No more snickering. The entire floor of mostly unmated male wolves went deathly silent. As if they wished to hear the answer to those questions themselves.
Did any of them have a clue? Did anyone understand how much this weighed on me? The state of my pack was a constant worry, keeping me awake at night. Literally. I couldn't remember the last time I had a full six hours of sleep since I made the call on that Second Reaping. None of them, not even Lambert, staring me down for his answer, knew what it meant to lead a dying pack.
And they never would. I wasn't as emotionally distant as Tess accused me of being yesterday, but I wasn't about to let my subjects see how truly worried I was about our future.
I kept my expression cool as I told my assistant, "You're upset. Take the rest of the day off and gather yourself."
Lambert's face twisted into a stubborn scowl. "But I'm not done —"
I placed a firm hand on his shoulder before he could finish his protest. "Take the rest of the day off, or you'll find yourself without a job."
Thatthreat finally got through to him.
"Sorry." Lambert lowered his head. Glanced toward all the openly staring office workers. "Yeah, yeah. I’ll take the day. Tell Rhonda one of us will have to move out.”
He left then. Exactly as I wanted. But not as I wanted.
Only bonded mates could read each other's thoughts, but I swear I could hear the resentment brewing in the heads of the other office males who hadn't been sent home for speaking their minds.
Less than five minutes into the official work day, and it'd already turned to shite. Plus, my office was a right tip. I could smell that Scrubber Steve, as we called our dedicated office cleaner, had been in here recently. But my waste bin was still full, and my desk was covered in the crumbs from the biscuit I'd eaten before meeting up with Tess Friday night for what was supposed to be a concert date before dinner and a rideshare back to her flat in Ballsbridge.
Also, the office had an overpowering, outdoorsy smell on top of Scrubber Steve's. Like woods and open fires. Was Scrubber Steve using a new cleaning product in here, I wondered as I closed the door behind me.
If so, I'd have to assign someone other than Lambert the task of talking to him about going back to the old stuff, or at least something that didn't smell so…
My thoughts trailed off onstrongwhen I saw Scrubber Steve's crumpled form behind the door I just closed… and the large, male wolf with shaggy red hair and a thick beard to match who stood above him.
I realized in an instant that this fellow, not some overly scented cleaning product, was the source of the aggressive outdoorsy scent. Dressed in a full-on argyle kilt and a black tee thatstretched across his broad chest, he looked like the Scottish version of the fellow on the front of my favoriteViking Shiftersvideo game.
I might have even commented on the uncanny resemblance.
If not for the massive knife tucked into his large fist.
I glanced back down at Scrubber Steve.Had he…?
"Dunnae worry, he's passed out, is all," the Scottish intruder assured me. "But you…"
He pointed the knife at me. "I fully plan to slit your throat if you dunnae give me the answers I need."
Naomi
“Aw, feck, this shite again!”
Fiona, the baker's daughter I'd put in charge of kitchen duty, cursed in her particularly Scottish way when a new tidal wave of scent heat swept through the habitat, overpowering even the smell of the Irish sausages she'd just finished frying up on the electric range it had taken us eons to learn how to use.
"The last one was less than an hour ago!" Orpah wailed as she ladled porridge from the large pot we'd made on the range's other front circle into my bowl. "I swear I truly can't take another day of this."
Bearing all crosses without complaint was one of the top tenets of self-conduct in the St. Ailbe Ordnung, but I couldn’t blame Orpah for despairing.
I had to tamp down the urge to whine myself, considering we'd all just spent the last day and a half being woken up in increasingly shorter intervals by the scent equivalent of a tornado siren.
Somehow managing to contain a weary sigh, I set aside the white porcelain bowl of porridge I'd been so looking forward to eating before Amanda's latest heat spell hit our noses. “I’ll go tend to her.”
"But what about…?" Orpah started to ask.
"And I'll send someone else to help you finish filling up the bowls," I called over my shoulder as I walked through the kitchen’s sliding metal doors.
The automatic doors inside the half-dome habitat were another surprising detail in a space full of them. The wolves who had kidnapped us wore hand-stitched clothes that reeked of animals, and they hadn’t seemed that advanced in the technology department. Yet, this strange rock wall residence appeared to be carved into the side of something — a mountain, maybe.
