In a couple of months, it would be the twentieth anniversary of the day my twelve-year-old sister Maria had been kidnapped from her after-school soccer practice. It wasn’t the kind of anniversary anyone wanted to celebrate.
My twin and I hadn’t fit the stereotype of being close; not at that age, anyway. If anything, we’d kind of hated each other. Sibling rivalry at its finest.
“Stop calling them twins,”my alpha father would always tell my beta mother.“They’re just littermates.”
And every single time, she’d reply,“They came out of my uterus thirty minutes apart, George, and I’m not built to squeeze out five babies at a time like an omega. They’ll always be the twins to me.”
In the end, ‘always’ had ended up being twelve years, nine months, and two days. First, my sister was taken, disappearing into the black hole that was the shadowy world of omega child trafficking. My mother only made it six months after that before she took her own life.
I’d been too young to fully understand that Mom’s tendency toward sadness and apathy for most of my childhood had been undiagnosed clinical depression. I also hadn’t understood until much later that my sister didn’t simply vanish from existence one day. She’d been dragged into the depths of hell, and she’d suffered there for who-knew-how-long.
By contrast, my mother possessed an adult’s understanding of what had happened, paired with a parent’s irreconcilable guilt over what she saw as her own failure to protect her daughter from the world’s monsters. She had eventually decided that overdosing on pills was preferable to suffering that unrelenting pain day after day.
My father limped along for another thirteen years before dying of cancer, but he’d been a shell of a human being for most of that. I took over much of the running of his business at a ridiculously young age—behind the scenes, at least.
Very little of the wealth I enjoyed today was because of anything I’d built myself. I was just competent enough at doing the work my father had started that I didn’t lose his fortune, once it fell into my lap at the ripe old age of twenty-six.
Trying to help trafficked omegas behind the scenes was my attempt to fill the hole in my past where my family should have been. And now, here I was, watching the new family I’d built nearly lose their lives because of it.
I leaned back against the shower wall, feeling a bruise on my shoulder twinge as I gently thumped my head against the cheap plastic enclosure.
“What the fuck are you evendoing, Knockley?” I growled at myself.
There was no time for this kind of self-indulgence, though. God alone knew why, but there were people outside who’d placed their futures in my hands, and it was up to me to make sure they didn’t end up in the same kind of mess as my birth family.
Somehow, leading a small bachelor group of alphas had felt completely different than being the head of a mated pack with a scent-matched omega and a vulnerable beta tossed into the mix. It also said a lot about the current situation that Jez’s attempt on my life had become a mere blip on my radar at this point.
I’d been surprised to find her in the shower with Heath, but not massively shocked by it. Heath had always been intensely loyal to me... probably more loyal than he should be. However, from what I was able to gather, Jez had basically saved our lives back at the hotel. If Heath decided that the scales were balanced now, maybe he had a point.
I reserved the right to hold a grudge against the caramel-coffee scented omega who’d nearly put me in a matching grave next to my mother and father’s. But the equation started to look quite a bit different after she’d saved Gage and Tony, especially at the risk of her own life.
Giving my face a final scrub, I turned off the shower, dried myself with aching arms, and gingerly limped over to the vanity. The mirror was fogged over, and that was probably just as well. Bud was on his way to bring replacement clothing to the hospital, but for now I followed Heath’s lead and wrapped a cotton hospital gown over my underwear.
At least I hadn’t pissed or shit myself while I’d been trying to keep a massive concrete slab from crushing the others. That was something, anyway.
When I opened the door, it was to find Heath wrapped around Tony and Jez on the room’s large bed. Bags of clothes sat abandoned on the floor nearby. I’d been so out of it that managed to completely miss the sound of people coming and going.
Heath turned to look over his shoulder as I closed the bathroom door behind me. He looked as tired and drawn as I felt.
“How is he?” I asked quietly, tilting my chin toward Tony. Both he and Jez appeared to be fast asleep, and I couldn’t help an irrational twinge of jealousy at Heath’s intimate position with them.
“Concussion, just like you said,” Heath reported, his voice equally low. “They told me it’s okay to let him sleep. Bud brought us some stuff. He says to tell you he hasn’t been able to find out where they took Paolo. No new word on Gage yet.”
I nodded to show I’d heard him, and debated if my battered back could cope with resting in the chair again.
“You’ve gotta sleep too, Knox,” Heath went on. “You’re dead on your feet.”
There were a hundred things that needed doing. Unfortunately, I was self-aware enough to know that if I tried to do any of them right now, I’d either pass out or screw something up without realizing it. I eyed the two medical beds, struck by a kind of gut-level revulsion at the idea of crawling into one after having spent the better part of a week in an identical bed, elsewhere in this very same hospital.
Heath followed my gaze. “Just lie down here. It’s not like we’re short on room, and I’m ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percent sure she’s not interested in killing us anymore.”
I sighed. I was ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percent sure he was right, but I still hesitated. This was one of the handful of pack-friendly rooms in the hospital’s patient wing, designed specifically for things like supervised, medically risky heats and pack births. The bed had an Alaskan King-sized mattress, and two small people with an average-sized alpha wrapped around them didn’t even take up half of it.
It was the scent that finally got me. They’d showered, but already, a hint of sweet coffee laced with aged whiskey had begun to permeate the room. That, along with the sight of an omega with her back exposed when the pack was in danger, tipped the scales. Heath had his arm stretched around both Tony and Jez, but that unguarded back ate at me.
Goddamn it, I thought, and stiffly eased myself into the space between Jez and the edge of the bed.
My bruises and strains throbbed with a deep ache in time with my heartbeat, but I didn’t want to shift around for a more comfortable position and wake the pair of sleepers. I’d give myself half an hour to get a second wind. After that, I needed to badger the nurses for an update on Gage, and check in with Bud to see if he’d been able to track down Paolo’s location yet.
