Not to be Borne (Intertwined Fates Book 2) Read online

  Not to be Borne

  N.J. Lysk

  ***

  Cover by Andi Hara Designs

  Copyright 2020 N.J. Lysk

  All Rights Reserved

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  Not to be Borne

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Epilogue

  Author notes

  The Alpha Solution

  Other Books by N.J. Lysk

  For Sharita Lira, for their upcoming birthday (27.12.2020), I hope this was what you wanted ;p

  With thanks to Li Iacobacci, Brandyn Lauren Barksdale, Jasmine Cooper, Gema Cela Rodríguez & Toni Wilson.

  When his twin brother presents as an omega, Michuá feels like the world is ending. In a way, becoming an omega himself seems almost fated...

  Choosing an alpha from a faraway pack who can afford to take them both is the only way to stay together, but Zybyn’s new alpha wants a lot more than they have bargained for and in a journey towards a strange land, there is nothing to stop him from taking it.

  Omegas must obey and follow, but can the love they bear each other be stronger than instinct?

  A dark mpreg romance with a happy ending.

  Prologue

  When Zybyn presented omega, some people assumed I should be relieved since it made it highly unlikely I would. But why the fuck should I feel better that the bullet had missed me and hit the person I loved most in the world instead?

  I almost wished it had been me. The way he’d looked when the elders had explained he was one of the rare omega males... I don’t think I will ever get his pain off my chest.

  Our parents tried to help, kept him at home and talked to him—to us, because I couldn’t do fucking shit about what was happening to him but I wasn’t going to leave him. He was my twin, my other half... And I knew he was afraid.

  Because omega males were precious and that meant they could be worth a lot to a pack, especially a pack like ours that needed so many things. The mountains were a hard place to grow up even if you had teeth and the agility of a puma on your side.

  We were okay, but we were never sure we would be okay. Sometimes there wasn’t enough prey to go around. Sometimes some of the guys would go down to the towns at the foot of our mountain and it’d turn out there was no one hiring big, burly men to do their heavy lifting or whatever.

  I had been meant to go too, now that I was eighteen and tall enough to make an impression, but after Zybyn presented, I couldn’t bear to. No one tried to convince me, not even the elders—they were too smart to waste their time with arguments that would lead nowhere.

  We didn’t really talk about it, but I knew Zybyn was afraid they’d find him an alpha. Except they had to find him an alpha, omegas needed one. And I was only a beta, sure, but at least... At least I would be by his side to protect him as best I could.

  THE ELDERS INVITED some alphas from the nearest pack to meet him. It was for the best, they said. Zybyn would have a lot of children and our pack couldn’t feed them, they added.

  Like Zybyn wasn’t pack. Like he didn’t deserve to have their support.

  He met with them, and that meant I met with them too—though I sat in a corner and kept quiet like I’d promised my mother. I gave them a chance because Zybyn needed me to—he’d gone into heat already and they’d had to lock him in one of the deeper caves to keep him safe.

  I couldn’t pretend to myself it wasn’t hurting him to be alone after spending the full moon guarding the only entrance.

  He needed an alpha and it couldn’t be one from our own pack, the elders had made that very clear.

  MOST OF THE ALPHAS were nothing special. They walked in gingerly, all forced smiles and soft words, like they thought Zybyn was a child instead of a fully-grown man. I stared because Zybyn didn’t do more than glance at them. I wasn’t sure if he was embarrassed or if it really hurt him to behave defiantly towards an alpha now. I was afraid to ask.

  Xander was not like that. He was formal, bowing his head at each of us in turn and introducing himself. “I have come from quite far to meet you,” he told Zybyn.

  My brother swallowed, stealing a look, but didn’t say anything.

  “I didn’t know you had a twin,” the alpha added, briefly glancing my way. “But I’m glad you’ve got someone on your side. It must have been quite a shock for you, for one.”

  “Yeah,” Zybyn acknowledged quietly.

  “It doesn’t have to be all bad, though,” Xander continued, taking a seat across from us, long legs crossing elegantly as he sat. “In my pack, you’d be honoured.”

  Zybyn didn’t speak, so I did, “Honoured?”

  Xander’s dark eyes turned my way, curious but not seemingly bothered by the interruption to his wooing. “Of course, an omega has great power. The greatest power, that of giving life. What is a pack without a future?”

  “Would you honour him too?” I asked. Direct questions were rude, but they were also hard to answer dishonestly.

  “Yes, naturally,” the alpha told me softly. He wasn’t lying about it that I could tell. “If he agreed to be my mate.”

  AFTER XANDER, THERE were three other alphas in the course of two weeks and every single one of them requested Zybyn be their mate.

  “You must choose someone, son,” my father told him that night after the elders had met. “There were several promising candidates, and... well, you will learn to love him, whoever it is.”

  I bit my tongue not to argue; I could see it cost our dad to say it and it was true. What could any of us do against Zybyn’s heats if he remained unbonded?

  Chapter 1

  It was almost a relief to present myself after that. Like the other shoe dropping.

