Page 23 of Omega Hunted

He hunched again. “No.”

My wolf had been quiet since the moment Soren took the fork, and I stood at the counter with my coffee, and for the first time since the bond broke, it wasn’t pulling, and I had no idea how to handle that awful lack of feeling. I didn’t want to examine it, but my wolf going still and warm in the presence of a frightened omega was a thing I didn’t understand. Raff was dead. I had a purpose and a plan, and I was not going to complicate any of it by acknowledging that my broken, grief-rotted wolf had apparently decided he wasn’t done.

I put my mug in the sink.

He smells like hope, my wolf whispered.

“You’re wrong.” He’d been wrong before. Every morning, he’d expected Raff to answer, and every night, he’d searched the empty places inside us for a bond that was never coming back. Hope wasn’t walking around my kitchen wrapped in one of my sweatshirts. Hope was dead, and neither of us should have survived this long by pretending otherwise. My wolf had become an unreliable narrator since Raff died, forever trying to convince me there was still something worth living for.

Wrong.

Chapter Nine

SOREN

I’d only come downstairs because lying in that bed had become impossible—too warm, too still, too much space for my brain to run. I’d used the attached bathroom and stood at the sink for a long time with the cold tap running, washing my face and the back of my neck, scrubbing my arms until the water ran clear. I couldn’t face the enclosed space of a shower, the undressing, and the long blank minutes of staring at tile with too much time to think—so I’d done what I could at the sink, put another log on the fire, and came down.

I’d heard every word he said, but he hadn’t said he’d found out who I was, nor had he threatened me in any way. Then he’d handed me a knife. Not that it would do much good—he was huge, and he could snap me in half without breaking a sweat. But then he was asking what else I needed.

Everything. That was the answer. A crib, tiny clothes, blankets, bottles, medical care in case of emergency. Safety. Asha and I needed everything, and we had none of it, and it was all wrong.

I couldn’t trust my own instincts right now.

What was I doing?

Nothing. That was what I was doing. Helpless as a kit with my whole world fractured, standing in a stranger alpha’s kitchen, with no plan, and Yannick’s face still there every time I let my attention slip.

Yannick.

The grief welled up and came out of me before I could stop it—a sob, brief, involuntary. Where were his babies?

I pressed my hand to my belly.

Focus on Asha.

She was there—lower than she’d been a week ago, the shifted weight of her, the new pressure—and she turned when I pressed, slow and unhurried. Still there. I breathed out.

“Are you okay?” Cassian asked.

“I don’t know.” I was dizzy and exhausted and hungry, but none of those things were the real problem. I’d eaten what I could but now it was stuck and I needed to stand.

He moved to help me, and Goddess help me I brandished the knife at him and he stopped.

I’d understood how big he was when he carried me and then cradled me in bed, but the reality was different. His eyes, when they came up briefly and found mine, were amber. His wolf was still close to the surface; that much I knew.

He hadn’t watched me eat. His feet were bare on the stone floor, no shoes—an alpha at ease and not positioned to strike.

My cat tried to tell me something.

Look, he said.

The wolf scent wafted through the kitchen when Cassian stood to refill his coffee—a shift in the air, the warmth of him—and my cat’s head came up and turned toward it, but not with alarm. Nope, it was way more complicated than that: an instinct that had woken him in the first place, pulling at him, interested.

Look, my cat demanded, then huffed, and curled back up.

My back hurt, and the trembling that’d been in my hands since I woke had settled deeper, into a vibration at the core of me. I couldn’t hold the knife much longer, and I rested an elbow on the table, because I needed a few seconds to just get through it. I dropped the knife, and it clattered to the table, and I tried to grab it, and nearly cut myself, until I managed to grip it again.

I heard the clunk of the refrigerator and the opening of a cupboard.