Omega Hunted by Linsey Moon
5
"In here, my dears."
The Lady waved them through a set of doors into a large sitting room, lit by a line of large windows along the opposite wall, which looked out on the deep green forest beyond. A comfortable seating area invited them with plush sofas and chairs, dark violet against the pale lavender of the carpet and the cool blue-white of the walls.
On the other side of the room a table draped in a white cloth had a full tea service waiting, little sandwiches and pastries piled on a tiered silver tray. Between them were arranged several beautiful mirrored vanities, as well as full length mirrors and tall, elaborately painted changing screens. It was the richest looking room Savannah had ever seen, even on TV.
"Take a moment to rest and refresh yourselves," the lady said, shepherding everyone inside. "The stylists will be along in a moment."
As the last omega stepped into the room, she shut the door behind them and they all heard the solid click of the lock. Silence hung for a moment as they all looked at one another.
"So, does anyone know what exactly is going on here?" Savannah asked, breaking the silence.
"Well there's no way any of what that lady said was the truth," the tall girl replied immediately.
"I think it is," another omega, a red head in weathered looking sweatpants and an old t-shirt said. "At least, some of it has to be. There's obviously going to be a party and they brought us here for something. Why not as party favors for some rich alphas?"
"I honestly don't care," said another girl, a willowy brunette who'd been eyeing the table with the food since they walked in. "They'll do whatever they want as usual. It's not like we can stop them. I'm going to eat."
She made a beeline for the table and several other girls followed her.
"How long was the DOA holding you for?" the tall girl asked Savannah, and Savannah looked back at her in confusion.
"A few hours, maybe?" she said. "I think they took me last night, but they drugged me and I was out for a while so I don't know for sure."
"What about you?" The tall girl abruptly shifted her gaze to the girl who had been in the car with Savannah. She was small, with birdlike bones and a waist length sheet of black hair. She had stayed close to Savannah since they got out of the car, and now huddled behind her, wide eyed, like she thought the tall girl was about to lunge at her.
"A few days," she whispered.
"Shit, they had me more than a month," said the red headed girl.
"They had me for three years," the tall girl said, and Savannah stared, appalled. "For the first few weeks I had no idea what was going on. They just kept shuffling me around to one facility after another, losing track of my paperwork, transferring my case to different agents. I thought it was just stupid bureaucratic bullshit, but eventually I caught on that I still hadn't been registered, that the system basically had no record I existed. So I tried to make a break for it. Didn't get far. That time.
“The third time I actually managed to avoid them for a couple of days, thought I was in the clear. Obviously, I wasn't. After that one they stopped shuffling me around and just threw me in a hole. For the last few months I've been inside a windowless room eating microwave meals and fast food they stuck through a hole in the door."
"It was only for one year, I think, but I was in the same place," one of the other girls chimed in. "Or some place a lot like it."
The other omegas repeated similar stories of being shuffled around and lost in the system for ages, or locked up in storage somewhere.
"They were waiting to have enough of us," Savannah said, putting it together. "Slipping an unregistered omega out of the system like that, they probably can't do it that often. And they needed us all to be the right age, the right look. They must have been gathering us up for years. We're all, what, eighteen to twenty-one?"
The girls murmured their ages. The oldest was twenty two. The youngest was the dark haired girl behind Savannah, who had just turned eighteen a few days ago.
"That's a lot of effort and planning for some party favors," the tall girl said.
"They're selling us," Savannah said. "They must be making a fortune."
"If those alphas are as powerful as the lady said," the red head confirmed, "they're probably charging the net worth of a small country for just one of us."
"Yeah, I don't really care how many zeros they put on the price tag," the tall girl countered. "I'm not down with being sold off."
"I am," the red headed girl scoffed. "If these guys are as powerful as the lady said, hell, I'd pay them for this kind of opportunity. I was about to spend the rest of my life hiding under a rock. Now I get to be a princess instead? Sign me the fuck up! I don't care who the guy is!"
"When they caught me my parents were waiting until I was old enough to sell me off anyway," another girl said bitterly. "At least this way I'll end up with an alpha worth having instead whatever creeps my parents could bring in."
"You'll care when it's some gross oil baron three times your age," Savannah pointed out.
"There's nothing we can do about it anyway," the red headed girl said. "Wherever this place is, it is way out in the middle of nowhere. Even if we managed to get away from the guards and the house we'd just be wandering around in the woods alone."
"Not if we work together," Savannah countered. "There's enough of us we could overwhelm them, get a phone, steal a car maybe."
"Or sure, they wouldn't stop all of us," the red head says, rolling her eyes. "But they'd stop some of us. You want to risk being one of the ones that doesn't make it? And what do you think they'll do with the ones that get left behind when they don't have enough omegas for their stupid party? Back into storage, if we're lucky. Our best option here is try and impress the alphas at this party, and that makes *you* the competition."
Savannah balked, thrown by the red head's aggression. Judging by the murmurs of agreement and the looks on their faces, a lot of the girls agreed with her. Too many to make escaping as a group a viable option.
"This is the best chance any of us are ever going to get to end up with a future worth having," the red head continued. "And I am not going to let you screw that up for me. If I see you doing anything that could jeopardize this for the rest of us, don't expect me to keep my mouth shut."
Savannah looked to the tall girl, who shrugged, giving up. Savannah wilted. There went basically any chance of escaping she could see.
Before she could say anything else, the doors opened and the Lady of the House bustled in again, followed by a team of stylists carrying tackle boxes full of styling products and wheeling racks of glittering ball gowns. They descended on the omegas like a cloud of locusts and Savannah was lost in a whirl of activity. Someone was taking her measurements, ducking around the person testing makeup pallets on her arm, who kept having to jerk her arm back out of the way of the person yanking dresses off the rack and holding them up to Savannah one at a time before throwing them aside.
