Omega's Harem (Feral Wolves of the Arctic Book 3)

by J. L. Wilder

  She nodded. “My parents bought them for my older siblings’ birthdays. One every year. And my littermates and I inherited them as we grew up.”

  “So it wasn’t like Victor told us,” Pax said. “You really weren’t just running around wild.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not trying to be rude or anything, but you probably shouldn’t believe what Victor said about me and my pack. He heard it all from his father, right? And his father was the sworn enemy of our pack.”

  Pax nodded. “Does that ever bother you?” he asked. “Being mated to the son of your family’s old rival, I mean.”

  She marked her place in the book and set it down. It was clear that she wasn’t going to get any reading done. “Sometimes it does,” she said. “I know my family wouldn’t like it. At best, they would feel uneasy about Victor and about what he wanted with me. At worst, they’d consider me a traitor for getting involved with him at all.”

  “That must be hard,” he said.

  “It is,” she agreed. “But what’s really frustrating is that the way I feel about it is more or less the same thing Victor’s going through. And I’m dealing with it, and he isn’t.”

  “He still hasn’t spoken to you?” Pax asked.

  “He acts like I don’t exist,” Lily said. “Honestly, I’m beginning to wonder why he bothered to bring me back.”

  “It was the best thing he could think to do in the moment,” Pax said.

  She eyed him speculatively. “He told you that?”

  “Yes,” Pax said. “I’m probably not telling you anything you don’t already know when I say that he’s been having second thoughts about it.”

  It didn’t really come as a surprise. What did surprise her was how much it hurt to hear that. “I guess he’s beginning to wonder whether he’ll ever be able to stomach my presence,” she said.

  “I know that’s not what you want to hear,” Pax said. “But believe me when I tell you he’s torn about it. He admitted to me yesterday that he didn’t only bring you back because he was worried about allowing you to stay with your family. He also wanted to keep you with him.”

  “I don’t know how he’s going to reconcile that with the fact that he doesn’t even want to talk to me,” she said.

  “Neither does he,” Pax said. “But I think he understood, even if it was only subconscious at the time, that it would be easier for him to reconcile that than leaving you behind.”

  She sighed and leaned back in her chair. “I just want all of us to be happy,” she said. “I just want a simple, harmonious family dynamic, like what my parents have. Is that so much to ask for?”

  Pax cocked his head at her. “Really?”

  “Okay,” she allowed. “I know it is.”

  “I realize it’s what you grew up with,” he said. “But Donovan and Victor and I are changing our whole lives. We’re rewriting what we thought we knew about the world.”

  “You know it means a lot to me that you’re doing that for me, right?” she asked anxiously.

  “Of course,” he assured her. “I’m not saying any of this to make you feel guilty. Besides, we aren’t just doing it for you. We want to be with you. You know that.”

  “It’s so strange to have such great relationships with you and Donovan, and at the same time to be worried about what’s going on with Victor,” she said. “I’ve never known my mother to struggle with her relationships being in such different places at the same time.”

  “I imagine they had worked out most of their drama by the time you were born,” Pax said.

  Lily nodded. She had never thought, really, about what her parents’ lives had been like before she and her siblings were born. She knew her mother had become pregnant quickly—how many times had she reinforced to Lily that omegas always did?—but she wondered now whether there might have been some difficulty with integrating three alphas into the cohesive pack she had always known.

  “Promise me we’ll find a way to make it work,” she said to Pax. “Promise me that everything is going to be okay.”

  “Of course it will,” Pax assured her. “I’m not going to give up on Victor. He’s an old friend of mine. And I’m certainly not going to give up on you.” He rested a hand on her shoulder. “There are more bonds tying this group together than you realize, Lily. We’re not going to fall apart.”

  “No matter what?”

  “No matter what,” he said.

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, when the breakfast dishes had been cleaned up and the Vancouver and Moose Jaw betas had dispersed, Lily caught up with Victor. “I need to talk to you about something,” she said.

  He raised an eyebrow. She was unsurprised by that response. He hadn’t spoken to her since the day of the fight, and she had responded in kind, preferring to let him take his time and warm up to her.

  But last night, as she had lain awake in her bed, pondering the details of her conversation with Pax, she had reached an inevitable conclusion. And now she needed to speak to her alphas.

  All three of them.

  Together.

  For a moment, she thought Victor might refuse to talk to her even now. But then he spoke. “What’s this about?”

  “About the future,” she said. “About what we’re going to do, all of us, now that you’re my alphas and I’m your omega.”

  His jaw tightened. He was still struggling against that idea, she could tell.

  “All right,” he said. “I suppose you want the others too?”

  “I do,” she said.

  “Go to your bedroom,” he said. It was a command, which she thought was unnecessary—this conversation had been her idea, after all, and he could hardly doubt that she meant to cooperate. But maybe he needed a way to vent his frustration, or a way to feel as if he was in control. She wouldn’t complain. He was ordering her to do something she would have done anyway.

  She wondered if he was aware of how often during their time together he had done that.

  “I’ll get Donovan and Pax,” he said. “We’ll meet you up there, and we’ll all hash this out.”

  “That’s perfect,” she said. “Thank you, Victor.”

