by Kari Gregg
One Last Try
By
Kari Gregg
Copyright © 2017 Kari Gregg
Cover by: Lou Harper © 2017
Clipart by AnimalsClipart.com
All rights reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Warning: This book contains strong language, sexually explicit situations, and may be considered offensive to some readers. This book is for adults only.
Dedication:
To Susan Sorrentino, Jennifer, Laura, Nina, and Jason – I wouldn’t be able to do it without you. Your input and support are beyond value to me.
And,
For my husband,
Who heroically deals with my neurotic bullshit every single day.
When Nox was fourteen, his brother Joth murdered their older brother, their mother, and a human girl. Nox survived, but the attack wrecked his womb. Shattered, Nox rejected the pack who fumbled helping a barren, grief-stricken omega cope. He built a new purpose for himself as a master craftsman. Mating? No thanks. He’s better off alone.
Humans studied Joth in prison until his father’s death ended the weekly visits. Joth demands Nox in their father’s stead in exchange for resuming therapy and tests… thereby risking the destruction of Nox’s carefully ordered world. Again.
The pack drafts alpha fixer Dio to untangle the mess. One sniff of the wary omega convinces him Nox is his mate. New medical treatments offer a slim possibility Nox could bear children, but if the past years taught shifters anything, it is an omega’s value is greater than his fertility. Reconciling Nox with his pack is more important. Laying to rest the ghosts haunting Nox is too. Learning to trust? Vital.
Dio just needs to coax Nox into one last try.
Content Warning: Omega mpreg and fertility themes, dubious consent, shifter knotting, an omega who rejects labels, and a bewildered alpha who wouldn’t have it any other way.
Prologue
Sandpaper whooshed at a steady cadence as I smoothed the rough surface of a cabinet I planned to include in my next full moon tithe to my pack. Powdery sawdust covered my fingers and sprinkled into heaps on the floor. It plumed in the air, irritating my nostrils despite the dust mask I wore to protect my sensitive nose. The regular rub of sandpaper against wood hypnotized me. I liked the sound. I welcomed the grit against my skin. Satisfaction filled me while I watched a project that had only existed in my imagination finally come to life.
Concentrating on work helped me resist the wild impulse to flee. Both my father and Farron, who was my pack alpha, had repeatedly told me, if only this once, I had to stay. I must not run. Rather than shifting and scooting out the back of my workshop like I wanted, I traced my fingertips along the grain of the wood and waited.
Outside, across the back yard separating me from my childhood home, a screen door slammed.
Nerves jangling, I jumped.
“—long past time I stepped down so a new alpha can lead.” A grunt disturbed the chirp of birds and buzzing insects. “As a pack fixer, you’ll hopefully also right what went wrong.”
“Today is just an introduction. At least at first.”
“He won’t come out to meet you.” That voice belonged to my father. I would recognize his breathy rasp anywhere and I knew Farron’s gruff boom too. The third voice was new to me, husky and low. It stirred my anxious dread. “You can bet he hears us, though. Sawdust overwhelms the scents he detects, but he never completely lets down his guard, so he’s definitely listening. He knows a stranger is nearby, and he won’t leave the shed while he senses a potential threat.” Feet shuffled, kicking up clumps of dirt near the porch on the other side of the wide back yard, and my stomach balled into a sick knot, because I recognized the scuffing sounds. My brother Joth had also enjoyed kicking clods of dirt at the bottom of the porch steps, long ago. “No one will be able to coax him out of his den. He won’t leave his workshop unless he decides to run.”
“The last thing I want to do is scare him into running away.”
“Nox doesn’t scare easily.” Farron guffawed. “But he is a runner. Goddess knows the boy has reasons aplenty, but I can’t say fear is one of them. To have any legitimate chance at mating him, you’d better learn that.”
My muscles quivered with exhaustion while I moved the sandpaper over the wood, back and forth. Trepidation brought the tiny hairs on my arms to urgent attention. The trio of shifters gathered a scant hundred yards from my den agitated me, but my father’s presence with the other two urged me to deny the instinct to shift, to instead linger.
“Won’t he feel cornered if I go into his den to greet him?”
Yes.
My shoulders drooped.
No.
“Maybe,” my father said, his tone weary.
“Probably,” Farron agreed. “He won’t bare his teeth or cower, though. Handle him wrong and he’ll just stare through you like you aren’t even there.”
I curled my fingers against the wood, crinkling the sheet of sandpaper in my grasp.
“C’mon, he’s the last of the pack to acknowledge you as the new alpha, and it needs to be done,” Farron said. “Let’s see what you’re made of.”
I bent my head over the cabinet, which I’d arranged horizontally on the workshop floor to best reach what required sanding before I applied the first coat of sealant tomorrow. My nostrils flared, my body stiffening as the footsteps approached. If I’d yielded to the instinct to retreat into my animal form, the ears atop the head of my wolf would’ve peaked, then flattened, but I grudgingly remained on two legs rather than four.
Farron spoke true. I was the last, and I couldn’t put off acceding to the new alpha any longer.
