by J. L. Wilder
She thought it would never end. She thought she would live in searing agony for the rest of her days. And then, just when it seemed too much to suffer even a moment longer, it was over.
She came back to herself slowly. She was aware of nothing so acutely as the cries of her children; though, after a few moments, she began to notice that someone was wiping the sweat from her brow. She looked up. Jamie. He’d gotten a washcloth at some point. Now, he smiled down at her, looking as though he thought she’d hung the moon. “You were amazing,” he told her quietly. “You did perfectly.”
“The babies? Are they all right?”
“They’re gorgeous.”
“How many?”
“Five,” he said.
She exhaled deeply. “Just like we thought.”
“Just like we planned for,” he agreed.
“I want to see them.”
“Mark and Harley are getting them cleaned up. They’ll be back in a moment.”
She struggled to sit up, desperate for a look at her children, but Jamie placed a firm hand on her shoulder and held her down. “No getting up,” he said. “You just gave birth. Lie still. You have some recovering to do.”
It was an order. Maddy felt it wash over her, felt the sublime pleasure that always came along with submitting to an alpha’s command. Today, though, it wasn’t enough to distract her. Not from this new and urgent need. “I want to see them, Jamie.”
“They’re coming now.” He stepped back from the bedside to make room for Mark and Harley.
The bed was wide enough for all five babies to be laid down, side by side. Maddy lifted the nearest one into her arms. “It’s a boy.”
“Three boys and two girls,” Mark confirmed proudly. “Fifty fingers and fifty toes. That one there—” he pointed to the child in her arms— “is the firstborn. I’d say he’s most likely to be the new alpha—but it’s really too soon to know for sure.”
“They could all be alphas,” Harley pointed out. “Rarefied bloodline, remember.”
Jamie nodded in agreement. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that were true.”
Maddy felt a strange sense of pride. To think that the next three alphas of the Hell’s Wolves might be right here on her bed—that she had made them—made her feel immensely important. Precious, even. Her childhood had been full of people taking care of her and putting her on a pedestal, making the world revolve around her because she was an omega. Only now, with her children by her side, did she fully appreciate the beauty of the role she’d been born to.
Mark waved a hand at his brothers. “Okay,” he agreed, “but the prime omega. Like I am with us. The one who leads the leaders.” And again, he gestured to the boy in Maddy’s arms.
“I wouldn’t be too cocky,” Harley said. “Not after what happened with the Death Fangs.”
“Okay, I get it, I hid in a hole—”
“No, not that,” Harley said, although he had broken into a grin at the mention of Mark in the hole. “I’m not trying to give you a hard time or anything. I’m talking about what Jamie did. Jamie was the one who really made them go away, in the end. Jamie was the one who saw what he needed to give them to make them leave us alone.”
“A way to walk away with their dignity intact,” Mark said, nodding. “It was pretty impressive. I couldn’t have done it.”
“Neither could I,” Harley said. “Maybe we’ve been wrong all these years. Maybe Jamie is the prime alpha.”
But Jamie shook his head. “I don’t think there’s any such thing as a prime alpha,” he said. “None of us have ever been forced to submit to each other, have we? It doesn’t work like that. We voluntarily follow the person who’s best for whatever job needs doing, that’s all. And all three of us have different skills.” He scooped one of the other boy babies into his own arms. “If we do have three alphas here,” he said, “I’d be willing to bet it’ll work the same way for them as it does for us.”
Maddy frowned as a sudden thought occurred to her.
“If we have alphas,” she said, “we could have an omega too. Couldn’t we? One of the girls could be an omega.”
“That’s likely,” Jamie said when the other two looked at him for an answer. “It didn’t happen in our family, because our mother only had sons. But the omega gene runs in families, just like the alpha gene, and almost everyone who has it either has an omega for a mother or a grandmother. It’s rare, so it’s not likely that both girls got it, but I would say the odds are good that one of them did.”
“When will we know?” Maddy surveyed her daughters anxiously.
“When did you know you were an omega?” Jamie asked her.
“I always knew,” she said. “I mean, not always, I’m sure, but I can’t remember a time I didn’t know.”
“There are milestones,” Jamie said. “You can usually tell by watching toddlers in a pack at play. The alpha—or alphas—will dominate, dictating what games the group plays and who gets what toy. Omegas, on the other hand, are submissive at play, always giving away their toys when someone else asks, always sensitive to the emotions of those around them. We should be able to tell by watching them if we’ve got an omega.”
Maddy felt her stomach drop. For the past nine months, she’d been imagining the joys of watching her children grow up. How many times had she pictured herself sitting among a happy group of toddlers as they played together? But now, the image took on a dark significance. When that vision became a reality, when she sat amid her children and watched as they played, she would be scrutinizing their every move for the dreaded sign that would mean one of her daughters was an omega.
“Maddy?”
She blinked. All three of her alphas were staring at her, concern written on their faces. “What’s wrong?” Harley asked anxiously. “Your face is white.”
“Are you lightheaded?” Mark asked. He turned to Jamie. “She’s not bleeding, is she?”
