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I slipped out quietly, picking a tiny piece of bacon off my shoulder and popping it into my mouth. “Sorry about the mess.”
“You’ve made a bigger mess for yourself than some food, girlie,” he replied, running a hand over his buzz-cut salt-and-pepper hair. “You know you can’t stay here.”
“The freezer? You’re right. I’d freeze to death.” I grinned. Del was the only shifter I could sass with impunity. I think he kind of liked it.
He leveled a dark look at me. “I mean the compound. You’ve got to get out.”
Did he mean I needed to leave the pack? “I can’t. It’s three days until I can get away for real. Officially.”
“Grant will find a way to kill ya before then. He’s not right in the head.”
We both spoke so softly, our voices were less than whispers. We knew better than to draw attention to this conversation. With a nod, Del directed me to the leftovers he’d salvaged from the breakfast plates. Not much, but it was all the food he and I would get until dinner, so we ate fast, stuffing burnt ends of toast and scraps of eggs in our mouths.
I swallowed hard. “Best breakfast in the whole state of Alabama,” I whispered, forcing a smile. “Tastes better than ever.”
He huffed, and replied with his mouth full, “You’d eat a rat sandwich, Flor.”
“I have eaten one, Del,” I teased back. It was true, and I wasn’t ashamed. I’d caught that rat myself, cooked it, and seasoned it with discarded salt packets, back when I was eight. It hadn’t been the worst meal of my life by far.
“Shut up and eat.” Shaking his head, Del sat on a stack of red-printed rice bags. He stuck his legs out in front of him, and we both stared at the prosthetic one, pondering the shit pile the morning had become.
“Want me to rub it?” I usually gave him a massage on the muscles near the end of his stump, above the knee. He said I had magic hands. The truth was, contact with other pack members helped with pain, whether it was physical or emotional. Since Del had lost his leg—I’d heard it was some sort of accident that had happened when I was still a baby, but had never been stupid enough to ask him outright about it—he’d lost his rank. That meant he’d lost the right to stay with the other Enforcers. He’d never been mated, as far as I knew, so he didn’t even have family to help out. If he’d had other relatives, they’d all bailed when he was hurt.
Most wounds, even severe ones, healed within days on mature wolves. Shifters who hadn’t shifted, or really low-ranked ones who were either born weak or starved that way, healed a lot slower. It could take weeks for a deep cut to close up on one who hadn’t ever shifted before; I’d had wounds that had taken a year for the scars to disappear. So shifters with the kind of injuries that would never heal, like missing eyes or limbs, were treated as if they had no value at all.
If you asked me, even without one leg, Del was one of the strongest and best wolves we had.
Before his injury, he might have stood a chance of taking our Alpha’s spot in an official challenge. Now he was only slightly more valuable to the pack than I was. He was everything to me, though. Del was the only shifter who hugged me, who talked to me like I wasn’t trash. He was definitely the only one who knew my secret plan for the Conclave.
He was all the family I had.
“Come on. Rub time.”
“All right, girlie,” he sighed, rising to lock the doors. When he sat back down, I pulled off his prosthetic and started rubbing. “Probably the last time I’ll get to feel those magic hands of yours.” He grunted slightly as I worked on a bad knot of muscle at the bottom of his torn quadricep.
“You’re right. Grant’s gonna kill me.” I let out a groan. “Actually kill me. Three days until the Games start, and I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.”
Del nodded. “Gonna have to move to Plan B,” he muttered, shocking me.
“There’s a Plan B?” I perked up. If Del had a plan, all wasn’t lost.
“There is,” he said slowly. “But you’re not gonna like it.”
“I’ll like it better than being force mated to Trevor, or killed by Grant, I bet,” I snapped back.
Del shushed me and strapped his prosthetic back on. He moved efficiently around the kitchen, grabbing handfuls of things and stuffing them into an old camping backpack. I narrowed my eyes as I took note of the odd assortment. A few of the airlocked packets of dried meat that the Enforcers usually took on training runs, his favorite butcher knife, an old canteen that looked like it had been through a war—the Civil War, maybe—and lots of other things.
He thrust a baggie into my hands. “Get up. Fill this while I talk.”
I stood and pulled back the drawstring on the open oatmeal bag by my side. “Who are we feeding today?” The pack bought rice and other staples by the hundreds of pounds, though only ranked shifters had access to the dining hall. These days, our unranked shifter families were literally starving, so Del and I had started sneaking rice and grains out, delivering it anonymously to their back doors with whatever meat I could hunt with a slingshot—squirrels and rabbits, mostly.
“It’s for you,” Del answered. “You can get to my house?”
I nodded. The hole we’d made in the fence between the compound and the pack’s hunting grounds wasn’t that far from his house. Well, his shack.
“Take this.” He lifted up the backpack he’d filled with the food and added a few other things to it. “Get to the hunting grounds. Go by my place first; pick up anything you need. We can’t get you back to the dorm for your own stuff.”
“I don’t have anything there except a toothbrush anyways.”