When Farron pushed open the door of my workshop, I ignored him. I focused on my task, staring at the pale wood as I wiped sawdust free. Pretty. I’d chosen the oak well, my skill at deciding where to make the cuts to most attractively form the furniture I built innate to me after years of practice in my craft.
“Nox?”
I trembled, but I didn’t give Farron my attention. I’d tolerated his intrusion into my den these past few years, but no forbearance was required of me now. He wasn’t my alpha anymore.
The stranger stepped around Farron, who hovered at my dilapidated shed door. I studied them both beneath my lashes. The new alpha stood a little taller, the crown of his dark head climbing an inch or two higher than Farron’s. Each of them wore blue jeans, but where Farron had opted for his regular oxford button-down, the new man wore a hooded sweatshirt with the crackled logo of West Virginia University splayed across the chest. His skin was darker than Farron’s, but not as tanned as mine. Few shifters spent as much of their days outdoors as I did, but the new alpha wasn’t as pale as Farron who, in the last couple of years, had worked inside more as his health had deteriorated. I wasn’t much of a judge of age, but the stranger looked to be around thirty, which was how old my brother Kinessa would’ve been, had he lived. He had Kinessa’s thick shock of midnight black hair and obsidian eyes too.
Those eyes saw everything.
I shuddered, because I could feel them seeing right through me.
“Nox,” the stranger said.
My blood went cold. I wanted to be anywhere except in my den where this new alpha could look at and talk to me, but I didn’t run. Even when he walked in slow, careful steps from the door to where I crouched at the cabinet, I didn’t move.
“You’re doing so well.” I shook at the purr of approval in h
is praise while he squatted too, his hands dangling between thick thighs as faded denim stretched and strained against as his bunched muscles. “You don’t have to say a word. I smell your submission to me as your alpha,” he said and lifted his hand. He cupped my cheek, his thumb brushing across my skin. Bewitching. Intoxicating. “My name is Dio.”
He’d given me permission to remain silent and I hated talking. No matter how long I’d lived feral, I’d remembered my words as soon as I’d returned to my human form so I could speak. I just never desired it, rarely had anything relevant or important to say, and in truth, I had nothing worth mumbling or mentioning now either. A shifter didn’t frequently meet a new alpha, though, and acknowledging Dio’s leadership of the pack was vital. Especially from me. No matter how crazy, broken, or wrong the rest of them believed me, even I knew that.
I didn’t open my mouth to speak, but I could respect him in other ways. I pushed into his palm cupping my cheek, allowing myself the luxury of his warmth heating my skin. Gathering my courage, I forced my chin up, not to meet the frank appraisal of his eyes with my own, but to bare my throat.
“You’re going to be fine, Nox.” He exhaled a long, pleased breath and smiled, his touch tender, his dark eyes kind and sparkling. “From now on, everything will be different, but you’ll be okay. I promise.”
I’d heard Farron speak to him of possibly mating me, though.
His promises were just words and meant less than nothing to me.
Chapter One
Six months later...
“You grew up.”
My brother’s voice had deepened during his years of incarceration. Gaze lowered to the metal table, I shivered at the mix of strangeness and familiarity. Part of me rejoiced. I hadn’t seen or spoken to Joth since we were boys, but despite what he’d done, the wolf inside me stirred with excitement at a reunion with my kin, any kin. The rest of me knew better, and I kept my attention the fuck down, my numb fingers grasping the telephone humans had provided as our means of communication. A thick pane of reinforced glass separated us, one I’d been assured could not be pierced by the claws of a shifted wolf and, in separate rooms, he couldn’t smell me through the overbearing prison aroma of cleaners and sweat. I was safe. Completely safe.
I shuddered anyway.
Joth chuckled at this visible sign of weakness. “You always were the runt of the litter. A year older than me, but still the smallest.” His chair squeaked, and when I cautiously peeked, he’d leaned forward, his massive body edging closer to the reinforced glass window. Only the barriers humans had erected prevented him from looming over me. “You grew, though.” He flashed a smile full of teeth. “So did I.”
When my heartbeat fluttered, I hoped the telephone wasn’t sensitive enough for him to hear it. I glanced at the video camera filming my side of the visiting room, hardly comforted by the flashing green light that told me the humans were recording and monitoring us closely.
“Won’t you look at me, Nox?”
I couldn’t. I sensed the humans and my alpha urging me to raise my stare from the table, to do as my brother bade me. When our father died, Joth had suspended the test regime and counselling that human authorities had instituted to study him. Humans were such contrary creatures. Their laws prevented the gathering of evidence and otherwise assessing a murderous shifter without the shifter’s permission. Joth had denied them that for months. No taped transcripts with human psychiatrists, no MRIs. Nothing.
“You can look at me, you know. I won’t hurt you.”
Oh, how I wished that was true.