  It was Zybyn who found me. We shared a room and that morning I was too drowsy to get up for the morning meal.

  “Michuá?” he asked, shaking me awake.

  I could hear the worry in his voice, but I still couldn’t open my eyes.

  “Oh, fuck, Michuá... No!” he shook me harder, digging his sharp nails into my arms. “Snap out of it!” he demanded, and I groaned, my bones felt heavy, my muscles sore like I’d transformed back and forth three times in a row and my body hadn’t had time to heal.

  “Ss—stop,” I asked, voice coming out raspy like I’d drunk ice water too fast.

  “This can’t be happening,” he said, and then said it again, voice breaking.

  I didn’t understand he was crying until he bent over me and pressed his forehead to my shoulder, wetting my skin with his pain. I wanted to reach out and hold him but all I could do was make my fingers twitch. Even when I managed to open my eyes, my vision was blurry and the room seemed to sway. “Zybyn...” I managed.

  He tensed on top of me and sat up, cupping my face in his hand. “Shhh,” he told me. “It’s okay, you’re going to feel a little weird, but it’s gonna be okay. It won’t—” He stopped, wiping his tears away with the back of his sleeve. “It will be okay, you gotta remember that, and I will be with you. I won’t leave you. I will keep you safe, I swear.”

  I was too out of it to realise it was my own words he was repeating back to me, my own promises, so easily broken by fate—like my love meant nothing, not even if I was willing to lay my life down to prove it.

  HEAT WAS, IF POSSIBLE, worse than it looked.

  And I had Zybyn in the cave with me to help. He shouldn’t have, but no one else would have been allowed. Even though I was an omega, I was still a ma
n and even though I couldn’t impregnate them, any woman who slept with me would be considered despoiled, and of course if an alpha or beta man fucked me...

  But Zybyn was safe, and Zybyn knew what it was like. And if there was one person in the world with whom I didn’t feel humiliated wailing to be fucked... It was him.

  The morning after was difficult. The lust-craze had lifted but I still remembered way too clearly that I’d asked my brother to get inside me, that the come staining my thighs was his, that he’d pressed kisses to my throat and promised me everything and anything.

  But of course any awkwardness between us didn’t have time to build. The pack now had two valuable omega males ready to be mated and that meant that they could ask for even more from the alphas who’d visited.

  I WAS ALLOWED THE LUXURY of a bath, clearly because they wanted me to look and smell good because the first thing the Elder told us was, “You can each choose one of the candidates, they won’t mind—”

  “No!” I screamed.

  Elder Grel turned my way and it hurt to keep looking her way, her alpha eyes seemed to pierce right through me.

  But I did it anyway. For Zybyn. “No, we’re going together.”

  “What?”

  “We— We’ll go to the same pack,” I said. I ended up panting, eyes squeezed shut.

  But of course Zybyn was there to hold me up. He put a hand on my shoulder and spoke, “The pack across Lake Iguaque is large enough. They sent an alpha named Xander,” he added. “I— I’ll mate him, and Michuá can mate another alpha from his pack.”

  I clenched my fists, hurting myself. The idea of Xander touching Zybyn... much less...

  It was stupid, Zybyn was going to have to get pregnant sooner rather than later—it’d be the only thing that would alleviate his heats—and an alpha could protect him and help him control his instincts better than a beta.

  And this way at least we’d be together. It was easier to focus on that. We’d as good as lost everything that mattered to us—but not each other.

  If I’d got to choose, I’d have chosen Zybyn anyway.

  WE DIDN’T TALK ABOUT my first heat and the way he’d... given me what I needed. That’s all it had been, but even so, I could barely hold myself back from apologizing.

  He understands what it’s like, I reminded myself the next night, curled under my blankets and facing the wall, pretending he wasn’t still awake across the room. We’d bathed and I could no longer smell him on me. My body had healed any... marks he might have left, and at least it hadn’t happened here.

  In our room, we were still... still ourselves.

  And we had bigger things to worry about than a crazy night of heat where we’d crossed lines that should have never been crossed.

  Like Xander.

  The alpha smiled in delight when we called him back from the room he’d taken in the closest human town and told him of our decision. He’d looked at me before, but it felt different now, heavier, interested.

  Of course he was, even our packmates had trouble telling us apart—what did this man care that we weren’t the same person now that we were both omegas?

  His interest was natural and the very reason we were talking, and it was surely normal for an omega to feel a little wary of an alpha staring at them, wasn’t it? Alphas protected omegas, naturally, but they also decided everything about their lives—where and when and how many.

  Even when not in heat, an omega’s body was not their own.

  “I am very happy,” he told Zybyn. “I hope to make you happy too.”

  Zybyn nodded, tense, but he smiled back bravely.

  And I kept my mouth shut, which was as much as anyone could ask of me given the circumstances.

  Chapter 2

  The journey would be long, especially since we needed to travel in human form to transport our belongings. It soon became evident that Xander’s agility didn’t make up for his lack of knowledge of how to navigate mountainous terrain. Or maybe tigers like Xander weren’t as well suited to it as pumas, even if we all had two feet at the moment.

