The last thing he needs is for the Winterstoke pack to miraculously survive only for Otto to be revealed because some old beta doesn’t like the look of him when she comes in for her afternoon tea and crossword puzzle.
He can’t face sitting in his hotel room either so he lets himself into the Callister house.
It’s still and quiet, the scents of the inhabitants have faded. Elyse must still be working and Dan... well, Dan’s off on suicide mission for no reason other than that he’s too proud to admit that he’s as crooked as the rest of them.
Last night, he let himself in and went straight to the fridge. Then he sat eating lasagna out of the pan all on his own while Dan went off to sulk or whatever he was doing when he shut his bedroom door behind him.
Now, he takes his time looking around. The front door opens onto the lounge. It has a small television in the far corner, a sofa and a pair of armchairs. Framed scenic photographs dot the walls. They’re generic enough that they could be discards from the hotel.
The only sign of personality is an enormous bookcase that takes up all of one wall. It’s double-stacked with pink-and-purple romance novels, the kind with women in frilly dresses clasping overly muscled men on the cover.
Otto sets up camp in the lounge, setting his laptop on his knees in the armchair that smells most like the sheriff.
It’s an alpha thing, he tells himself. It’s all about making my scent more prominent.
He helps himself to Dan’s whiskey while he writes out his report. That’s an alpha thing too, he decides.
He types out the last line of his report four times then deletes it before typing it out again: Callister unable to stay behind without blowing cover.
He’s not sure why he’s covering for the guy. He’s going to be dead soon anyway. Otto’s finger hovers over the back space.
Damn it. He taps send.
Elyse’s key sounds in the lock at a little past six. By then, Otto has drunk more than half the bottle and the world has turned warm and blurry.
She stops in the doorway when she sees him, suddenly unsure.
“Just doing my report,” Otto says, but he’s clearly drunker than he realizes because the words come out slurred and he has to repeat himself, carefully enunciating each word so that she understands him.
Elyse smiles but the smile doesn’t reach her eyes and she doesn’t move. Otto gets it. If he was a woman who found some big drunk brute in her lounge, he’d also be very nervous.
“It’s fine,” he says, making sure to pay attention to the words so they come out right. “I’m just gonna...”
He’s just gonna nothing, he realizes. He’s way too drunk to even get out of the armchair. “Just gonna stay here tonight.”
“Okay,” Elyse says slowly. “Would you like something to eat?”
“Yeah, thanks. Do you have any more lasagna? That was nice.”
“Uh, no,” Elyse replies and even through his drunken haze, Otto can see the confusion on her face. He realizes he left last night before she even got home. She probably blamed Dan for the empty pan.
“That’s okay. Anything you’ve got’s fine,” he says, enunciating carefully so that he doesn’t slur any more than he needs to.
“Sure.” Elyse scuttles past him as if unsure whether he’s going to make a sudden move.
It’s a reasonable assumption, he thinks through the haze. Why wouldn’t he? Otto is a man who looks like a thug. He has the job of a thug, and he’s just sent a perfectly nice fellow to his death.
“I think he sent himself,” Elyse murmurs, and it’s only then that Otto realizes he’s been talking aloud. Sharp green eyes meet his.
“You know what, you’ll definitely feel better with something in your stomach,” Elyse says.
There’s something in the way she’s scrutinizing him that Otto doesn’t like, as if she’s stared right into his soul and seen something interesting.
Otto blinks. That was definitely a drunk thought. Food will definitely help with that.
“Thanks,” Otto mumbles.
Elyse gives him a nod, still with that sharp look in her eyes. Otto looks away, not wanting to meet her gaze.
She bustles around in the kitchen. The radio clicks on, followed by clinking noises.
Otto wonders where Dan is now. Probably still on the plane, he thinks.
By midnight, he should be in River Beach.
By morning, he should be dead.
Dead Dan, he thinks to himself. Dead tall Dan with his serious gray-green eyes, and determination to do what’s right even though he himself is wrong.
