obediently by the communal fires day after day, learning the tedious arts of spinning winter wool, pressing medicinal poultices, and brewing soothing teas from mint and chamomile, Maekar spent his hours tearing through the woods. He had long since learned to tune out the clucking scoldings of the elder omegas tasked with keeping him in line. Let them fret and wring their soft hands. They could never catch him when he threw off his tunic, dropped to all fours, and let his wolf-shape take the lead, yipping through the valleys until his lungs burned and his paws were muddied.
The elders had hoped his temperament would gentle with time. They could hope until their faces turned blue, for all Maekar cared. As the omega grew, he foraged and fed strictly on his own terms. When the cooks ladled out bowls of lukewarm, salted porridge at dawn, Maekar turned his nose up at the stuff. He preferred to slip away to the sunlit clearings where the briars grew wild and overrun with plump berries. He would gorge himself until his fingers were purple and his teeth ached with sweetness, uncaring of the sticky mess. Why shouldn’t he live by instinct? He had realized years ago that he was more wolf than boy, and so he decided to only answer to the call of the earth rather than the rigid laws of the pack.
But there was one tradition that even he could not ignore.
At a youngling's eighteenth summer, the mandatory rite awaited them all. A milestone as inescapable as the changing of the leaves and the turning of the weather. Every young wolf who had reached the threshold of maturity was required to present themselves to the omega blessed by the spirits, a man who lived deep within the heart-wood. The omega was a seer whose black eyes were said to be stained by the smoke of divine fires, a man so closely attuned to the ancestral voices that walked the forest trails that he could cross realms and speak to them. His esteemed task was to cast the bones and read the ash to see if the gods had woven a mate for any of the emerging adult wolves.
And so here Maekar was, entangled in the pointless stupidity of it all.
He sat cross-legged on the cold stone floor of the spirit-hut, shifting uncomfortably as his backside itched against the dirt and rocks beneath him. He had only shown his face because missing the ceremony meant enduring a full moon’s worth of grueling chores from the pack alpha, not because he held any romantic notions about the gods or their supposed grand designs. He figured the spirits would take one look at his displeasing nature, wrinkle their ethereal noses, and decide no wolf in their right mind had done anything punishable enough to be tethered to a feral foundling. Something that Maekar himself would prefer as well. He didn’t want to be shackled to some boring alpha who expected Maekar to cook his dinner, mend his clothes, and bear him a litter of whining pups.
Maekar grimaced at the thought.
The clearing of a throat tore Maekar from his musings. The hut was dim, illuminated only by the sputtering light of low-burning candles. The seer’s shadowed eyes drifted slowly over the cluster of antsy youths huddled near the entrance, his gaze lingering only briefly on each face before landing squarely on Maekar. He dipped his brown hand into a shallow wooden bowl filled with ash, murmured a prayer in an archaic dialect that Maekar was convinced was nonsense, and pointed a skinny finger straight at Maekar’s chest.
"The wind and the boulder share a breath," the man intoned lowly.
Maekar blinked, cocking his head as he struggled to hear. "Baelor, son of the Alpha, is bound to you, wild one. Your path is his, and his den is yours."
Maekar couldn’t help it. An undignified snort ripped from his throat before he could swallow it back. Baelor? The pack leader’s mismatched-eyed, dreadfully competent son? Him? A wolf whose posture was always painfully straight, and who followed every single rule the pack ever etched into bark or stone? It was a jape, surely. It had to be.
Smack.
Before Maekar could voice his derision, a lightning-fast rap from the seer’s wooden staff caught him firmly across the knuckles, stinging his skin and sending a fiery ache right up his forearm.
"Do not mock the spirits, boy," the omega hissed, his black eyes boring into him with harsh clarity that made the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. "The thread is spun. It cannot be broken, and if you try, even you will wish you hadn't."
Maekar rubbed his smarting hand, his ears reddening as he dropped his gaze to the floor. Around him, the other youths were staring at him with stunned eyes, a flurry of shocked whispers fluttering through the room like a flock of startled birds. He itched to throw a rock at them in order to shut them up like he did with the annoying woodpecker near his den that tormented him every morning.
But as the initial spike of humiliation began to recede, a wave of realization crashed over him, dredging up scattered, confusing memories from the past few years that he had begun to piece together in a new light. And naturally, at the center of them all, was Baelor.
The pack was small. Of course they had crossed paths from time to time, though they had rarely spoken of anything substantial. Just a handful of passing words exchanged occasionally, a few polite murmurs during seasonal feasts, maybe. Yet, with a strange sensation swirling in his stomach, Maekar realized he had never truly been out of Baelor’s line of sight.