  Zybyn and I slowed down for him without being asked. We were sore and tired, and we didn’t speak much. Despite our natural adaptation to the mountain, it was still dangerous to navigate inattentively and the further we got from home—our birth pack now—the more unfamiliar the land was.

  Despite his difficulties, Xander was patient but relentless, always pushing us to go a little farther than he’d originally indicated. We rose to the challenge almost without noticing that we had no choice in the matter.

  There were no direct orders, not then, but the will to dominate was already evident.

  I have no excuse for it, except that I didn’t even know myself and the whole world had turned upside down.

  MAYBE ZYBYN KNEW AND thought it better not to mention it, but I had genuinely forgotten heats didn’t always wait for a full moon. His next one came in the middle of the night, his twisting body waking me up from the exhausted sleep I fell into every time Xander allowed us to stop and rest for the night.

  “Zybyn...” I touched his arm, heart constricting for him.

  And then I heard a low growl and looked up into Xander’s face. The sound had been for me, but all his attention was on my twin. The alpha normally slept a little further down from us, a gesture I hadn’t even thought about until he climbed on top of my brother’s writhing body, hands travelling up Zybyn’s knees and under his tunic as he sniffed.

  Zybyn’s eyes opened, all pupil and dazed, and Xander leaned in and claimed his mouth in a brutal kiss, shoving his tongue in Zybyn’s mouth and pressing their bodies together.

  It was their first kiss.

  Zybyn shuddered, hands twitching for just a moment before they were pinned down by the alpha’s giant paws around his wrists. He melted into the kiss then, body going pliant—he didn’t have a choice, his body was meant for this.

  I knew what would happen and part of me wanted to move away, but I felt frozen to the spot watching as Xander firmly pressed Zybyn’s hands down to the floor, then let go and took hold of his knees, tugging until his bottom was exposed and Xander could fumble for his own clothes and expose his engorged alpha cock—almost twice the size of Zybyn’s. My twin was hard too, and his entrance shone with wetness as it twitched with need—a need that I knew intimately was more pain than desire, more desperation than arousal. Xander didn’t use his fingers at all, just placed his dick against it and—holding onto Zybyn’s hips—shoved himself inside my brother’s untouched body.

  Zybyn’s scream tore through me, breaking me from my paralysis and making me reach out for the alpha’s arm to—

  Xander shoved me aside, growling with canines extended.

  “Stay,” he demanded, and I felt myself go lax right there on the ground, just a couple feet away from Zybyn.

  I watched, I couldn’t not. It was the only thing I was allowed. Xander pulled on his legs and got the rest of the way in and Zybyn whimpered brokenly under him, arms still pinned by the invisible force of Xander’s will, arse held tightly in the alpha’s hands for his use. His eyes were closed but his face was turned towards me—probably just an instinct, like in his desperation he wanted me close to...

  But there was nothing I could do, except watch every twitch and grimace play on his face. He was in pain and I couldn’t help him. I couldn’t do anything at all, not when I’d been told to stay in place.

  Xander picked up a rhythm, pushing into my brother’s hole again and again, the smell of sex and sweat rising in the air with his moans and growls of pleasure while Zybyn whimpered quietly under him and I watched it all.

  It was meant to feel good for an omega to serve his alpha, but Zybyn kept his teeth gritted throughout as his alpha took his pleasure.

  Time made no sense any longer, but eventually Xander sped up and held still, keeping himself buried to the hilt, as he spent into Zybyn’s twitching body. And then it was over, he loosened his grip and let Zybyn’s legs fall open around him
and removed his member—hard and hot and so long I couldn’t see how he’d fit it inside my brother’s small body.

  “You weren’t quite ready,” the alpha told my brother as he reached over and helped himself to the spare shirt that I’d been using for a pillow to clean himself up. “Next time will be better.”

  Zybyn didn’t answer, but the alpha didn’t notice, he was already turning back to his sleeping spot. Like he’d just had a shit in the forest instead of...

  I turned my body, not even remembering the order until I realized I could move again. Zybyn was curled up away from me. He’d lowered his tunic, but he was shivering in place like he was cold. If anything, he was warmer than usual, but I pressed myself to his back, putting an arm around him, offering all I had—the heat of my body. He didn’t press back against me but after a while, he stopped shivering and then, a good while after we’d heard Xander’s snoring start again, he relaxed into sleep again.

  XANDER DIDN’T MENTION what he’d done to Zybyn. His only concession was not to criticize my brother’s slower pace the next day as we continued our descent.

  I didn’t say anything either, I didn’t dare. What would happen to Zybyn if he had no one with him after his new mate was done with him? I had to be with him, I couldn’t defy his alpha... And Xander had said it was going to get better, hadn’t he? He’d seemed alright before when I’d been a beta, and everyone knew alphas couldn’t control themselves around omegas in heat. Even if they hadn’t been quite high enough in heat for...

  For breeding.

  That’s what Xander must have meant. And of course breeding would feel good to Zybyn.

  And to me, when I was... I shoved the thought away. It was Zybyn that mattered now, would he go into heat again the next night?