Title: The Empires of Luxor City
Author: Sasha Hope
Publisher: NineStar Press
Release Date: February 3, 2020
Heat Level: 3 - Some Sex
Pairing: Male/Male
Length: 77400
Genre: Science Fiction/Fantasy, LGBT, futuristic, crime/thriller, family-drama, urban fantasy, alpha/omega, gangsters, criminal underworld, reunited, crossdressing, hurt/comfort
Synopsis
In the aftermath of his father’s funeral, Dom Wesa, the new Alpha of Luxor City’s Central Empire, stumbles upon an Omega in desperate need of help. The Omega, Lin Vasiliev, wakes to find he’s been taken into Dom’s home to be rehabilitated. Dom thinks the young addict may have information about the illicit drug trade going on in his Empire. He gets Lin sober to question him only to discover that Lin is new in town and ignorant of Luxor’s laws.
Dom and Lin are both suspicious of each other at first for their own reasons, but as that wariness wears away a deep attraction develops between them. Dom dotes on Lin, leaving the once stone-broke Omega bathed in finery he never could have imagined. They start planning for Lin’s upcoming heat, when they will be driven together by their kindling bond and strong compatibility as an Alpha and Omega pair. However, in the midst of their swelling romance, Luxor’s most notorious Alpha reappears sparking a gang war that threatens to turn the entire city into a battleground.
Excerpt
The Empires of Luxor City
Sasha Hope © 2020
All Rights Reserved
There had never been fewer tears shed at
a funeral.
It was strange. Crowds had wailed at
funerals for worse men, but not a single soul in Luxor City wept for Malik
Wesa, a business magnate who’d left behind a wife and two sons. They just stood
there, all of them staring straight ahead with cold black eyes as the funeral
director rolled the old man’s coffin into the crematory. Visible through a tiny
char-stained window, the man who’d once been their leader burned down to ash
and bone until there was nothing left of him but dust.
Shaking the image from his mind, Dom
Wesa walked out through a wrought-iron fence and left the inner-city funeral
home. He buried his hands deep in the pockets of his overcoat and made his way
back across the busy city streets toward his office on the east side of town.
A chill rolled off the water near the
docks as the year moved into fall. Dom originally drove to the funeral home
with the rest of the family, but he couldn’t bear to spend another second with
them even if it meant enduring the icy wind.
When a family member dies, all too often
they are given a whole new life story. This was a universal truth Dom struggled
to wrap his head around. There weren’t any tears at his father’s funeral, but
there were enough artificial words of kindness to make him grit his teeth and
bite his tongue until his eyes watered.
They all loved to mention how hard
things would be for Dom with his father gone; how much weight would now fall on
his shoulders.
Dom wanted to laugh. He’d been running
this town without his old man’s help for ages. The death of the man he had
stopped calling father a long time ago wouldn’t change a thing in his
day-to-day life; it just made his position more official. Dom was now the
eldest Alpha of the Wesa family, one of the great crime families in Luxor City,
the capital of New America.
Decades back, when the government’s
power over New America first started to crumble, the gangs of Luxor City went
to war, fighting for control over the expansive city’s lucrative ports. As Dom
walked through the streets, he passed the remnants of that conflict in the form
of bullet holes etched into brick walls that lined the sidewalks and
boulevards. Luxor hadn’t always been a haven of prosperity. These wounds were
stark reminders that they should not let war tear their city apart again.
They’d been preserved during reconstruction.
After years of brutality and gangland
warfare, the dust finally settled over the metropolitan battleground. Only three
factions were left in a city divided by chaos. They brokered a peace treaty, a
deal that divided Luxor into three Empires, each ruled firmly by the Alpha
heads of the surviving crime families: Wesa in the Center, Faraji in the North,
and Sun in the South.
Dom Wesa was the sole Alpha heir to the
Central Empire, a great strip of land stretching from the high-rises along the
city’s eastern ports all the way to the cliffs on the western coast. Their
portion of city was the smallest, but the Center also included the West Island,
the final stretch of green pasture and woodland in Luxor, a place where only
the wealthiest families could afford acreage.
Sila Wesa, the family’s Omega matriarch,
still maintained an estate there. She would probably return home once the
ladder-climbing mourners all left her in peace. As an Omega, she was expected
to stay home and mourn her Alpha’s death for at least a year. Dom hated
thinking of her returning to that vast hollow estate, but she wouldn’t be
alone. She had his younger brother, Atsadi, with her.
Maybe they could be happy there now, but
Dom couldn’t stand the place.
He made his way to his portside office,
the private sanctuary where he conducted the family business, far removed from
his father’s offices across from the luxury hotels and nightclubs downtown. It
was an old-fashioned Deco-style building, relatively small compared to Luxor’s
expansive high-rises, but taller than the nearby brownstone residences lining
the old dock’s edge.
Dom entered through the public hall and
took the stairs to his office instead of his private elevator. He couldn’t
stand still, not even for a minute, not until he got a drink in him.
His office took up most of the fifth
floor. A large window lined the street-facing wall, giving him a view of his
docks and businesses as well as the swaying blue horizon of the Pacific Ocean.
Ships pulled in and out, always coming
and going. The ports were the center of all business in Luxor. They had been
around since the city’s foundation and wrapped around the entire coastline,
enclosing Luxor in a circle of docks extending out into the water like a sea
urchin’s spikes. It was a well-known fact that he who controlled the ports,
controlled the trade, and he who controlled the trade, controlled the city.
