The Kaelen Thorne

POV: ASHER STEELE

"Get out," I commanded. My voice was a dead, flat drawl that offered absolutely zero room for negotiation.

The female kneeling on the plush, dark velvet carpet between my legs flinched violently, as if my words were a physical strike across her face. Her wide, terrified eyes darted up to meet mine, her pupils blown wide with the instinctual, suffocating panic of a prey animal recognizing a lethal predator. A thin string of saliva clung to the corner of her swollen lips, and she hastily wiped it away with the back of a trembling hand, her breathing erratic and shallow.

"But, sir..." her voice cracked, pathetic and desperate as she looked up at me. "Please, let me try again. If you didn’t like the way I..."

"I said, get out." The lethal edge bled heavily into my tone this time, a low, guttural vibration that resonated directly from the depths of my chest. It was the undeniable warning rumble of an Alpha on the absolute brink of snapping.

She scrambled backward on her hands and knees in sheer terror, her fingers frantically grabbing her discarded stiletto heels from the floor before she stumbled upright. She practically threw herself out of the private VIP room, slamming the heavy, soundproof mahogany door shut behind her without daring to cast a single look back.

My face remained a rigid, cold mask, completely void of the festering frustration churning beneath my skin. I stood up from the single leather couch I had been lounging on and pulled my trousers up. I aggressively tucked in my shirt, buttoning my pants and buckling the heavy metal belt in place. The metallic click was deafening in the sudden, suffocating silence of the room.

I walked over to the opposite side of the dimly lit room, moving toward the crystal whiskey decanter resting on a polished oak table. I didn't bother with ice. I poured a heavy, amber measure into an empty glass and tipped it back against my lips, letting the fiery liquid burn a harsh path down my throat. I slowly sipped the rest, turning my gaze toward the massive one-way glass window that overlooked the main floor of the gentlemen's club.

Down below, the pulsing neon strobe lights washed over a writhing sea of grinding bodies. It was a chaotic, sweaty mess of human and shifter flesh, entirely driven by primal urges and cheap alcohol. I could see every depraved act, every drunken stumble, but behind this tinted glass on the second floor, no one could see me. I stared blankly at the pulsing club, entirely numb to the relentless temptations surrounding me.

Soon, the heavy door of the VIP room clicked and swung open. Even without turning my head to look, or bothering to catch the specific scent, I knew exactly who had stepped inside. It was my Beta, Carter.

"What the absolute fuck is wrong with you?" Carter’s voice was heavily laced with unfiltered exhaustion and palpable frustration. He stomped into the room, his heavy boots thudding against the floorboards. "That is the third female you’ve violently kicked out tonight, Asher. And that’s not even counting the other three females you threw out three days ago."

I didn't answer him. I kept my back turned and continued to stare blankly at the chaotic scene unfolding below. This routine was getting old. The empty encounters, the forced attempts at release—it was all completely useless.

"We are just wasting our damn time here," Carter aggressively pressed on, stepping up to stand beside me. "Why do we keep coming back to these places when literally no female is good enough for you?"

"Exactly my thoughts," I finally replied, my voice a hollow, deadened echo. "Let’s go."

I slammed the heavy crystal glass back down onto the oak table with a sharp, cracking thud. I snatched my tailored black coat off the back of a nearby chair and strode purposefully toward the exit, making my way out of the private room without waiting for his response.

The moment I pushed the heavy door open, the deafening, relentless bass of the club's music violently hit my chest. The hallway reeked of a suffocating mixture of humans, cheap perfume, stale sweat, and the pungent musk of raw sex. Yet, despite the overwhelmingly explicit atmosphere designed to trigger a shifter's deepest urges, I was having an incredibly hard time getting into the vibe.

It had been almost two months since I actually fucked someone. And for the last two weeks, I had completely lost my appetite for even a basic blowjob.

There was nothing physically wrong with my cock. I could easily get a rock-hard erection when someone wrapped their hands around it in the dark, driven by sheer biological mechanics. But the moment I associated that physical arousal with the actual faces of the females kneeling in front of me, a wave of hopeless, crushing annoyance would instantly wash over me. The arousal would completely evaporate, replaced by an overwhelming urge to just leave. I became so utterly uninterested that I no longer had the urge to be mouth-fucked by any of them anymore.

It was the fundamental reason why I refused to fuck anyone at this point. No one was captivating enough, no one was good enough to hold my arousal in place until I could finally blow my load and find my release.

But beneath this emotionless, detached exterior, a terrifying crisis was violently brewing. Something inside me was horribly off. Even if I masked it perfectly behind an Alpha's cold authority, I was quietly coming to the sickening realization that I was going to go completely feral soon.

My inner wolf, Beast, was already on the jagged precipice of crossing that point of no return.