He remembered the phantom weight of a gaze pressing into his spine whenever he crossed the central clearing, long before he had even known what an alpha's attention was supposed to feel like. He remembered finding fresh kills wrapped in cloths that smelled of Baelor left near the threshold of his door. He had been given fat hares, plucked pheasants, and venison quarters. All of which he had greedily dragged inside and roasted over a small fire without too much thought. He had blindly assumed it was just standard pack charity distributed quietly to the lowest-ranking, unbonded omegas who couldn't hunt large game for themselves. Now, looking back, the absurdity of that assumption made his face burn.
And then there was the river.
The flush from Maekar’s ears scorched down his neck as he recalled a sweltering day from a previous summer. The heat had been oppressive, making the air thick and the mosquitoes rampant, and Maekar had stripped down one afternoon in order to plunge into the rushing waters of the creek to find some relief. He had scrubbed at his skin with gritty sand, relishing the cool bite of the water and the rare luxury of isolation, until a ripple upstream had caught his attention. He had jerked his head up to find Baelor standing motionless among the limbs of the trees on the opposite bank, watching him with an intensity that had made Maekar narrow his eyes.
At the time, Maekar’s defensive instincts had flared. He had figured that the alpha was standing judgment over him, watching him as one watches a pathetic creature. Maekar had never been self-conscious of his skin, marred and uneven from a near-fatal bout of the pox he had survived as a sickly pup. The illness had left tiny pits scattered across his face, shoulders, hips, and thighs—an ugly contrast to the smooth, unblemished hides of the other omega wolves. In truth, Maekar had never cared about the flaws in terms of vanity. He wore his scars like a badge of survival, a testament to what he had conquered. But he had despised the thought of anyone looking down on him or cataloging his imperfections. He had screamed at Baelor to fuck off before wrapping himself in his pelt and storming away into the brush.
Now, sitting in the cold stone hut with his knuckles still throbbing from the seer’s staff, Maekar wondered if there was something else there. Perhaps Baelor hadn’t been judging him or sneering at his marks. Maekar did not know much about the alpha, but he did not think him cruel. Maybe Baelor had simply been standing sentinel, considering Maekar and the invisible threads that the gods had bound them together with.
The ceremony dissolved in a teeth-grinding blur of curious gossip and sidelong glances. Maekar didn't wait for the seer to issue a formal dismissal, which would undoubtedly earn him another chiding later. He bolted from the hut as if the floorboards were on fire, sprinting away from the compound, tracking hard toward the southern perimeter of the woods where Baelor was scheduled for his afternoon border patrol.
The sky grew darker as Maekar pushed past the carved boundary markers, his boots tearing up moss and ferns in his reckless haste. His head hurt, pounding with a mixture of anger, betrayal, and a strange, fluttering heat that felt both too queer and too vulnerable. It would be better off, he decided, to claw it out of his body before it could take root.
He found Baelor near the old border stone, a towering block of granite draped in creeping ivy and marked with ancient pack wards. The alpha was leaning casually against a gnarled tree, his frame relaxed, dressed in boiled leather hunting gear that clung tightly to his broad shoulders.
"Baelor!" Maekar snarled, coming to a halt just a few paces away, his chest rising and falling so rapidly he half expected to explode into his wolf at any second.
Baelor jerked and turned around at the harsh summons, his eyes homing in on Maekar. That easy, infuriating calmness that always seemed to cloak the alpha wavered momentarily, before quickly settling back into place.
"Why didn’t you tell me?" Maekar spat, crossing his arms tightly over his torso, sinking his nails into his forearm in an effort to steady himself as another tremor racked his spine. If he shifted now, he’d be likely to shred Baelor’s skin into ribbons. He wondered absently what the punishment would be for maiming one's mate.
Baelor didn't feign surprise at the question, which eased Maekar’s anger just a hair. "The pack rules held my tongue," Baelor said evenly. "An alpha cannot claim their mate until the spirits name them of age. You had to come to the seer yourself. You know that, Maekar. Do not feign ignorance."
Maekar sneered at the chastisement. "I’m feigning nothing. You mean to mate me because of some spirit nonsense? You should have told the elders to piss off and been done with it."
A muscle jumped in Baelor’s cheek. "I did no such thing. I mean to mate you because you are meant for me, because you are mine."
He spoke the words as if they were inarguable, such as the sky being blue and the grass being green.
"You do not even know me," Maekar countered hotly. "We have spoken a dozen sentences in the last five years. You are the son of the pack alpha, groomed for leadership, and I am—" he paused, something twisting in his chest before he continued stubbornly, "well, I am what I am."