Otto’s only aware that he’s drifted off when he wakes with a start, his neck shooting pains down the muscle where he’s slept awkwardly against the bend of the armchair.
The house is still and dark, the lights off in the kitchen and in the hallway leading to the bedrooms. There’s a sandwich on a plate on the side table by Otto’s side but when he reaches out to it, the bread is dry and hard.
He swallows and immediately grimaces. His mouth tastes like something died in it.
Died. The word jolts awareness into his brain and he scrambles for his phone, finally locating it in back pocket of his jeans.
No notifications. It’s almost five in the morning. The challenge will be over by now, and Dan is either dead or alive.
Schrodinger’s Dan, Otto thinks and that’s what makes him realize he is still way too drunk. The empty bottle of whisky is tucked between his side and the chair. It had been almost full when he started.
That’d explain it then, he thinks.
Otto blinks and pushes himself up from the chair, immediately feeling a wave of dizziness. He’s still way too drunk to make it out of the house and up the stairs and find his room. Even if he could remember where he put his keycard.
He stumbles into the kitchen and drinks water from the faucet, scooping it up with his fingers in long greedy gulps, rinsing the whiskey and grossness out of his mouth.
He stands with his head bowed over the sink for a long time, trying to let the dizziness pass and his head clear.
Nope. It’s not going anywhere. He’s way too old to drink that much without there being consequences.
He staggers back through the lounge and pushes the door open into Dan’s room. The man is almost certainly dead. He won’t mind if Otto passes out on his bed.
Dan’s room is interesting. He’s not tidy. Not even a little bit. The duvet has been left in a tangle in the middle of the bed. He hasn’t bothered to take his coffee cup to the sink. How the man manages to drink that much caffeine and manage to sleep at all is utterly beyond him.
His socks lie in the corner of the room where he’s kicked them off, and he appears to have a clothes chair instead of a closet where everything just lies stacked higgledy-piggledy.
Most interesting of all is the pile of romance novels by the bed, one left facedown in a way that Otto just knows the readers in his life would have something to say about.
Otto hadn’t expected that. Maybe it’s something to do with Dan’s wrongness: makes him read these things like he’s a woman or an omega.
It’s an intriguing thought, and one that makes a lot of sense to Otto. Maybe there’s some genetic cause for Dan being the way he is. Maybe he has some kind of repressed omega gene. It would explain a lot.
It would explain the peculiar magnetism that just doesn’t seem to let Otto shake Dan loose from his thoughts.
There’s a photo on his nightstand: a picture of much younger and gawkier Dan with a boy who looks like a younger version of him: skinny, sandy-haired with the same long face and smile.
Brother, Otto thinks drunkenly. Has to be.
And when Mason Reed kills Callister along with the rest of the Winterstokes, is Elyse going to sit in the front row at the funeral with Dan’s brother beside her? Does the brother know what type of alpha Dan is? Does he know that he’s wrong?
Otto lets himself fall, his nose right on Dan’s pillow, and his boots and jeans
still on. The pillow smells of cedar wood and the sweet coconut of Dan’s shampoo.
When he wakes up, the sun is streaming through the window right onto his aching head and there’s a voice saying, “What the fuck?”
Otto twists his body and opens bleary eyes.
There are dark circles under Dan’s eyes and he smells like somebody else’s blood tinged with the tang of airplane.
“You’re not dead,” Otto mumbles with a sense of bewilderment.
The damn fool did it. He didn’t die, Otto thinks with a rising sense of pleasure.
“No and if you’re planning on killing me for it, would you mind waiting til later?” Dan says, his voice thick with irritation. “It’s been a damned hard night. I’d also like to sleep in my own bed.”
Somewhere in the back of Otto’s mind, he’s aware of what he should do.
He should start interrogating Dan about what happened: find out who lived and who died and send the report back to Ronmin so the paranoid jerk can find another place to shoehorn in his chaos.