There were days when the dark turmoil was so heavy I could barely control him. The feral instincts clawed mercilessly at the inside of my skull, demanding blood and violence because he was starved of a mate. I barely let him out to run anymore. If I did, I strictly confined my shifts to the presence of my Beta, my Gamma, or a heavily armed perimeter of my strongest, most trusted warriors. Beast had become an unstable, violent nightmare over the last two years.

The breaking point had occurred exactly sixteen full moons ago. I had made the massive mistake of running with the newly shifted pups in our pack. During the run, Beast had witnessed the pups affectionately licking, wrestling, and petting each other—a pure display of pack bonding. The sight had triggered something twisted and deeply possessive within him. In a split second, he had gone completely mad. He lunged, fully prepared to slaughter our own youth in a blind, feral rage. Thankfully, I managed to furiously mind-link Carter and my Gamma, and both of them were fast enough to physically tackle my massive wolf into the dirt, throwing him out of the way before he could tear the pups to shreds. I hadn't run with the youth since that night.

Beast desperately wanted a mate. And the faster the clock ticked, the more violently impatient he became.

I was already twenty-eight years old, and in a few short months, I would be turning twenty-nine. In the human world, I was still young, in the prime of my life. But for a shifter of my bloodline, an Alpha of the Mystic Pack, I should have been mated years ago. An Alpha who remains unmated, possessing no female to anchor his volatile soul, and having no heir to pass the dominant Alpha genes down to, eventually goes completely haywire. In more direct terms: their minds rot, and they turn into mindless, feral monsters.

And I had absolutely no fucking idea how to stop it.

No one in the entire territory knew the depth of the terrifying turmoil consuming me from the inside out, except for my Beta and my Gamma. I had painstakingly hidden this dark deterioration from my father. I couldn't let him know, especially since he, along with my grandfather, continuously breathed down my neck, aggressively pushing me to find a mate—whether it be my fated mate chosen by the Moon Goddess, or a chosen one I picked myself.

I had never rushed out aggressively hunting for my mate for the simple, foolish reason that I believed she would just eventually fall from the heavens and reveal herself to me when the time was right. But the years bled by, the silence stretched, and before I could even fully grasp the gravity of my mateless reality, my wolf was already losing his damn mind.

Both my father and my grandfather, and all the men before them who held the title of Alpha of the Mystic Pack, had seamlessly found their fated mates between the young ages of eighteen and twenty-three. None of them had ever experienced the agonizing, feral deterioration I was enduring right now. I was navigating uncharted, deadly waters, and I felt deep in my bones that it wouldn't take much longer before I was entirely doomed.

I knew the clock was ticking down to zero. I had to make a drastic decision soon. I needed a mate, or I needed an heir to ground Beast's chaotic energy.

But with my total inability to find even a shred of pleasure in the physical act of fucking, what the hell did I even need a mate for? It rendered the entire concept completely pointless.

"Alpha Steele..."

A wavering voice suddenly snapped me out of my dark, racing thoughts. An older male shifter, dressed in a crisp, formal suit, nervously approached us in the hallway.

Despite the practiced elegance and the strict formality in his posture, I could instantly sense the heavy, suffocating reek of fear and uncertainty bleeding into his aura. He was a shifter, the designated night manager of this establishment. I was absolutely certain that the trembling female I had just violently kicked out of the VIP room had run straight to him, crying and complaining about my sheer ruthlessness.

"I will still pay for the private room, and I'll pay for the females' wasted time," I stated coldly, not giving the man a single second to reply or offer a pathetic apology. "My Beta will take care of the entire transaction."

I turned my broad shoulders, fully prepared to walk out of this suffocating hallway, when the absolute fool made a fatal miscalculation. He reached out, his trembling hand grasping my forearm to stop me.

A vicious, blood-curdling growl instantly reverberated out of my chest, vibrating through my ribs. I snapped my head back to look at him, my vision blurring as my pupils dilated rapidly. I gave him a lethal, silent warning, letting the pure, unfiltered Alpha dominance bleed into the air for daring to touch me without permission.

"My... my deepest apologies, Alpha!" The manager practically shrieked, snatching his hand back as if my skin were made of burning acid. He stumbled backward rapidly, throwing both of his hands up high in the air in an act of total surrender. "I just... I just want to make sure I can give you some vital details to make up for our females not being able to appease your tastes tonight."

"Details?" I asked, my tone dangerously soft. My forehead creased into a deep frown as I slowly crossed my thick arms over my chest, staring him down. I heard Carter shift his stance, his heavy boots planting firmly behind my shoulder. My Beta was clearly interested in hearing whatever desperate information this man was trying to sell.

"Next week, the annual Omega Feast will be exclusively held right here, in this club's underground venue," the manager said, his voice shaking slightly as he nervously rolled the ends of his perfectly groomed mustache between his thumb and forefinger.

He was sweating profusely. He had every damn reason to be.

"And?" I demanded, entirely unimpressed by the revelation.

