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He’d stacked three flat totes and went to set them down beside a pair of backpacks when one of them brushed his arm, and he winced and paused to rub the spot through his sleeve.

“You should put something on that, especially if it blistered,” Wren’s father suggested, a nugget paused halfway to his lips.

Huffing, Rusty shook his hand out and headed back to the trunk only to have Wren’s father appear at his side.

“Let me take a look. I’ve got plenty of experience dealing with injuries, especially burns.”

“Meh, it’ll be fine in a minute,” Rusty grumbled and grabbed the next stack of totes. “That engine is nowhere near hot enough to singe me. I probably just scraped against something sharp, which is why it still stings like metal shavings are in there.”

“That, or some of those little bitty bugs have managed to survive in here despite how cold it is outside. I didn’t notice the chill until we got up into the mountains and I finally had to start dialing the heat up.”

“Oh man, I hate those things,” Rusty grumbled, “they’d better not be trying to survive the winter in here. Shouldn’t they have died off already? For the love of Rice Krispies, we’ve got snow on the forecast, not that anyone can make up their minds if it will be tomorrow, the next day, or sometime next week.”

“Yeah, I, um, heard some forecasts calling for it too and started to get really fudging nervous the further north we drove,” Wren’s father replied, rubbing his arm through the thick sleeve of his leather jacket before finally shoving his fingers beneath the sleeve to try and scratch, “and I hope it buries us in icy fluff and kills these things.”

How the hell was it still bug season?

The other wolf shucked his jacket off, while Rusty set the totes down besides the last batch, before fetching the final two backpacks and a box from the trunk, along with an overstuffed duffle bag that felt like it had half a dresser crammed into it. Rusty was about to make a crack about him carrying a rocket launcher in there, with how heavy it was, when his phone started screaming Blessed Hellride, and he stepped away to answer it, since that was Roark’s ringtone and he never called, ever. He was strictly a text sort of wolf.

“Where are you and who are you with?” Roark half-asked and half-snarled the question, the slightly frantic note in his voice catching Rusty completely off guard.

“I’m at work,” Rusty explained. “Just finished emptying the trunk of a car for a wolf who brought in a rolling sieve. You should see this thing oozing fluids from damn near every hose.”

“Is he the only person you’ve been around this morning that you didn’t know before you got to work?”

“Uh…yeah… Roark, what the fudge is going on?”

“Check your left wrist, and you tell me.”

Check…fuck, that’s the one that was still steadily stinging like a son of a bitch. He knew mates could tell when one another was hurt, but he’d thought that only counted with major injuries, not scrapes and bug bites. Still, he did as his mate said. Instead of a gash or welt, Rusty saw brightly interwoven shades of brown, grey, and black running across his wrist, intermingled with the marks that had begun to form when he and Roark had chosen to adopt their pups together.

“The fu---fudge,” he stammered, since the kid was eyeing him as he paced further away from where the dad stood staring at his arm now too, just as Brooks came strolling through the door.

“If you’re all set here, we can get you guys loaded up,” Brooks said, his words carrying a sense of wrongness. Rusty couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but then, there was a mark as bright and brilliant as any of his tattoos in a spot where he’d never gotten ink before, and a man standing several feet away that might be responsible for that. Holy shit, bondmarks only came in that bright when the compatibility levels were off the charts.

And when the fates wanted to be certain that a mate didn’t get away.

Shit.

No wonder the thought of Brooks packing up all the things Rusty had just unloaded felt so completely wrong to him.

“You just found our mate,” Roark declared. “Now don’t let him go. The pups are asleep. I just left Baz in the office to grab us both some coffee. I’ll let him know what’s going on.”

“You, um, might want to bring the SUV just in case,” Rusty explained. “His car isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and he’s got a pup with him.”

“A…alright, I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“Which means you’ll be driving like a maniac,” Rusty said. “Don’t. We’ll still be here when you show up, or at least, I’ll do my best to convince him to wait. Brooks just showed up. I didn’t realize that’s who he’d called for a ride, but um, I have to go.”

“Brooks, hang on a second,” Rusty called when Wren’s father didn’t stop him from picking up his stuff and beginning to carry it outside.

As soon as Rusty closed the distance between them, he understood why. Wren’s father was still staring at his arm, all the color having drained out of his face. Brooks set the boxes down, straightened to his full height, and lowered his shades, sweeping his gaze over all of them as a shadow fell over Rusty from behind.

“Or we can wait,” Brooks said, shoving his shades back up.

Rusty shoved his fingers through his hair for the tenth time since answering the phone, well aware of it being a disaster now, most of it having pulled free of the messy bun he’d tied it back in. He reached for the bottle of water he’d set on his workstation earlier that morning and chugged it, nearly choking when he momentarily inhaled instead of swallowing.

“I umm… I think I might need a few days off,” Rusty muttered to Cage when he realized the shadow was his boss coming to check on him.