“Otto, seriously. Get out of my bed. Actually, you know what? Never mind. It stinks of booze in here anyway. I’ll check myself into one of the hotel rooms.”
“I’m out. I’m out,” Otto mumbles, doing his best to get into a sitting position. He fails horribly and falls right back onto the bed.
“God, you’re drunk,” Dan says, crouching down so he can look Otto in the face. “Am I going have to drag you out of here by your feet?”
“T’was your whiskey.”
To his surprise, Dan just stares at him for a second like it was the last thing he expected Otto to say, then he bursts into laughter.
Dan laughing is a beautiful thing, Otto thinks, watching Dan’s face light up, gray-green eyes sparkling.
Maybe it’s the remnants of the whiskey or maybe it’s just instinct. Perhaps he’s just happy that the guy’s not dead or maybe Otto’s just wrong too, but before he has a chance to think it through, he just pushes himself up onto his elbows and pushes his face towards Dan’s, aiming for his mouth.
It all goes wrong. He’s too drunk and he misjudges the distance between them, landing his mouth hard against Dan’s teeth.
The other alpha freezes immediately, and they just stay like that for a micro-second, mouth against mouth, breath hot between them.
Then Dan gives the softest little sigh and shifts his mouth just slightly, pressing soft lips against Otto’s own before his tongue presses into Otto’s mouth.
He doesn’t taste like any omega Otto has ever kissed. There’s no sweetness or scent of slick rising through the air. He tastes like Dan. He tastes like he smells: of coconuts and somehow the tinge of dry air from the airplane.
This is weird, Otto thinks. Weird, but nice.
Dan’s hand reaches up and cups Otto’s jaw, rubbing a soft thumb into the stubble he finds there.
It’s a bad move. His thumb catches the hollow of Otto’s neck as it moves up, pushing in just slightly enough that a wave of dizziness flows over him, sending all the booze rising up through his throat.
Otto has just enough time to shove his head out of the way before he throws up all over the carpet in Dan’s bedroom.
SUMMER
The Wild Wolf
DAN
river water and pale skin
River water washes over the body, pushing it up against the branches of the fallen tree.
The tree acts as a natural dam at the bend in the river and it’s thick with caught debris from upriver. Dan picks his way carefully through the mud, trying to ignore the way it squelches through his bare toes.
By unspoken agreement, Adam Winterstoke stands back and lets Dan do it.
Adam’s not supposed to be patrolling at all, but it’s the annual mating run and neither hell nor high water nor life-changing injury is going to stop the Aylewood pack leader from carrying out his duty.
“Is it a wildling?” Adam calls from the bank as Dan wades deeper into the water.
The dead man lies with his arms flung over the length of a branch, keeping his head just above the flowing water. One arm is broken bad enough that Dan can see a glint of white bone.
Long hair fans out past him, flowing with the water rushing past. His skin is a perfect pale white, untouched by the sun but marred by pale bite marks washed clean by the river.
This is a man whose skin has rarely seen sunlight: a man who’s spent his life covered in fur.
“Yeah,” Dan yells back. “Pretty sure of it.”
It’s habit that makes Dan reach up to the dead man’s neck to check his pulse, his fingertips touching cold wet skin. He presses in, prepared to pull his fingers back straight away at the confirmation of what he already knows.
What he already knows is wrong. A steady beat thumps underneath his index and middle fingers.
“Call Gregor,” Dan yells to Adam as he watches from the bank. “He’s still alive.”
It takes almost an hour to get the man out of the branches and onto the banks of the river without injuring him further, and even longer to get him down the mountain and onto the road to the truck. Despite all the tugging and manhandling, the wild man stays unconscious the whole time.
Luke and Gregor meet them at the road, ready to take him down the mountain to the clinic.
They get the man in easier with all four of them to help, but Dan watches the truck drive off with a sense of foreboding.
Chaos creates opportunity, he thinks.
Life has been quiet in Aylewood since Mason Reed died. This feels like chaos coming again.