Baelor was still for a moment, his gaze still locked onto Maekar, and it took all the pride Maekar had not to turn from it. He clenched his fists to his sides as he watched Baelor push off the oak tree and step forward, closing the distance between them until Maekar could see a smudge of dirt at Baelor’s temple and the cracked skin at the corner of his lips.
Perhaps he is not so perfect after all.
"I know you," Baelor insisted firmly. "I know you are stubborn, and difficult, and combative."
Maekar flushed and scoffed, opening his mouth to bite out just what he thought of Baelor in return, but the alpha kept talking, his voice curving into something so quietly earnest that it had Maekar halting his tongue.
"I also know that you are kind," Baelor continued steadily. "I saw you last autumn, sitting by the creek for three solid hours comforting a crying pup whose mother was out on a distant hunt, refusing to budge an inch until he finally stopped shaking. I saw you nurse that fledgling crow with the broken wing behind the woodpile, feeding it crushed beetles from your own palm day after day until it finally took flight."
Maekar swallowed thickly as a tight knot formed in his throat. He finally looked away, staring fixedly down at a patch of clover near Baelor’s feet, unable to meet the bizarre, devastating fondness in the alpha's gaze. How had Maekar never noticed him? But then again, no one had ever watched Maekar that closely before. No one had ever cared enough to see his hidden moments. He had always thought himself invisible to the highborn wolves, or worse, an eyesore to be tolerated.
Baelor reached out, his warm fingertips brushing gently against Maekar’s jaw. "And I must admit that I would mate you simply because I like the look of you as well," the alpha murmured.
And there it was again, that maddening sincerity. It both sent his heart racing and pricked at him in equal measure. Maekar clung to the feeling that was familiar, and a scowl crossed his face as he looked down at his own body—at the scabs still healing on his knees from where he’d taken a brutal spill down a shale slope two days ago, at the dirt permanently wedged under his nails, at the pink textured scars mottling his skin, and the bony ridges of his ribs pressing visibly against his thin tunic.
"You like the look of this?" Maekar laughed incredulously, though there was no humor in it. "Your eyesight must be failing you from sitting in too many stuffy pack meetings in the dark."
The ease fell from Baelor’s face at the words, and the corners of his eyes tightened as he stepped even closer, his breath fanning across Maekar’s cheeks.
"Believe me," Baelor said, lifting his hand to tuck a stray lock of silver hair behind Maekar's ear. "I can see just fine."
Maekar made a sound in his throat. He did not understand how Baelor could say such things, could touch Maekar as if he always had, could speak of them being mates without bitterness or mocking. Maekar wanted to bite him. He should have jeered at him, slapped his hand away, spit at his feet. He was not sure why he didn’t.
"I didn't ask for this," Maekar muttered instead. Then, more petulantly, “I did not ask for you.”
"No," Baelor agreed quietly, his hand sliding down from Maekar's hair to rest possessively against the back of his neck, pulling him that final, terrifying inch closer until there was no space left between them. "You didn't. But the gods are deaf to what we ask for. They only give us what we need."
Maekar felt it then, the whisper of the bond that was beginning to thrum to life. He sighed, his resistance crumbling even as he opened his mouth to offer one last feeble counter, but Baelor cut him off, lowering his head and pressing his lips straight against Maekar’s in a searing kiss.
Maekar had nothing to compare it to.
It was not soft, as he thought it might be, but bruising. The want in it was clear, and a part of Maekar still did not wholly believe it—that this was not some grand jest. But as Baelor tore his mouth away and started tugging at Maekar’s clothes, his musk potent in the air, Maekar knew that at least this, Baelor’s desire for him, was real.
The tunic was barely over Maekar’s head before Baelor dropped his head down. He sank his teeth into the reddened peak of Maekar’s left chest, biting down sharply enough to draw a startled gasp from the omega before swirling his tongue over the aching bud.
"I am not your prey," Maekar hissed, though it was somewhat weakened by the scent of his slick pooling in the air.
Baelor lifted his head and grinned wickedly. “Aren’t you?” he teased.
Before Maekar could curse at him, he leaned down once more and took the nipple back into his mouth, sucking hard while his thumb dragged across the other tightened bud before pinching it between his fingers. Maekar’s hands knotted in Baelor’s dark hair as his back arched, torn between pushing him off and dragging him nearer. Baelor seemed to sense the indecision, chuckling lowly.
"You like that, don’t you?" Baelor murmured against his chest, mouthing over the raw nipple before he flicked his tongue across it one last time.
Before Maekar could gather his bearings, Baelor grabbed him by the chin, forcing his head back so their eyes locked.
"Down," Baelor commanded roughly.
