While his smile was sallow, it was so damn sweet as it spread across his features. He was still handsome. Still my Leo. Sometimes it was hard not to see the way his body had been ravaged and feel entirely responsible.
It had been incredibly reckless and stupid to think the three of us could waltz into some secret lab and come out unscathed. We’d only managed to do that with the party at Chadwicke’s estate because I had a special skill, there were lots of other people to blend in with, and a whole bunch of other mitigating circumstances lined up at once. Leo had quite literally paid for my hubris, and I wasn’t going to let that happen again.
It embarrassed me that it took until Ricky and I had the honest-to-God agreement to come up with a plan for me to come up with the oh-so-brilliant idea of “let’s find help”. Yeah, a real Einstein moment there.
Both Ricky and I had gotten used to being on our own, although in very different ways, and we’d forgotten that we didn’t have to do everything within our own little bubble. That night I had reached out to America while Ricky went on runs to see if he could find any other allies. He’d ended up running into one of the escapees that Leo had somehow managed to free when he was captured. According to them, after we’d escaped, almost the entire lockdown staff had been focused on trying to contain Leo. And of course, the alpha being who he was, he’d used every opportunity to damage or break cages. Apparently, nearly a dozen different experiments managed to get out of their holding area, but only the one Ricky found, and another, had managed to go the full distance.
They were starving and still very weak when Ricky brought them to me, but I did my best to fill their bellies and treat themhowever I could. A difficult thing to do considering I didn’t know everything that had happened to them, but I figured I could help with the headaches, the nausea, the pain, and the bone-crushing fatigue.
“Yeah, that’s the one,” Leo said, still smiling, although his eyelids were beginning to flutter. He’d pretty much been asleep since we brought him back, but that was fine with me. Sleep meant he was healing, and it gave me time to adjust to him being back.
For so long I’d been terrified that he’d never come home. I’d spent so many nights lying in bed, replaying everything that had gone wrong, worrying that would be the last time I’d ever see him. Thankfully, I’d been given a second chance.
I wasn’t going to take it for granted.
“I’ll get that ready for you right now. And perhaps some toast?” Although I would have loved to fill him up with some roasted rabbit or even fresh greens from the garden, I was pretty sure those would be a little harsh on his stomach. After all, he’d only been back for a little less than a day. He still needed some time on the B.R.A.T diet before I moved him onto richer solids, but that would happen soon enough. He was a shifter, after all, and I had no doubt the more calories we got into him, the faster he would heal.
“Sure, I can take a slice.”
“Sounds like a plan.” I hurried downstairs, stepping over the two shifters who had made makeshift beds for themselves on my living room floor. I felt bad that I didn’t have more room to accommodate them, but they seemed more than happy with the arrangement. It was likely a marked improvement from their cells at the facility or the forest floor.
If my presence bothered them, they didn’t so much as stir. Like Leo, they needed a lot of rest so their bodies could heal properly. When I entered the kitchen, I wasn’t surprised to seeRicky washing dishes from the night before. Normally, it was no problem for me to keep up with my own stuff, except when my depression got really bad, but with all the guests I currently had, I really appreciated his help.
“I’m going to make some tea and toast for Leo. Do you want some?”
“Nah,” he said, wearing the same grin he’d had on ever since we’d gotten home safely. It hadn’t been a straight shot from the lab. We’d driven quite far on the highway before getting off at a random exit, hopping onto another highway, then going through back roads until we reached the interstate. I’d held onto Leo the entire time, even when my eyes fluttered closed somewhere around two in the morning. We’d arrived at America’s soon after that. The rest of the rescue vehicles had beaten us there. As far as I could tell, we’d all managed to get away without being followed. Pretty impressive, if I had to say so myself.
I wasn’t a shifter, but even I could tell that shifters had pack rivalries and inner tensions, so they didn’t often work with each other, and that sort of assumed separation was the best thing we could take advantage of. Eventually the brothers would catch on that we were all uniting, but the longer we could stop that from happening, the more likely it was that our plans would work. Because as much as I would have loved for all the drama to end, we still had a whole lot of pack numbers to recover.
Not to mention a whole lot of brothers to deal with.
That thought was daunting, so I pushed it out of my head, and just in time, too, because I realized Ricky was still talking to me. Whoops.
“—hunting again. I’ll have to go a bit farther than usual, but I’m pretty sure there’s an issue with deer overpopulation a couple of hours away from here. I want to help curb those numbers before it gets bad. I imagine with all of us shifters goingmissing, there’ll be more and more issues like that cropping up in the tri-state area.”
Oh. I hadn’t even thought of that. Naturally, shifters, with their high needs for protein, would eat a lot of meat. It would likely make all of them go bankrupt if they had to get it from the store, and I got the impression that their wolf side needed the enrichment of the hunt as well. So, with all that considered, it made sense that they put a dent in the local wildlife population. Man, I very much doubted the brothers cared that they were disrupting the ecosystem, which just showed how their insidious greed disrupted everything right down to the way nature was meant to work.
“Be safe, okay? Leo would kick my ass if anything happened to you.”
Ricky let out a good-natured laugh and gently elbowed at my side. “Please, we know Leo would never lay a hand on you. In fact, I’m pretty sure he’d cut his own arm off before doing something like that.” Then he wiggled his eyebrows. “Except for, you know, in a fun way.”
“All right, that’s enough from you. Off you go,” I said hurriedly, feeling my face heat. What he was saying was true, and I did like the intense bite of Leo’s fingers when he held my hips while fucking me, but that didn’t mean I wanted to talk with Ricky about it.
“But I’m not done with the dishes.”
“I’ll do the rest. Go on. Those deer won’t hunt themselves.”
Ricky was still laughing as I ushered him out. I couldn’t stop the grin that formed on my face. The moment might have started on an awkward note, but it had certainly ended on a fun one. I liked that I could mess around with Ricky. We still had a ways to go in getting to know each other, but I could understand why Leo made him his righthand man. He had a good head on his shoulders.
Once he was gone, I put some water on to boil and finished the rest of the dishes. Not having Ricky here for dinner eased some of the issues of not having enough food, because I wasn’t sure how much pasta my two additional guests could tolerate. While they weren’t on the same B.R.A.T diet that Leo was, it wasn’t like they’d been eating well in the wild, so I still tried to be considerate to their healing digestive systems. That was becoming increasingly difficult to do with the last few dollars I had. I really needed to get to work, but how was I supposed to go back to stocking shelves full time when I was trying to save an entire pack?
That was something I would worry about later. Right now, I needed to take care of Leo.
So, that was what I did. Once the tea and toast were ready, I took them up to him and made sure he drank and ate before falling asleep again. I tried to spend most of the day at his side, which was definitely easier to do since my cats were also lingering on the bed. Except for Goober, who seemed to have decided that Leo’s chest was his territory. The Maine Coon lived on it pretty much every time Leo fell asleep, purring away like there was a motor in his chest.
It was a sure sign that my cats accepted him, and it made my heart swell. If they could accept a wolf shifter as part of their colony, surely there was nothing too weird about a wolf shifter pack accepting a human as one of their pack members?
Was I getting too far ahead of myself? Leo and I had made promises before everything had gone to shit, but what if something had changed? What if me letting him get captured had changed the way he felt about me? What if he had PTSD and that changed the way he felt about me? A million and one questions all flew around my head, but as much as I wanted them answered, I wouldn’t be selfish and trouble Leo with them. No, he needed to concentrate on getting better. Once he wassolid on his own two feet, then we could worry about my massive insecurities and fears.