Dom was fond of the old portside
architecture. He had always been keen on the brutalist, Deco styles of ancient
cities. He even decorated his office to match with polished wood and geometric
patterns of gold emblazoned on black surfaces.
Inside the familiar space he’d made his
own, he poured himself a glass of whisky from a decanter on his side table. He
took a good long swig before taking a seat in the plush leather chair behind
his mahogany desk.
Sighing heavily, he closed his eyes
until a quiet thud on his desk drew them open again.
A thin newssheet folded down the middle
sat in the center of his desk. Images flashed across its holographic surface.
Dom recognized himself, his brother, and his mother in more than one. Fucking
paparazzi.
The Luxor City Times headline read:
Death of Malik Wesa leaves Central Empire in hands of son, Dominik.
Dom stared at the paper with a deadpan
expression. Unblinking, he took another sip of his drink.
“Somehow I figured you’d be back in the
office today.”
Dom’s gaze shifted in the direction of
the voice.
His right-hand woman, Isa Saqui, stood
over his desk smirking down at him.
Isa had been Dom’s eyes and ears ever
since terminal illness took his old man out of power and put Dom in charge. She
was an Alpha, a member of the dominant sex, like everyone in his inner circle.
Isa stood tall, a muscular and imposing woman with angular bone structure
casting dramatic shadows over her olive skin. Her long hair was tied in an
intricate brunette braid that fell over one shoulder.
Dom turned away from her and picked up
the newssheet. Without giving it another glance, he tossed it back across the
desk toward her.
“The headline is hilarious,” he muttered
before taking another drink.
Isa chuckled as she snatched the thin
device back up.
“Isn’t it?” she said as she examined the
article. “I mean, it’s not even news. Your old man hadn’t been running shit for
years.”
Dom huffed.
It was true. Even before his father’s
illness, Dom had been in charge, but Malik’s stint in the hospital had truly
put him in power. In under a year, he’d earned the city’s respect and made vast
alterations throughout the Central Empire to counter his father’s ineffective
rule. Dom had always been in control; nothing would change now Malik Wesa was
gone.
“We shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,”
Dom said, smiling around the rim of his glass.
“Then let’s talk business.” Isa grinned
like a shark. “Because I haven’t got anything good to say about the old
bastard. How was his funeral, by the way?”
Dom simply shrugged in response. “Let’s
talk business.”
With another snort of a laugh, Isa
pulled out her phone and started going over a list of the day’s imports. The
ships had come in on time, and their guys on the docks were already warehousing
their “product,” storing it until it could be shipped throughout Luxor.
“So, we finally received those luxury
cars we’ve been waiting for, two weeks late, but that’s the Southern trade
route for you. Same shipment had a few crates of unprocessed opium—”
Dom cut in with gritted teeth, “Make
sure that goes straight to the labs. Apart from heat suppressants, I don’t want
to see that shit on my streets.”
“Already done.” Isa hardly even glanced
up from her phone. “The independent Omegas of Luxor are already thanking you.
You truly are a hero, Dom, providing them with suppressants and saving them
from their dreaded heats. Less mating means more working. Off your backs and on
your feet. That can be your campaign slogan.”
Dom eyed Isa, trying to gauge her level
of sarcasm before gesturing for her to carry on with a short huff of amusement.
“What else?”
“Firearms from the mainland,” Isa said
before listing off the models and manufacturers. “About half of this shipment
is being sold to the Sun family in the south. They’ve got an underground trade
problem on their hands.”
In the south of Luxor City, the Sun
family controlled the majority of the city’s ports, but only imported from the
Second Continent, across the western seas. This made them an excellent trading
partner for Dom whose eastern ports shipped to and from New America. Whenever
the Southern Empire wanted products from the New American mainland, Dom was
their man, and when he needed Second Continent shipments, he knew just who to
ask.
“All right.” Dom stood from his chair,
rubbing his hands together. “The agent from the Sun family will want to see the
guns before we truck them over. I’ll call—” Dom stopped abruptly when a terse
shout erupted from the streets below, loud enough to resonate through the glass
window and into his fifth-floor office.
“What the hell was that?” Isa asked with
a furrowed brow.
Dom walked over to glare out of the
window. They were right above the lobby, so a glance down offered a clear view
of the ground below.
Across the street, a young man stumbled
along the sidewalk. Even from the distance, Dom could tell there was something
off about him. He swayed with each step, unable to keep to a straight line and
using one hand to balance himself against the wall of the opposite building to
keep from falling over.
He disappeared into an alleyway, followed
closely by another man. This much larger man was the one shouting furiously as
he marched into the narrow passage after the boy.
Dom turned from the window and grabbed
his coat. Without a backward glance, he stormed out of his office.
“Dom? Hey! What the hell was that?” Isa
repeated as he passed. She tried calling after him again, but he was already
out of the door.
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Meet the Author
Sasha Hope is a lover of story, art and design based in Canada. As a writer and an artist, she enjoys having the opportunity to create new characters and build new worlds for readers to explore. Having studied linguistics and a myriad of languages from a young age, she is passionate about including characters of different backgrounds in her work. Whether the setting is fantasy or reality, she believes that a diverse cast with diverse languages and cultures is a wonderful thing.
Crafting stories that embrace MM romance and erotica is her modus operandi. When she is not creating new worlds she is travelling this one looking for inspiration or enjoying her career in the videogame industry.
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