  He grunted and walked off

  Lily turned and went to her room. She sat on the bed to wait.

  They didn’t keep her waiting long. Donovan came in first, looking confused. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Victor said I should come in here. You two haven’t been fighting, have you?”

  “Nothing like that,” Lily assured him. “I wanted to talk to my alphas, that’s all.”

  Pax came in with Victor on his heels. Unlike Donovan, he didn’t look worried, and he didn’t ask Lily what was going on. She wondered if he had come to the same conclusion she had reached after their conversation yesterday, or if he had anticipated what she was about to say.

  “Thanks for agreeing to talk to me,” she said, mostly addressing Victor. There had never been any real question regarding whether the other two would agree to a conversation with her.

  “What’s up?” Donovan asked.

  “I’ve been thinking about our future,” she said. “About what life is going to look like for the three of us.”

  Victor folded his arms across his chest and said nothing.

  “Victor,” she said. “You have to see that it’s for all our benefit if we try to get to the next stage in our relationship. It’s not helping either of us—any of us—for you and me to walk around like strangers.”

  “Say what it is you want,” Victor said. “I have things to do.”

  “Don’t be a dick,” Pax said.

  “You’re still a guest here, Pax,” Victor said. “Show some respect.”

  Pax raised his eyebrows. “I’m a guest?” he asked. “All right. Do you want me to leave? I can go with the Moose Jaw Pack. And we can take Lily with us.”

  Lily felt herself shudder. “You wouldn’t really do that,” she said. “You wouldn’t take me away from Victor, would you?”

  Pax sighed. “You know I wouldn
’t,” he said. “Much as I might like to right now, I could never do that to you.”

  “This is exactly what I’m talking about,” Lily said. “The four of us—the three of you—we’re all stuck together. None of us can leave each other. So we can keep on walking around like a bunch of strangers, or we can try to figure out a way to turn this mess into a real family.”

  Pax shrugged. “You know I don’t have a problem with that,” he said. “I’ve never belonged to a pack, but I’ll go wherever you need me to be.”

  She nodded. It was what she had expected from Pax, but it was still good to hear it. “Donovan?”

  “I need to look out for my pack,” he said. “I can’t abandon the Moose Jaw Wolves. But Pax...you know I’ve always wanted you to be one of us anyway. My only problem was that I didn’t think we could be alphas together.”

  Pax nodded. “I still see you as the alpha of the Moose Jaw Wolves, for whatever that’s worth,” he said. “I’m not going to challenge you for dominance of your betas.”

  “I appreciate that,” Donovan said, smiling.

  “This is a mess,” Victor spoke up. “You’re talking about having multiple alphas in a single pack, with betas that report to only one alpha but an omega who submits to all of us?”

  “It doesn’t seem that complicated to me,” Donovan said mildly.

  Lily turned to him. “You brought me here for a reason, Victor,” she said.

  “That’s right,” he said. “To get you away from the Arctic Wolves. To put an end to the pack that defeated my father.”

  “But that’s not the only reason,” she said. “You could have killed me if that was what you wanted.”

  “I’m not a killer.”

  “Your father would have killed her, Victor,” Pax said quietly.

  Victor paled. “Don’t talk about my father.”

  “We need to bring all the packs together,” Lily said. “It’s the only way to make this family work. We need to find a way to unite the Moose Jaw Pack and the Vancouver Pack into one.”

  Donovan nodded. “I think that’s the right decision,” he said. “The members of each pack can continue to recognize the alpha they’re used to, unless and until they find themselves submitting to multiple alphas, as Lily has done.”

  Lily took a deep breath. “But that’s not all,” she said.

  “What else?” Donovan asked.

  “If we’re bringing your packs into the family,” she said, “it’s only right that we try to do the same with mine. I want to go north and reunite with the Arctic Wolves, and I want to broker a peace between them and you. I want us to unite and form one big clan.”

  Chapter Twelve

  PAX

  “We need to at least talk about it,” Pax said.

  The three alphas were sitting on the porch, beers in hand, which Pax considered progress. They hadn’t even managed to sit down and have a conversation together since the day of the fight. He had begun to wonder whether they ever would.

  Better still, it had actually been Victor who had initiated this informal meeting. The three of them had left Lily’s room without answering her request to return to her pack up north. Donovan had made some comment about their needing to consider, but Pax could tell that both he and Victor had been too shocked by the request to formulate a response.

  He appeared to be the only one who hadn’t been surprised. He wasn’t sure exactly why. Maybe it was because he was the only one who didn’t belong to a pack. Maybe his independence enabled him to see more clearly how tightly bonded the others felt to their packs.

  He would have found it more surprising had Lily never wanted to return to her family. He felt as though he had always known that they would eventually need to have this conversation.

  “We’re not talking about it,” Victor said flatly.

  Pax glanced at him. It was no more than he had expected, really, but it still frustrated him. “You don’t speak for all of us, Victor,” he said. “I want to talk about it.”

  “So do I,” Donovan put in.

  “And I suppose you’re threatening me again?” Victor asked. “You’re telling me that if I won’t agree to what you want, you’ll take Lily and leave?”