"And, they are saying that this year's batch of Omegas is drastically more beautiful than the last time the event was held," he rambled eagerly, desperate to salvage my patronage. "I thought I would personally let you know, in the sincere hope that you might finally find a female that will interest you at the said feast."

I scoffed, my eyes narrowing into a cold glare. "Are you standing here telling me this because you genuinely believe I can find a female that interests me? Or are you pitching this bullshit because it’s heavily beneficial for your bottom line once I start throwing thousands of dollars onto the bidding floor?"

"No! No, Alpha, I swear it!" he stammered defensively, his eyes darting wildly between Carter and me. "It’s just that... well, we’ve noticed lately that absolutely none of our highly trained females were living up to your expectations. So I thought, if you just joined this year’s Omega Feast, perhaps..."

I didn't bother listening to the rest of his pathetic, desperate babbling. I turned my back on him in complete disgust and walked aggressively away. This sweating manager and his sordid establishment had absolutely nothing left to offer me. I was certainly not interested in attending a glorified meat market like the Omega Feast, just as I had actively ignored it for the previous ten years.

"So, what do you think?" Carter asked me, his voice echoing slightly as we finally stepped into the private, metallic elevator that would take us straight down to the club’s VIP guests’ parking lot.

"Think about what?" I snapped, staring at the closed metal doors.

"About the Omega Feast," Carter pressed relentlessly. "Are we attending it?"

I shot him a vicious glare over my shoulder. "Didn’t you just watch me walk away from that babbling idiot? I am entirely uninterested, Carter. Go on your own if you want to stare at weak females so badly."

"Why the fuck would I attend an Omega Feast on my own?" Carter fired back, his tone rising with irritation. "I already have a mate. You’re the one that desperately needs one."

"An Omega? For a mate? For the Luna of the Mystic Pack?" I let out a harsh, mocking laugh. "You have got to be fucking kidding me."

"Who said anything about making her your mate?" Carter sneered, crossing his arms.

I tilted my head, glaring at him at the exact moment the elevator pinged sharply, the metal doors sliding open to reveal the freezing, concrete expanse of the parking lot. I shook my head in disbelief, slipping my bare hands deep inside my coat pockets before I strode out into the frigid air. "If you actually think I’m going to throw away pack funds to buy a weak Omega just to be my personal sex slave, then you’re the one losing your shit, Carter. I can just go out and check..."

"...check around?" Carter interrupted aggressively, finishing my sentence as we both came to a halt in front of his massive black SUV. He pressed the button on his key fob, the vehicle unlocking with a sharp double beep. "Check around like what we’ve been doing for the last couple of agonizing months?"

My jaw tightened so hard my teeth ground together. I aggressively yanked the passenger door open, slipping my large frame into the leather seat, and slammed the heavy door closed, vibrating the entire cabin.

"We’ve been literally everywhere, Asher, and absolutely no female was fuckable enough for you," Carter stated matter-of-factly, climbing into the driver's seat and slamming the engine to life. "What do we honestly have to lose?" He threw the car into gear and began driving steadily toward the steep concrete exit ramp. "I propose that we just go and check the feast out. And if absolutely none of those Omegas can make you hard, then we’ll leave. We go home. No harm done."

I remained stubbornly quiet. I propped my elbows heavily against the freezing window pane, resting my head against my long fingers as I stared blankly out into the dark.

"Alpha..." The shifter posted at the security booth, who was checking out our vehicle, bowed his head respectfully as we passed. I merely acknowledged him with a cold, dismissive wave of my hand, not bothering to make eye contact.

Within minutes, we were merging onto the brutal, desolate stretch of the Northern highway, making our way back to the safety of our territory. The silence in the car was suffocating. I reached out, picking up a cigarette from the dashboard. I sparked the lighter, the brief flame illuminating the tension in the cabin, and took a deep, dragging hit to fill my lungs with the toxic smoke. I rolled the tinted window down a few inches, blowing the smoke out into the night.

The brutal, freezing wind instantly rushed in, brushing violently against my skin and sending a sharp chill down my spine. The temperature out here tonight was easily in the negative degrees Celsius, dropping rapidly, but the biting frost never bothered me at all. The long, grueling years of my life had only made my skin thicker, far more durable and accustomed to the unforgiving, harsh weather of the North.

"Think about it, Asher," Carter said out of nowhere, his voice cutting through the whistling wind.

I didn't turn to look at him. "Are we seriously not done with this damn topic yet?"

"My son needs an Alpha," Carter stated, his voice dropping the argumentative edge, replacing it with a heavy, sobering gravity that anchored the words deep in my chest. He gripped the steering wheel tight, his eyes fixed on the dark road ahead. "If you can't produce an heir to secure our bloodline... what the hell will happen to our pack?" Carter turned his head slightly, delivering the final, piercing hook that tore through my stubborn defenses. "And what do you honestly think will happen to Beast?"