My reply is instant: “Unfortunately for us both, I won’t be fucking off for a while. I’m here, so you and I might as well try to get along. It can’t be that hard.”
“Maybe I don’t want to get along with you,” he growls out. “I don’t know you.”
I shrug. “Doesn’t really matter, does it? Like I said, I’m here and I’m here to stay for a while. If you make a call and get me dragged out of here kicking and screaming, Asher will be upset. You might be an asshole, but surely you don’t want to piss off your brother like that.”
Mason skulks as he looks away. “You’re not my problem. You’re Asher’s. Stay or don’t, I don’t fucking care.”
That’s as close as we’ll ever get to a truce, so I don’t push him further. This cabin, this freaking mini-mansion, is large enough for the three of us. We don’t have to be up in each other’s business if we don’t want to be. This alpha clearly wishes to be left alone; if I know what’s good for me, I’ll do just that.
Now, the question is, do I know what’s good for me? Do I care enough to tiptoe around this alpha during my stay here? I don’t know that I have the answer, but if you take my history into consideration…
No. I probably won’t leave this alpha alone. I have the feeling Mason and I are going to see each other a lot more these next few weeks.
Chapter Seven – Rourke
Time is a funny thing. You think you have your routine nailed down, and then one thing happens and changes everything. I was in a routine for so long, throwing myself into work, rising through the ranks of Alabaster Security, eventually standing side by side with the best of them—the Alabaster sons themselves.
And that was fine. For years, it was just fine. I thought I had everything I needed.
Then mom got sick and started pushing me to find someone. A pack, but she’d settle for a mate for me. So she can see me happy and know that I’ll be fine once she’s gone.
I’m thirty years old. I’m no child. I can take care of myself just fine; I don’t need a mate or a pack to be fulfilled in this life, but if I try telling her that, she only gives me a look, and that look says more than her words ever could.
Dad died years ago, back around the time I presented as an alpha. It left my mom, a beta, to freak out about how she would raise an alpha by herself.
Not only an alpha, as it turns out, but an über. Yeah, let’s just say I gave my mom hell those teenage years. Not something I’m proud of.
Long story short, when she got sick, I really had to stop and think about what’s important to me. I’m no teenage alpha anymore, and mom’s really the only family I have left. The last thing I want is to make her unhappy. If settling down is what she desperately wishes to see before she goes, then… then that’s what I’ll do.
Of course, once I decided that, it still was like pulling teeth, getting me to go to that ceremony at the Omega Garden. I’m not the kind of man who enjoys dressing up in tight suits and shiny shoes.
The last week, I’ve tried everything to get my mind off what happened, but try as I might, I simply can’t. That’s where time comes in, and how it doesn’t always act the same.
When you try not to think about something, you typically fail spectacularly, and when you’re purposefully trying to keep busy, time crawls on slower than it ever has. More than seven days have passed now, but it feels as though it’s been half a year or more.
Seriously, I’m not exaggerating or trying to be funny. It’s been torture.
I go into work like a zombie, which, if you know me, isn’t me at all. I never phone it in at work; I always give it my all. I have my own teams now to oversee, to train. There’s a lot on my plate.
Home base for me is a warehouse on the edge of the city, where Alabaster Security sometimes conducts its less-than-legal encounters. We work with the local police department often, which is why said department typically looks away when we’re on a job and trying to gather information.
Sometimes the only way to get said information is to resort to some unsavory tactics. Torture. Kidnapping. Starvation. Once the fools give us the information we need, we hand them over to the police. As long as our clients are safe and their goals are secured, it’s all aces.
One of the rooms in the warehouse is a large open space where newer recruits get trained in the art of hand-to-hand combat, along with other close-quarter weaponry and defense. It’s as I walk into that room one morning that I’m greeted by a grinning alpha.
“Morning, sunshine,” he says with a wide grin, clearly in a good mood. Though, I’d argue, he’s been in a good mood ever since he and his pack found Mercedes. Warren Alabaster, the adoptive son of Daniel Alabaster, AKA our company’s founder. “You look particularly thrilled to be here today.”
On any other day, his comment would be true. Lately… it hasn’t been.
Warren is sitting in a chair off to the side, pulling on some black gloves as he waits for me to respond. He’s fitted in all black, straps everywhere, weapons all over his body. Like me, he’s got a thick head of black hair and piercing blue eyes, which means on more than one occasion, strangers have assumed we’re related.
We’re not brothers, though. Not even cousins. More like friends.The only one I’m closer to would probably be his older brother, Pax.
Standing before him, I shake my head. “That obvious?”
“Dude, it’s been obvious the last week. Your head’s been up in the clouds or something, Rourke. It ain’t like you. Did that omega at the ceremony really have such a strong effect on you?” As my friend, he knows better than everyone what goes on in my personal life, and as such, he already knows the play-by-play.
That omega. The Dryers girl. I didn’t even know her first name. It’s something I could easily have found out, but I’m trying to respect her wishes.