  Donovan sighed. “We shouldn’t have said that, Victor,” he said. “We’re not going to do that. We couldn’t do that to her.”

  “We couldn’t do it to you either,” Pax said. “You’re bugging the hell out of me with your stubbornness, but you’re still my friend. I don’t want to hurt you like that.”

  “You don’t want to hurt me like that, but you don’t have any problem dragging me up north and forcing me to face my father’s enemies?”

  “You were going to face them anyway,” Donovan pointed out. “You were the one who went north first.”

  “To plan an attack,” Victor said. “Not to combine the packs!”

  “But everything’s different now,” Pax said. “They’re not just the enemies your father told us about. Not anymore. They’re Lily’s family. And if this is what she wants...how can we not even consider it? How can you not want to give her what she wants?”

  “You don’t think I want to?” Victor asked, looking up.

  For the first time, Pax really took in the expression on Victor’s face. He looked haunted. He looked as if he had been to war. He was pale and drawn, and Pax could see that he had lost weight. He had dark circles under his eyes.

  “None of what’s happened here has been what I wanted,” Victor said. “I didn’t want to imprint on a woman I could never allow myself to touch. I didn’t want to take her away from her family, and spend every day knowing that I might have hurt her by doing so. I didn’t want to betray my father by aligning myself with a member of the only pack that ever defeated him, the only pack he ever hated.”

  “Why did he hate them so much?” Donovan asked. “Is it really just that they lived differently than he did? Because I have to be honest—I’ve never understood why that was such a problem. They were far away. They weren’t bothering anybody. Who cares what they were doing?”

  Victor didn’t answer.

  “There was another reason, wasn’t there?” Pax guessed.

  Victor sighed. “He didn’t like to talk about it,” he said. “He didn’t want anyone else to know. He was...he was ashamed of it. But he told me once.”

  “Told you what?” Pax pressed.

  “The omega of the Arctic Wolves,” Victor said. “She’d be Lily’s mother. She used to belong to the Vancouver Pack.”

  Donovan stared. “What?”

  Pax was stunned. He had been pretty sure that there was something he wasn’t being told about this situation, but he would never have imagined this. “I don’t understand,” he admitted. “If she belonged to the Vancouver Pack, how did she end up in the Arctic?”

  Victor looked down, clearly ashamed on his father’s behalf. “My father tried to get her to submit,” he said. “But she wouldn’t do it. She fought him. At her mating ceremony, she resisted him. There was nothing for him to do but to declare her too feral to belong to his pack and to send her away.”

  Pax shivered. “That’s awful,” he said quietly.

  It was difficult to reconcile this story of Josh with the man he had known, the man who had saved his life by finding a home for him. He had always thought of Josh as kind and compassionate.

  But suddenly, another memory came to him, a memory of Josh’s omega. Victor’s mother.

  She had been quiet. She had hardly ever spoken. She had moved around the house like a shadow, taking orders, serving the men and then disappearing.

  It had never occurred to Pax at the time, but suddenly he wondered if her silence had been born of fear.

  Josh had been good to his betas. He had been good to his guests. But to omegas...

  Maybe he wasn’t so kind to his omegas. Lots of alphas aren’t.

  Suddenly, he felt more aware than he ever had of the pain Victor must be going through. He had known that his fellow alpha was
grieving the loss of his father. He had known that he was worried about what his father would have to say about his newfound bond with Lily.

  But if Pax was right, Victor’s pain went deeper than that. He was also being forced to reckon with the fact that his father hadn’t been a good mate, that he had been cruel and abusive to the omegas under his authority.

  That couldn’t be a fun thing to learn about your father.

  Pax wanted to reassure Victor that that wasn’t the kind of man he was, that he didn’t need to worry about following in his father’s footsteps. But he didn’t want to call attention to Josh’s cruelty. Who knew whether Victor was ready to deal with that?

  Instead, he turned the conversation back to the matter at hand—Lily.

  “We’re going to have to combine two packs anyway,” he said. “There’s no other way to make this work. The Vancouver Pack and the Moose Jaw Pack will have to align.”

  “You know that’s not a problem for me,” Donovan said.

  “I can live with that too,” Victor said.

  That was promising. It was the first time Victor had made any real concession to the fact that their lives would have to be different now. For a moment, Pax considered walking away, leaving the conversation here for the day and resuming later.

  But he couldn’t. He knew that Lily was inside waiting to hear what their decision would be. As much as he didn’t want to push his friend, he wanted to bring his omega the outcome she wanted.

  So he steeled himself and pressed on. “We need to take into account what’s best for Lily, too,” he said. “We need to consider what she needs from us. It can’t just be about what we need as alphas. We have to value her needs as much as our own, if not more so. As her alphas, it’s our job to look after her and provide for her.”

  Donovan frowned. “And you really think the way for us to do that is by incorporating the Arctic Wolves into our packs?” he asked.

  “I think we have to consider it,” Pax said. “If it’s what she wants...”

  Victor shook his head. “I know you both think I’m biased against this whole situation,” he said. “And maybe you’re right. Maybe I am. But just because Lily wants something, that doesn’t make it a good idea. Think about what you’re asking.”