Fingers tightening on the telephone, I stiffened my spine and forced my stare up. From the identical metal table on the other side of the visiting room window. To the faded blue chambray shirt our father had provided so Joth wouldn’t have to wear prison orange. Pulse racing, I looked from his chest to his thick forearms, ropy with muscle under a dense coat of dark wiry hair. Black, like our father’s. It contrasted the pallor of his skin, the hand gripping his telephone receiver unnaturally pale. I squirmed in my plastic chair, a jolt of anxious dread shooting through me at this reminder my brother rarely saw the sun. Steeling my resolve, I peered under my lashes at the broad stretch of his shoulders, then at the white glare of his undershirt peeping from the vee of his shirt at his throat. Pride at my audacity swelled my chest upon reaching the stubbled column of his neck—he hadn’t bothered to shave for my visit. But neither his patience nor my determination could prod my gaze higher. I could not meet the stare of an alpha, even one as disgraced and stripped of power as my brother.
“You have Mom’s blue eyes,” Joth said, his voice a low purr of satisfaction. “I don’t know how I could have forgotten that.”
I didn’t know how he could have forgotten it, either. Whereas he and Kinessa had taken their dark coloring and muscular bulk in both human and shifted form from our father, I’d resembled our mother from the first—blond, lean, and surprisingly agile. Not nimble enough to evade attack when it had come, but I was physically as much an omega as she’d been.
Joth tapped his fingers on the table, drawing my wary attention back to him. “Dad brought pictures a few years ago.” He sighed. “The warden let me see them eventually, but you didn’t directly face the camera.”
If our father had taken pictures of me, he’d done it without my knowledge, but that didn’t surprise me. We’d been ghosts, he and I. We’d shared the same address, but while Dad had haunted the house, I’d built a den in an outlying shed. We hadn’t talked. We’d barely noticed each other. I hadn’t realized our father remembered I existed until the freeway wreck had claimed his life on my twentieth birthday. Some believed it an accident, but I knew better. He’d waited to join his mate and his oldest son in death until pack law would deem me an adult and not a single day more.
I gulped, swallowing down a knot of grief. “I’m surprised the humans allowed pictures of me.” I resembled my dead mother. A lot.
“They wanted to assess how I responded.” Shrugging, Joth relaxed into his chair. “It was a test.”
Foreboding tensed my shoulders. “Did you pass?”
“I have no idea. They don’t tell me much.” Joth blew out a long breath. “I didn’t shift, though. Or cry.” He straightened in his seat. “I was happy to see you grown up. At least I knew you were hale and healthy. Dr. Bennet calls that a positive sign.” When I glanced up, Joth smiled at me. “I’m glad I didn’t rape you.”
My stomach flipped.
I jerked my gaze down so fast my head took a dizzy spin. Sick terror flooded me and the muscles in my body clenched in alarm as fight or flight endorphins dumped into me. Only my tight clasp on the telephone receiver anchored me in place. Human authorities and my alpha had sent me into the visiting room for this, insights and information they’d hoped I might pry free.
“Oh?” I said through numb lips. “No one told me you’d considered rape.”
“Of course they didn’t tell you.” Joth pressed his lips into a thin line. “I couldn’t admit it to anyone. You were a kid.”
He’d been one too, my brother a year younger than me. My belly twisted at the painful realization my then thirteen-year-old brother had… had… “Why?” I asked the monster who was my brother.
“Why didn’t I tell them before? Or why didn’t I rape you?” he prompted.
When I glanced up, his brow furrowed. “Either,” I said. “Both.”
“I didn’t lie about killing the little girl. Or murdering Mom and Kinessa. Knowing humans would lock me up for the rest of my life, I confessed. I don’t hide from what I did.” He shook his head, ruefully. “I’m glad I didn’t rape you, though. I think I would’ve regretted that.”
Humans escorted Joth from his side of the visiting room later. My stomach churned, acid burning the track of my throat while they shackled him for the walk back to his cell. He winked. Smiled. Then, he vanished through the metal door.
The hour with him had passed quickly. My brother could be charming wh
en he wanted, and he’d made a concerted effort to draw me out after revealing the bombshell detail of my endangered virginity the day of the murders. With his message—warning?—delivered, he’d invested the rest of our hour together mining my memories of happier times. With an ease that astounded me, a laughing Joth reminded me about the persistent stench of Kinessa’s farts lingering in the bedroom we three boys had shared. He spoke of pancake Sundays, our frequent camping trips, and past holiday mornings too.
After the murders, I hadn’t wanted to remember. Thinking about Mom, Dad, and my brothers had hurt me deeper and more grievously than the coma Joth’s blow to my skull had induced. Our father, for instance, had stepped up as coach when we’d enrolled in little league. Comparing those sunny afternoons with him at the ballpark to the dark tormented shell of a man Dad became short years later ripped open festering wounds I’d hoped had scarred over.
By the time humans strode through the door to return my brother to his isolation cell, a smile had curved my lips despite the pain, though.
Grief was a funny thing.
Still as marble, I waited in the uncomfy plastic chair on my side of the visiting room until my escort slipped to my side and, with a hand at my elbow, urged me to stand. She led me through the labyrinth of security checkpoints to the prison parking lot where a black Cherokee idled. My escort passed a flash drive to the driver through the window while I opened the rear passenger door to climb inside. As soon as I safely buckled into my seat, the driver gunned the gas. The vehicle shot forward like a rocket.
Little unsettled shifters more intensely than cages.
“All right?” the driver called over his shoulder as he steered to the main road.
I met his gaze in the rearview mirror and nodded.
