Page 8 of Omega Hunted

He was frozen there at twenty-three. Healthy. Happy. Entirely convinced the four of us would grow old together, still arguing over coffee, still taking impossible missions, still coming home.

For one dangerous moment I could almost hear him laughing.

Then the office was quiet again.

I set the photograph beside the keyboard instead of putting it back in the drawer.

I hadn’t spoken to Ronan or Brec since Raff’s funeral. There hadn’t been a fight. Nobody had blamed me out loud. They hadn’t needed to. I carried enough blame for all of us. I was Team Three’s leader. I should have stopped Raff going back into the warehouse. I should have seen the second shooter. I should have brought every member of my team home.

The familiar ache tightened beneath my ribs. Three years hadn’t dulled any of the pain. Ronan had lost his little brother. I’d lost my mate. Brec had been left to pick through what remained of Team Three while the rest of us drifted apart. I came to the mountain, built a sanctuary that might never shelter anyone, and waited for death to catch up with me.

Some days I missed the terrible coffee after impossible missions. Brec’s awful jokes. Ronan’s dry sarcasm. The certainty that none of us ever fought alone.

Now all I had was the silence.

I glanced at the bank of monitors on the far wall where the feeds cycled automatically. Sixteen feeds, four to a screen: the perimeter cameras, the road cameras, and the two I had pointed at the gate from inside the tree line, where no one would ever look for them.

Satisfied my quiet corner of the world was secure, I pulled up the alarm schematics to occupy my mind when a soft warning cut through the silence and every instinct snapped to attention. Something or someone was on my property. I glanced at the top screen, expecting wildlife, only to see a flicker in the upper right quadrant, the camera watching the long approach to the property from the county road four miles out. I lifted my gaze.

A small car was moving far too fast for the conditions, and I leaned closer to the screen, concern sharpening fast. The bridge was closed, the road was treacherous, and no one with an ounce of sense should have been this far up the mountain. How the hell had they gotten across, and who was the idiot behind the wheel?

I watched, but I already knew the ending. The county road took a hard right where it crossed the runoff culvert, and on a clear day in July, you could take it fast, but today, with that much fresh snow on top of last night’s freeze, you had to take care.

The back end stepped out first, a lazy, slow drift. Then it came around hard, and the front went, and the whole car pivoted off the road in a clean white plume of disturbed snow and dropped into the ditch nose-first. Soundless on the camera, snow lifting and settling, and it canted thirty degrees then stopped.

Decker’s call had been thirty minutes ago, maybe a little more. The bridge would be shut by now, or nearly so. I clicked the second radio system I had in here.

“Decker.”

“Got a car that’s gone off the road just off my property.”

There was a pause, then a curse. “Shit. Okay. You handling it?”

No, I wasn’t. “You need to send someone.”

“Not happening for the foreseeable…” he began, and then he was talking to someone else before coming back. “It’s all yours. Call if you need medical support; we can try and snowmobile it in if you’re desperate. Decker out.”

Well fuck.

The driver’s door swung open, someone spilled into the snow, and whoever they were, they hit the snow hard and made no attempt to stand. They stayed on their hands and knees, head hanging, as if even holding themselves upright took more strength than they had left. After a long moment, they slipped again, dragging themselves forward one slow, desperate crawl at a time before collapsing into the drift and lying still enough that I found myself leaning closer to the monitor.

Help, my wolf demanded, and I knew I had to, but I was frozen. I’d built a life where nobody knocked on my door, nobody called my name, and nobody expected me to save them anymore. The familiar ache spread through the shattered remains of my bond, dull and constant until moments like this, when it sharpened without warning and stole the air from my lungs. My wolf stirred beneath my skin, not with excitement or purpose, but with the same hollow grief we’d carried every day since we’d lost Raff.

Helping people had cost me everything.

I wasn’t sure I had anything left to give.

The figure stirred again.

Not much.

Just enough to remind me they were still alive.

There wasn’t another house for miles, and if I stayed where I was, whoever had crawled out of that car would die before anyone else even knew they were missing.

“Fuck.”

I was already standing, thinking about heading to the snowmobile, getting winter clothing, my hands flattened on the desk as my attention snapped back to the monitors. Something about the way they were moving was wrong. It wasn’t the frantic scramble of someone trying to find their footing on ice. They were dragging themselves through the snow, keeping one arm tucked tightly to their body while his free hand clawed for purchase. Maybe they were badly hurt—shit, I had medical items here, but nothing for a serious injury, no surgical items yet.