Knot in This Lifetime

Chapter 1

Sage

Sage was used to ignoring the sound of wet squelching — where flesh met flesh and baritoned grunts of pleasure blended with high pitched moans. More than half of it were mere theatrics, spurred by the clinking tassels of gold that lined the pockets of Alphas.

Born into the shadows of a whorehouse in Area 51, where the walls were stained with blood, and the stench of old crusty semen and piss clung in the air, violence and debauchery had been her constant companions for as long as she remembered — or at least for as long as she'd existed in this place.

Her current identity was likely the result of expired abortion drugs — cheap, faulty remedies sold to scam desperate, uneducated Omegas. But it wasn't her own tenacity nor the pleas of her mother that spared her life. Instead, it was the promise of jingling coins in an already overflowing pouch. Her pack's Alpha ensured that the Alphas with a breeding fetish got exactly what they wanted.

Omegas were considered as nothing but playthings to the Alphas. To be locked away like canaries, singing for their masters' pleasures. Perhaps a few lucky ones would find a decent Alpha and escape that fate, but those were dime in a dozen.

The world wouldn't change for another galactic calendar, marked by countless deaths, rebellions and destruction before Omegas gained even basic rights — the right to control their own bodies, to dream, to have ambitions. And it was just her misfortune that she had somehow been thrown three galactic calendars back into this barbaric timeframe, to an era where the mere idea of Omega rights was laughable.

At first, she'd been in shock — screaming, crying, and begging whatever gods or higher entities might listen to send her back to her original time. But in the end, it didn't matter. There were no flashes of magic, no divine interventions, and her pack Alpha had come close to casting her out onto the streets for her hysterical behavior. As an eight-year-old girl in a world like this, she would have been dead within days, or sold into slavery, missing an organ or two. It didn't matter what her mental age was.

It was fear, pure survival instinct, that forced her to swallow her pride and fall back in line with the pack. They thought she was insane, yes, but she was useful — and that was all that mattered.

She supposed that the only silver lining she had to balance her god-awful luck was the fact that she'd arrived in this body years before it had differentiated. The tell tale signs were all too obvious especially with her major in Omega medicine. As soon as she gathered enough cash, she had practically inhaled every modern blocker and inhibitor she could recreate.

Now, to everyone else, she was just another unassuming beta — boring, unremarkable, forgettable. Just another cog in the machine of the time she despised. And that was exactly how she intended it to stay. Not even her pack Alpha or her mother knew the truth and she had no intentions of ever letting them find out.

Even as a Beta, her pack Alpha had tried to sell her into prostitution more than once. If not for her clever tongue and the sweet promises she painted, of endless gold, boundless fame, and unending glory, perhaps that might have been her fate. It was in fact, a pleasant surprise that her pack Alpha even considered those outlandish promises, much less believed in them. Nonetheless, she had the feeling it was likely because the demand and price for Beta females was low enough that he didn't force the issue. That, and any half decent careerist would be able to earn more than a Beta female selling her body could.

As for her mother, for all her good intentions, she was but an Omega bound to her Alpha. The bond compelled her to obey, to speak only the truth when commanded by her Alpha. It was why the pack's Alpha never suspected Sage of lying — after all, which Beta would lie to her Alpha and risk being kicked out of their pack? There were countless Betas out there who yeared to join a pack but most Alphas only accepted Omegas and the occasionally outstanding Beta.