“It isn’t that,” Maddy said quickly. “I just...I was worrying.”
“Worrying about what?”
“About the girls. About finding out that one of them is an omega.”
Mark looked confused. “You don’t want them to be?”
“God, no.”
“Why not?”
“Are you kidding?” Maddy asked. “After the life I’ve had?”
“But you’re happy, right?” Harley said anxiously.
“Sure, I am, now,” Maddy said. “But before I was happy, I was kidnapped. I spent half my life living in a cage and being treated like I wasn’t human. Just because I was an omega.”
“It won’t be like that for our girls,” Jamie said, squeezing her hand. “They’re safe here with us.”
“That doesn’t mean they’re safe,” Maddy said. “Before the Death Fangs found me, I had a great family. A pack that loved me and made every effort to keep me safe. They kept me indoors all the time, they never let anyone know I existed. I couldn’t go shopping or out to the movies with my packmates. I don’t want that life for one of my children. And even with all those extra precautions, I still got kidnapped.”
That silenced the alphas. They looked at each other, and Maddy could tell that none of them knew how to respond.
“And the Death Fangs are still out there,” she added. “They’re still out there, still running their omega farm, and they know where we live.”
“They aren’t going to come back here,” Mark said. “Not after what happened. They know we could have killed their alpha. They won’t risk that again.”
“Maybe,” Maddy agreed. “Or maybe they’ll just come back prepared. They knew I was pregnant. Even if they do think I’m ruined now, they’ll be interested to see my babies, won’t they? It would be the perfect way to get revenge.”
“Shit,” Harley whispered. “She’s right.”
“Of course, I’m right. Did you think they’d just let us get away with it?”
“It’s been four months, though,” Jamie said doubtfully. “It does seem li
ke they’ve decided to let us go.”
“If they’re thinking about it the same way Maddy is, they were probably just waiting for the babies to be born,” Mark said. “I bet they’ll give it another year, maybe two, long enough that it’ll be clear whether or not we’ve got an omega, and then they’ll come back. And this time, they’ll come in force. No one insults the Death Fangs and walks away. We should have known better.”
Maddy was shaking so hard she was worried she might jostle her children where they lay on the mattress. “What do we do?” she asked. “Do we run?”
“We can’t go on the run,” Mark said. “Not with infants. Besides, we don’t want to live like that either. Always moving from place to place, never really feeling safe.”
“And this is our home,” Harley added. “We made this place. It belongs to the Hell’s Wolves, and we’re damn well not going to be chased out of it.”
“But we can’t just stay here and wait for them to come for us,” Maddy said. She felt like she was going to cry. “We can’t let them take one of our babies!” She looked down at the two little girls on the mattress. They were impossibly small and so, so helpless. She had kept them inside her for nine months, protected them with her body. Now, they were on their own. How was she supposed to keep them safe from all the dangers of the world?
“They’re not going to take our babies,” Mark said. “We won’t let that happen.”
“How are we going to stop them?” Maddy asked. “There are dozens of them. It’s a huge pack. And there are only seven of us who are old enough to fight.” And that was being generous. The idea of little Piper having to fight the Death Fangs made Maddy want to cry all over again.
“She’s got a good point,” Jamie said, his eyes worried. “I don’t think we can defend the house against the Death Fangs, Mark. We’re good fighters, and we’ve got some time to prepare. We could set traps around the perimeter of the place, and that might stop some of them. But I think it would probably just make the rest of them mad. We don’t have the numbers to hold the place. I think Maddy’s right. I think we’ve got to run.”
“We can’t raise our children on the run,” Harley objected. “That’s no kind of life.”
“It’s a better life than growing up in a cage and being sold into slavery.”
“But those can’t be the only choices!”
Maddy cried, feeling hysterical. She had never felt this panicky in her life, not even in the barn waiting to be brought out for the Death Fangs’ auction. Not even on the day she had been kidnapped from her home in California.
“We’re not going on the run,” Mark said firmly.
“But—”
He shook his head over her protest. “Harley’s right. Our family deserves better. But Jamie’s right too. We can’t hope to defend the house in a full-strength attack by the Death Fangs.”
“If we can’t defend ourselves and we can’t run away, what does that leave us?” Jamie asked. “What are we going to do when the Death Fangs come?”
“We’re not going to be here when the Death Fangs come,” Mark said.
“We’re not?”
The gleam that appeared in his eye planted a seed of hope in Maddy’s chest. “No,” he said firmly. “We’re going to take the fight to them.”
Chapter Nineteen
Harley pulled the motorcycle to the side of the road, cut the motor, and let his momentum carry him across the shoulder and down into the trees. When he was about ten feet from the road, he parked his bike and hunkered, waiting for the others.
It had been his idea to travel separately this time. It felt strange to be on the road without his brothers—they had always gone on runs together, and he was used to falling in on Mark’s left side. He was used to looking to his right and seeing Jamie there.