"What color is this?" a fourth stylist demanded, lifting a hunk of Savannah's shoulder length hair.
"Straw blond?" The person with the dresses guessed without looking.
"You don't think it's more of a honey?"
"Why, are you dying it? You have to tell me if you're dying it. I can't choose her colors if you're changing the hair."
"Relax, I'm just toning it to take out some of the copper."
"Are you thinking updo?"
"She has the neck for it."
"I have some crystal drops that will look great with that."
"I want to do a kind of smoky thing with gold highlights around the eyes, try to bring out that color in her eyes. Is that hazel?"
"Looks grey to me."
"Yeah, kind of a stormy grey."
"If they were blue this look would be so classic I'd almost think it was too much."
"Who took the Valentino heels with the straps? I need those."
"Are we doing perfume?"
"No, just scent enhancers."
They rarely spoke to her directly except for orders. "Stand up straighter." "Go stand over there." "Hold this." Occasionally rather than order her to move they just grabbed her and moved her around themselves. It was a bewildering and alienating experience, especially for Savannah, who'd always been a bit of a tom boy. Plus, she had never left the house or saw anyone but her family, so she had never really experimented with makeup or hair styling products.
They chose a dress for her that to Savannah looked more like a negligee than a ball gown. It was a deep red floor length sheath of satin with slits on either side of the skirt that went all the way up to Savannah's hips in a way that reminded her of a loincloth. The neckline plunged just as daringly and the back was entirely absent.
She turned as scarlet as the dress when she saw herself in the mirror. She hadn't been looked at by anyone but her family since she was twelve. Now she was so fully on display that the stylists were having frank discussions about her underwear. At the same time, there was a thrill in it. She'd never seen herself like this.
Sheltered as she was, she'd never had a chance to become properly insecure about her body, but she'd always been aware she was a bit flat chested, with wide hips that left her, in her mind, looking imbalanced. If her hips had been smaller she could have pulled off the boyish flapper look. If her tits had been bigger she could have had a classic hourglass figure.
But in this dress, the deep neckline almost painted itself along the graceful, statuesque curve of her modest breasts. The slits of the skirt fell perfectly over the swell of her hips, baring her broad thighs. For the first time in her life, she felt dizzyingly sexy.
Her embarrassment warred with her unexpected delight. To make it worse, they'd sprayed every inch of exposed skin with scent enhancer. She'd never been terribly aware of her own scent, woodsy and herbal, but now she was surrounded by a cloud of thyme and cedar that seemed to intensify the more embarrassed she grew.
"I can't go out in front of people like this," she said. "Don't you have anything with a little more… fabric?"
The stylists ignored her, and looking around she could see all the other girl's dresses were similarly scanty. Even the male omegas were dressed not in suits but in androgynous arrangements of draped silk that exposed more than they covered.
When they were done, she did look like a princess. The kind from the cover of pulp novels illustrated by Frank Frazzeta, who spend most of the book being ravished. They sent her off to sit on one of the couches while they continued working on the other girls, with strict instructions not to eat anything or move too much. Savannah was really beginning to wish she'd taken advantage of the sandwiches when she had the chance.
She sank into the plush sofa next to the tall girl, who was so dazzling Savannah could hardly look at her without turning red. With her long legs and sharp features, elevated by the knife point cat eye makeup they'd given her, she looked like a Victoria's Secret model.
The stylists had covered them all in scent enhancers, so the room was a fog of sweet omega scents, but the tall girl's unusual spice and citrus cut through it cleanly. To keep from staring, Savannah searched the room for the dark haired girl and found her still being fussed over, someone adding touches of shimmering glitter to her skin while another stylist decorated her hair with tiny shining crystals.
The stylists had chosen a different key color for each of the girls (there had been fierce arguments over who got to use red) and they'd chosen white for the dark haired girl. She looked like a fairy tale in an eighties movie. Like Snow White or Jennifer Connolly in the Labyrinth, but with rather more skin on display. Her dress was by far the most conservative in the room and it was still a bit shocking. The tall girl was her opposite in elegant modern black.
"Somehow I was expecting big poofy princess gowns," she said to the other girl. "I would have been more comfortable with that."
"Yeah, sort of seems like they're encouraging people to try before they buy," the tall girl muttered. "Free samples."
Savannah grimaced.
"I'm Savannah, by the way," she said.
"Not much point in learning each other's names," the other girl said with a shrug. "I doubt we'll see each other again."
"Can't hurt anything," Savannah replied.
"You'd be surprised," the other girl said, her expression touched briefly with deep regret before she controlled it again. "I'm Corrine."
Gradually, the other girls joined them on the couch as the stylists finished with them. The dark haired girl was named Katharine. There was also Dawn, a tawny, freckled brunette who'd been styled like a nymph in deep green with flowers in her hair, and Tahnee, dark skinned and regal in royal violet and gold, who was the last to be finished as the stylists labored over her elaborately braided hair. The red headed girl, resplendent in dark peacock blue, didn't introduce herself, still giving Savannah the stink eye at every opportunity, but Savannah learned from one of the other girls that her name was Lyanna.
Eventually the stylists filed out and they were just waiting, listening as from somewhere below them the sound of music and conversation slowly grew. The party had begun.
At last the Lady, who had been standing by the door tapping her foot and eyeing her wristwatch, snapped her fingers to get their attention.
"All right, my omegas," she said, smiling at them widely. "It's show time."