Maekar's temper flared at the audacity. He stiffened and glared at the alpha. Baelor remained unmoved.
“Down,” Baelor repeated dangerously, and Maekar's knees buckled into the dirt, his cunt pulsing. Still, Maekar had his pride and it would not have him obeying so easily. His hands came up to shove against Baelor’s hips, his fingers digging into the taut muscles of the alpha's thighs. "I am to be your mate, not your—"
Baelor cut him off by hooking a hand into his silver hair, pulling tight enough to make his scalp sting. Maekar could only watch through slanted eyes as Baelor freed his cock from his breeches, pressing the hardened length directly against his lips.
"Do not be difficult," Baelor murmured. “Open, Maekar. Be sweet for me.”
Be sweet for me.
And this time, Maekar did curse the alpha, but Baelor grinned as Maekar finally parted his lips, the size of Baelor’s member filling his mouth, tasting of salt and smoke. Maekar gagged a little at the stretch, and Baelor eased out a bit.
“Easy,” Baelor soothed, before sliding back in, and Maekar breathed through his nose as Baelor fucked his mouth gently. "You're doing well."
Maekar rolled his eyes, and Baelor grinned once more. “It’s true, and in time, you are sure to get even better. I mean to have all of you, in every manner. This way you can wet my cock too before I take you fully, though by the scent of your slick it might not have been necessary.”
Maekar was unamused by the teasing, and he dragged his teeth pointedly along Baelor’s shaft in retaliation. The alpha grumbled at the action, his grin falling, and this time it was Maekar who chuckled against the cock in his mouth.
"Careful with those teeth," Baelor warned, though the hitch in his breathing told Maekar that the alpha wasn’t truly displeased.
Will he spill like this? Maekar wondered.
As if reading his thoughts, Baelor abruptly pulled out, leaving Maekar panting and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Before Maekar could scramble back up to his feet, Baelor grabbed him by the hips, hauling him bodily off the ground and pressing him back against the oak trunk. In a single blink he pulled Maekar’s breeches and underclothes down, and in the next he hooked an arm beneath Maekar’s right knee, hoisting his leg high and hitching it up around his own hip.
“Ready, sweetling?” he murmured.
Maekar was still staring at him stupidly as Baelor lined himself up and pushed straight inside. The thick width of him made Maekar let out another gasp, his fingers fist-deep in Baelor’s dark hair as the alpha took him with deep strokes. Baelor didn't lose his rhythm as Maekar squirmed and moaned against him; he didn't so much as grunt or break eye contact.
Do I not affect him the same? Maekar thought with a touch of uncertainty.
"Baelor—" Maekar whined out, though for what he could not say. His voice cracked, and the first sting of embarrassment was about to burn through him, only for Baelor to let out a loud groan at last.
"You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for you," the alpha said reverently, kissing him again as Maekar’s insecurities vanished as quickly as they had come.
Baelor kept thrusting into him, harder now, the rough bark of the tree scraping Maekar’s back.
What is another few scars? Maekar thought wryly as Baelor sucked on his bottom lip.
Maekar could not say how much time had passed with Baelor pressed against him, consuming him, hitting the place inside of him that felt too good and overwhelming all at once. Just as Maekar was about to say he could take no more, the warmth inside of him poured over, and he tensed, crying out into Baelor’s mouth as he spent himself, his cunt squeezing Baelor’s cock as he shuddered.
Baelor growled as the scent of Maekar’s release hit the air, pulling back just enough to rasp "Mine," before he stilled, burying himself deep inside the omega as he came.
They were silent for a moment as they caught their breath, and there were many things Maekar could have said. I will still do as I please, do not think this means that you own me, or, I like to sleep nearest to the den door, and you had better not snore. But before he could, Baelor broke the silence as he lifted his head, his handsome face serious.
“I know you did not want to be mated to me, perhaps you did not want to be mated to anyone, but I mean to treat you well, and I think we could have a comfortable life together, if you could stomach being by my side.”
There were no grand promises in his statement, no flowery words, and it was that plainness, the bare truthfulness of it all, that had Maekar nodding. It would be no great burden, he knew, to spend a life with such an alpha.
“It will not be a hardship,” Maekar muttered, and Baelor’s lips twitched.
“But,” Maekar sniffed. “I get to name our pups.”
Baelor’s brows rose. “Pups?” he repeated slyly. “You mean to milk me dry, don’t you?”
Maekar’s face heated at the slip-up, and Baelor’s expression gentled.
“You can name all of them,” he agreed quietly, “every last one of them, if you want.”
And years later, with pups filling up their den, Baelor did, in fact, make good on his promise.