Chapter Text
Vero lifted his wide-brimmed hat with his thumb and squinted against the whirls of red dust and the brightness of the sun as it reflected off the painted white of the post office across the dirt main street. He’d been in town a few days and the girls at the hotel at least were used to him striding in and out. They saw him bringing game to the butcher and they’d been watching him while he helped a few of the farmhands break one of the mustangs brought into the auction house nearby.
But it wasn’t the girls he was looking at. He wiped at his face with his handkerchief and made certain he was only peering out the corner of his eye when he spied the trussed up little peacock who belonged to Wilhelm Schulze–the rail baron. The boy was probably just shy of twenty and he smelled sweeter than sugared cream, dressed in the finest of feathers and silk at every possible moment and honestly the cleanest damned thing Vero had ever seen out west where everything always seemed to have a thin film of dust and grime all over it.
Wolfgang Voigt was his name and he barely spoke a lick of English. With sly green eyes and a mess of consistently-tousled brown hair, he parted seas of men with a mere pout and a flutter of his lashes. He was gentle and refined and Vero thought he might have had a little bit of a sinister streak in him if he was used to lounging in opulent rail cars and manipulating wealthy Alphas. One had to wonder how many Alphas such an Omega had serviced over the years. Was he a mate or a practiced and well-loved courtesan?
Vero lit a cigarette and watched the little creature move lightly over the grass, careful not to get his boots dirty as he went. If history played out right, the Omega would walk right in front of where Vero stood. He waited, breathing deep as not to allow his heartbeat and his scent to give him away. He counted to himself as the Omega stepped. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. His steps were quick as if it a dance and it wasn’t long before he had taken that last fateful one right in front of Vero.
“Gotcha!” he grunted as he snatched up the little Omega, struggling with the wriggling mass until he could mount his horse with him, swinging him over his lap on the saddle as a piece of cargo before he gave the “heeyah!” to signal Maelstrom to move. The stallion was off at a gallop, nearly running folks down as Vero moved his mask up over his face and made a beeline for the outer reaches of the plains where he could lose the law among the rocky outcroppings. With as much confusion as he’d just caused, it was likely that there would be some after him but not enough to catch him.
It was soon that he realized the local lawmen had lost their way chasing his fast gray dapple and he slowed in a canter to save the Omega from puking…though probably not soon enough. The little one was shrieking and struggling, kicking his legs and making a fine racket.
“Shut your little fool mouth. You’ll be back home to your Alpha in no time. Just as soon as he pays his due for yah.” He let a heavy hand come down and knock the little one on the back of his head. It wasn’t enough to do more than stun him and let him know that Vero meant business. When they were past a small outcrop of rocks and about a day’s ride from the gang’s camp, he pulled the little ransom off the horse and dropped him unceremoniously into the dirt. “We’ll see how snobbish you are after a few days in the wild with me, huh boy?” He dismounted as the Omega scrambled to his feet, backing up until he was flat against the tall rock with his hands out in front of him.
In a heavy accent, the boy begged. “Pleess. Pleess! Do not hurt! Plees!”
“I’m not gonna hurt yah, keep your hair on.” With that, he dismounted and pointed at the ground. “Sit your tight little ass on the ground here.”
The boy, probably unable to understand him, moved his eyes frantically between his finger and the ground before he nearly dove into the spot and sat, obediently allowing Vero to tie his wrists together. There was a smudge of something on the boy’s cheek so Vero moved to wipe at it with his thumb, the coarseness of his fingertip causing the boy to wince.
“Ehn,” he sighed. “Ain’t much for outlaws, I suppose. You’ve got your sights right…rich men don’t have calluses on their fingers.” Moving away from him, it took him a few seconds to get out a bit of canned beans from his saddlebags and he ate them cold. “We’ll get you to camp tomorrow and you can have a nice bed to sleep in. For now, you’ll have to make do with my bedroll.” When the boy showed no signs of understanding him, he shrugged. “Now, do I have to gag you, Omega?” He sat down and lifted up a strip of fabric, modeling it on himself as a gag before he pointed at the boy with a question in his eyes.
“Nein…” He shook his head. “No…”
“Alright, well enough.” He sat next to the Omega with his back against the rock, pulling out the small bit of instructions Harchem had given him before he’d left, forming the words carefully with his mouth.
Find Voigt. Take Voigt. Bring Voigt alive for ransom. Treat him well.
Vero had wondered several times if the last line was meant to tell Vero not to fuck the the little one on his way back to camp. There were a few of the men in the gang who would have faced no difficulty in taking exactly what they thought they deserved from a sweet little boy like this one–especially one who couldn’t tell them off in any way that mattered to them. Still…it was easy to tell what “no” was in German and Vero didn’t have the strength to put an Omega through some kinds of horror.
“Alpha?”
He looked up, folding the scrap of paper and tucking it back into his pocket. Those brilliant green eyes were sparkling with the emotions that were saturating his scent. Fear but also…hope? He’s smelled that enough in his life to recognize it and this disturbed him. “Omega?”
He leaned forward, his eyes and voice pleading. “Help. Help me?”