But it had been too dangerous to travel together this time. As soon as he’d raised the issue, Mark and Jamie had agreed wholeheartedly. The Death Fangs might not have wanted word to get around about the fact that they’d been cheated of what they saw as their property, but it was a sure thing that each and every member of their pack knew that there were three brothers—three identical alpha brothers—out there who had made themselves their enemies. One look at Mark, Harley, and Jamie would be enough to raise an alarm.
It was possible that the members of the Death Fangs who had seen them in Idaho would recognize them individually anyway. But Harley knew they stood out more as a trio than they did on their own.
Now, he hunkered behind the trees, prepaid cell phone in one hand, looking at his watch. He had been the last to leave home, and thus, the last to arrive. His brothers should already be in position, unless something had gone wrong. The phone call he was expecting was due at any minute.
Maddy was at home with the babies. She had been desperate to come along with them—in fact, she’d insisted on it—but they’d spoken with one voice, overruling her desire, ordering her to stay. “You have to take care of the kids,” Mark had said firmly, not adding what they were all thinking—if something went wrong, if the brothers were hurt or killed today, it was important that someone was still around to parent their children.
Maddy had understood what wasn’t being spoken aloud. Her eyes had filled with tears. But she had refused to let them fall. She was so strong, Harley thought now. So resilient. She knew they were doing what had to be done, and that if everything went well today, they’d never have to worry about the Death Fangs again.
The phone vibrated in Harley’s hand, jerking him out of his thoughts. He tapped the screen to answer. “Hello?”
“I’m in position,” Mark’s voice responded.
“Have you heard from Jamie?” Jamie had been the first to leave home and should have arrived in Oregon about six hours ago. He was in, perhaps, the most dangerous position of all. Harley was deeply worried about his brother’s safety.
“I just got off the phone with him,” Mark said. “He’s ready to go.”
Harley looked at his watch. “It’s quarter to three now,” he said.
“Go at five til,” Mark said. “I’ll go at three exactly, and Jamie will make his move now. I’ll call him back and let him know.”
“Mark?”
“What?”
“Be careful, will you?”
Mark’s voice softened. “Yeah. You too. I’ll see you past the Idaho border line if everything goes well. Pancakes at that diner.”
“Right.” Harley hung up the phone and looked down at his watch again. Nine more minutes to go. Then, he would make his move.
JAMIE SCALED A LARGE oak, shimmied out along one of its branches and reached out toward the barn window. He reached it, barely, and let out a sigh of relief. The hard part’s over.
Then, he had to laugh at himself. Of course, the hard part wasn’t over. The hard part was just beginning. Plenty could still go wrong.
The rope ladder he’d made and tested back at home was slung over his shoulder. Now, he dropped it into the room and draped it carefully over the window ledge so that half its length hung inside the barn and half remained outside. He peered carefully into the room. A cluster of frightened looking women stood in the corner.
“Hey!” he hissed.
A couple of them looked up.
He beckoned them over.
For a moment, he was afraid they wouldn’t come. Maddy had warned him that this might happen. They’ll be afraid. They might not be able to move, she’d said. None of the others moved on the night I ran away. If they wouldn’t come, he was going to have to go in and get them, but he’d need to figure out a way to secure the ladder first...
Then, a couple of the women broke away from the pack and made their way over to where Jamie could speak to them. “Who are you?” one of them asked softly.
“I’m here to help you,” he said. “I can get you out. Get you to safety.”
“All of us?”
He nodded. “We need to move quickly, though. Can you get the others to come over here?”
The women looked at each other, then headed back to the group at a trot. Jamie watched them converse, hoping this was going to work. If they don’t listen, we’re likely to get them hurt or killed, he thought. They have to listen. They have to trust me.
The women came over. It was the whole group this time, and although some were looking up at him with misgivings or outright fear, he could see hope in most of their faces.
He spoke softly, careful not to let his voice carry beyond the walls of the barn. “I’m going back outside,” he said. “I’ll hold the other side of the ladder steady. Climb out one at a time. Careful at the top going through the window. When everyone’s out, we’ll go into the woods.”
The women looked around at each other, and Jamie could see them making up their minds. Would they go with him, a total stranger? Or would they stay here and take their chances with the auction?
A dark-haired woman, the shortest of the bunch, stepped forward and took hold of the ladder’s bottom rung. She nodded.
“I’ll give it a tug when I’m on the ground,” Jamie said. “Then, you can start to climb.”
After that, it was easy. One by one, women threaded their way through the window and descended toward Jamie. He helped each of them to the ground and waved them back into the trees to wait for him. When the last woman had come down the ladder, he gave the ropes a quick tug and bundled it up as it fell toward him. He shoved it in his backpack, slung the pack onto his shoulder, and headed into the woods to join the women.
“What happens now?” one of them asked him in a hushed voice.
“Now, we wait,” Jamie said.
AT FIVE MINUTES TO three, Harley dialed the Portland Police Bureau.
“I’m on Route Ten, by mile marker thirty,” he told the desk sergeant who answered the phone. “I’m calling to report...well, I don’t know exactly what it was. It didn’t look right, though. There were a bunch of bikers driving this way and they all turned off on a dirt road that led straight into the woods. It looked like they were a gang or something.”