That means Otto and Ronmin. Assuming neither of them are here already. The Aylewood packs got lucky last time. That’s not going to happen a second time.
Dan shivers, despite the warm summer air.
“You okay?” Adam asks.
Dan sneaks a glance at him. Out of all the Winterstoke brothers, Adam is by far the stubbornest. The fact that he is still on his feet is proof of that.
“I’m fine,” Dan replies. “You ready to go?”
“Absolutely. We need to find Isaiah before this gets any worse.”
They stay out for hours without any luck. The woods are filled with the scents of wolves of the human kind, but the wild wolves are nowhere to be found, even after they cross the river and start heading up into their territory.
In the end, even Adam has to admit defeat and they have to head back.
The mountains are thick with the scent of the mating run: nervous omegas and pushy alphas, all out there playing wolf and chasing each other through the trees.
Not for the first time, Dan wonders what drives them to do it. There’s obviously some alpha/omega dynamic that he just doesn’t understand.
He understands the theory of it and he’s seen enough of it in real life to understand that the drive behind it is real, but whatever appeal there is to it just doesn’t compute.
That’s the softness, Dan’s brain helpfully supplies. It’s because you came out wrong.
“You alright?” Adam asks. They’re standing in the parking lot at the start to one of the hiking trails.
You’re asking me? Dan thinks. Adam’s face is pale and pinched with pain. Any longer up there and Dan was starting to think he was going to have to carry Adam down the mountain himself.
“I’m fine,” he says. “Bit worried about what all this might mean,” he adds honestly.
Adam nods, expression serious. “Me too.”
This is another moment, Dan recognizes. This is a time he can explain who he is and tell Adam that there’s another threat out there, and that Dan knows what it is.
He doesn’t. His chance to come clean with the Winterstokes vanished the moment he stood by and let Cal get taken by Mason Reed. Nothing is ever going to atone for that.
Dan sits in the car for a good ten minutes before he starts the engine.
I should call. He hasn’t spoken to Otto once since the big alpha threw up in his bedroom. He hasn’t seen him either, and he ha
sn’t had a single response to any of the emails he’s sent.
Otto kissed him, threw up then ran away, and Dan has no idea what to make of that.
OTTO
cider and coconut shampoo
The scent of Aylewood has changed since Otto was last here. Then, it was trees and mountain and the soft coconut scent of Dan Callister.
Now, it’s all of those things but it’s also the mating run: the scents of strange alphas rent the night air combined with the sweet smells of omegas in the distance.
All of that is overpowered by the scent of the single omega at his feet. The Fort Gosford pack is far larger than the Aylewood one, but it’s still small enough that he knows every alpha and omega in it by sight, and this omega has a reputation.
Cole Bennett is twenty-eight and has never been mated, although he’s come close a few times. Each time, he’s managed to weasel his way out of Ronmin’s match for him. He’s even managed to outrun the alphas on three mating runs.
Cole Bennett’s time has run out.
The omega’s face is slick with heat-forced sweat and he’s staring up at all three of him with bleary confused eyes.
“You’re going to be a good boy for me, aren’t you?” Ronmin says as he kneels down beside him.
Bennett looks from Ronmin to Otto to Ronmin’s new muscle, a giant of an alpha named Jeremiah Garrett.
Garrett is new. He’s transferred in from somewhere up north and has been in the pack all of three weeks. This is his first assignment.
Don’t screw it up. Just do as Ronmin tells you and it’ll be fine.
There’s a reason Ronmin chose the new guy to come along. He likes all his lieutenants to go through a loyalty test within the first month. Otto hopes the guy recognizes it for what it is.
“This won’t take long,” Ronmin continues, his eyes fixed on the omega. His face is flushed pink in the warm night air and his blond hair is damp with sweat. “I promise as soon as we’re done, you can go home. No more mating run for you. Won’t that be nice?”
Winterstoke Wolves Collection : An MM Mpreg Shifter Romance Bundle Page 72
