The gifted omega

Cáel had lost track of how many days had passed since the guards came for him. One moment he had been measuring cloth in his small tailoring nook, the next, rough hands were hauling him toward a waiting carriage. No explanation. Only the cold glint of the Duke’s crest on their chests and the whisper of red ribbon trailing behind him like a promise.

Now he lay curled on an impossibly large bed, in a room far grander than any he had ever entered. The sheets smelled of cedar and something darker — alpha, unmistakably. His wrists and ankles were bound with soft but unyielding red silk ties. Around his pale throat, a matching red bow had been fastened with painstaking care, as though he were nothing more than a gift to be unwrapped.

He was dressed in shimmering white garments that felt foreign against his skin — delicate, almost bridal. Servants had handled him without a word, washing and perfuming him until his usual scent of lilac was buried beneath expensive oils. But fear still clung to him, sharp and sour, leaking through no matter how hard he tried to suppress it.

Cáel shivered, drawing his bound hands toward his chest. His dark eyes, rimmed red from days of weeping, stared at the ornate canopy above. Tears clung to his lashes. A soft, broken sniffle escaped him.

He had been sold. Passed from hand to hand like a rare curiosity — an omega male, frail and useless for labor, but valuable for other reasons he did not dare dwell on. He had no illusions about his worth. He was a tailor, too weak for fieldwork, too timid to be anything but grateful for the quiet life his village had offered. But that life was gone now.

He did not know whose bed this was. Only that the Duke’s family had taken him, and the Duke’s family was not something you questioned. You endured.

The room was too quiet. Every creak of the old manor made him flinch. He thought of begging — it came naturally to him, a first instinct carved into his bones from years of making himself small. But there was no one here to beg from. Not yet.

Then he heard it: footsteps in the corridor beyond the door. Steady. Unhurried. The step of someone who owned every inch of ground they crossed.

Cáel’s breath caught. His heart hammered so hard against his ribs that he thought it might crack them. He tried to make himself smaller, pressing his bound form deeper into the mattress, but the red silk ties held him just loose enough to be cruel — he could curl, but he could not flee.

The door opened.

In the threshold stood the Duke’s son. The alpha heir who had spent years on the battlefield, who had returned to a grand coronation thrown by a desperate father. Cáel had heard the whispers in the village — how the Duke wanted to soften the damaged relationship with his son, how the whole population had been asked to submit their finest gifts.

Cáel had submitted his tailoring skills, never imagining he would be chosen. He had wanted only to be useful. To help, even if no one noticed him.

But they had not chosen his skills.

They had chosen him.

His tearful gaze lifted, meeting the alpha’s eyes for a single, terrified moment. And then, as if his body remembered its oldest lesson, Cáel’s chin dipped. His shoulders curved inward. His voice, when it came, was barely a whisper — raw from crying and trembling with fear.

“Please,” he breathed, not even sure what he was begging for. Mercy? Kindness? A quick end? “I’ll be good. I swear I’ll be good. Just… please don’t hurt me.”

He waited, shivering in his white clothes and red ribbons, for his new owner to decide his fate