Vero tilted his head, quirking his brow. “What do you mean? What do you mean ‘help’?”
“Help,” he repeated, his expression desperate. “Help.” He thought, his eyes flicking back and forth as if searching for a word. “Du sollst mich behalten. Keep. Keep!”
“I don't know what you mean to ask me, son, but you don't want me to keep you.” He waved a hand at the little one where he sat to dismiss the whole premise and pulled his journal out of his saddlebags, settling himself down against one of the rocks and opening up to a free page. He'd never been so close to such a pretty Omega and damned if he wasn't gonna take a shot at replicating that finely crafted face on paper. Sharpening his short drawing pencil with his hunting knife, he set about sketching out the basics of the Omega's form before the boy became overly curious and moved.
“Hey, hey, hey!” Vero barked, motioning for him to sit again. “I'm tryin' ta get yah down on paper, alright? Now sit there an' don't yah move!”
The German clearly didn't understand him. He leaned forward again, frowning.
“Stop it, you little tick!” Putting down his journal, he shifted forward to put his hands on the boy's upper arms, shifting him until he was back in his original position. Then he put a finger out as a signal for him to stay. “Stay!” he ordered.
The Omega pointed at his chest, awkward with his hands tied in front of him. “Wolf.”
“Yeah, Wolfgang, I know,” Vero grumbled. “Stay there. Don't move.”
“Don't move,” he parroted softly.
“Yeah.”
“Ja.”
The basic shape and outline was easy but Vero studied him hard for his more delicate features, finding that the combination of femininity and masculinity within a male Omega was far more difficult to grasp and convey than the other dynamics he'd chosen to sketch before. It was rare, after all, to find a male Omega—or any Omega at all—far out to the west. It was no surprise then that Schulze, the rail baron, was in the habit of taking one everywhere he went. Along with that, it was also no surprise that he should take with him one who hailed from his mother country. Intensely beautiful, Voigt was the subject of many a man's prurient dreams and they didn't mind rambling on about how much they'd like to rip him clear out of Schulze's cold, dead hands to fuck him through his heats and hear the sweet sounds of his exotic begging.
Vero didn't find Voigt's language exotic. He didn't find it anything but odd and disjointed and honestly bizarre upon the ears. Though the boy was handsome, it was all he had for Vero. That and the potential to net him an obscene amount of money. It had been Harchem's idea to take the boy but he trusted Vero—that's why he'd sent him alone. That or he absolutely thought Vero a waste of breath, the Alpha thought glumly, recalling the amount of times he'd stumbled over his own words and sometimes his own feet to make a fool of himself in front of the boss. Maybe it was just Harchem's way of giving him a fool's errand to get rid of him. Maybe it was that...but then maybe this was his chance. This was how Vero was going to prove himself.
He finished the boy's hair and the gentle curve of his nose but kept having to recreate his eyes, unsatisfied with the way they opened wide in a very Omega-like fashion to create a doe-eyed appearance. He almost appeared innocent which, of course, was some kind of ruse. An instinctual Omega ruse meant to force Alphas into protecting them when by all rights they needed no such protection at all. This particular boy was likely one of those. He didn't look like he could manipulate a man but Vero knew there was more behind those wide green eyes. The boy was sly. No doubt.
When he was finally satisfied that he'd gotten his eyes just right—with a hint of a malicious glitter behind them—he moved on and then paused, his pencil poised just over the gentle slope of his throat. His eyes darted upward and his lips were tight together.
“No bondmark?” he blurted, shifting suddenly and causing the boy to jerk in surprise. “Hey, hey,” he cooed, putting out his hands to show he meant no harm. Reaching out, he took the boy's chin and turned him one way and then the other, his pale white throat unmarred. With a soft set of movements, he shifted the boy's shirt so that he might reveal more of that perfect, supple skin and could find no evidence at all that the boy was anyone's mate. Despite the Alpha scent that hung over him—Schulze's earth and fire tones, through and through—he held no mark that he was taken. “No bondmark...” he mumbled to himself.
“Keep,” Wolf said to him blankly, staring into his eyes. He pointed at the Alpha with both his hands and then motioned to himself again. “Keep. Alpha keep.”
“No, no, no...that's not how this works.”
“Keep.”
“No.”
“Ja.”
He cracked a smile then, unable to keep from grinning. “Yer a sassy little shit, aren't yah?” He pulled out another cigarette and lit it, comparing the sketch he'd done to the real thing. He'd have to take a bit more time to practice, he thought. His eyes still weren't quite right. Especially not when the boy was brimming with consternation like he was now, pouting and unable to understand why the hell Vero wasn't sinking his teeth into him right this moment.
“Alpha. Ich will, dass du mich beißt.” He pulled his lips back from his teeth and made a chomping motion.
“Yah I know. You want me to keep you. But you're not for keepin'. Why the hell you'd ever want a man like me to bite yah, I'll never know. Ya'll must have lost your damned mind. Got scrambled up on the horse, huh?”
The boy turned his head away, grumbling to himself. “Hmmph. Du blöder Mistkerl.”