by J. L. Wilder
Weston lay down on his back and stared at the ceiling. How much longer could they possibly go on living like this, he wondered, before something finally forced a change? And when that change came, would the pack be saved? Or would it be utterly destroyed?
Chapter Two
CHARITY
“Good night, Charity!”
“See you tomorrow!”
“Get home safe!”
Charity raised a hand in farewell to her coworkers, who were still finishing up their closing duties at the restaurant and headed out onto the sidewalk. It was only a few blocks’ walk to her apartment, which was a good thing since she didn’t have a car. The walk was always a good way to clear her head after a long day at work.
Charity had never expected to have a job at all, much less one as a waitress. And yet, she found, she enjoyed the work. She liked interacting with the customers, some of whom were regulars and knew her by name, others of whom were dining with her for the first time and relied on her expertise about the menu. She liked the intricate dance that was ensuring all her tables were well cared for, never allowing one to fall behind or go lacking.
And she liked working with people. She liked being a part of a team. Life in the city could be so isolating sometimes. Charity had to remind herself often that this was what she’d wanted. This was what she’d chosen.
Sometimes she thought it was almost shocking that she hadn’t adjusted to her new life yet. After all, she’d been on her own for more than half a decade. Shouldn’t she have settled in?
But that was doing herself a disservice, Charity knew. Most days she was perfectly comfortable living in the city, working at the restaurant, coming home to the apartment where she lived by herself. Most days, in fact, she delighted in it. It was very freeing to be on her own. It was gratifying to see that she could make it, that she had the skills necessary to get by without any help.
Most days.
Some days it wasn’t delightful at all.
And by the time Charity reached her walk-up apartment, she knew that today was going to be one of the latter sorts.
It was because of the family who had come into the restaurant today, she knew. The moment she’d seen them, it had set off a visceral pain in her gut. They would have been shocked to realize they were having that effect on her, probably. The mother had been tired and harassed, barking at her four children, all of whom had been hollering and throwing things at each other across the table. The father had looked distracted and annoyed.
Still, there had been something enviable about them. They belonged to each other, Charity thought. That was what it was. They belonged to each other in a way that she belonged to no one.
And that was still a new sensation. Charity had grown up in a family far bigger than the one that had come into the restaurant today. There had always been someone around to talk to, someone to fight with, someone to hug, someone to share ideas with or make plans with. She had never before felt alone with her thoughts. But since she’d moved to the city, that feeling kept cropping up.
Her friends at the restaurant were nice. She liked them. But they weren’t family, and there were things she couldn’t be honest with them about. There were secrets in her past that no one could know.
Maybe it was time to consider dating apps again.
This was an old idea, and one she revisited, from time to time, when her loneliness grew unmanageable. She had profiles on a few popular dating apps. But the men she met were always disappointing. It never seemed to work out.
Of course, she had had love once...
But she pushed that thought away. It was too painful to think about him, and too difficult. She had decided to leave her old life, and her old love, behind. There was no point in lingering on unpleasant thoughts. There was no reason to dwell in memories of things that could never be.
Instead, she flopped down on the sofa in her living room and pulled up the Tinder app on her phone. The best way to put the past behind her, she knew, was to focus on building the present and the future. Her job already served her in that regard. If she could manage to find a man to love, maybe this life would start to feel like a real one.
There were a whole bunch of new messages. She had expected that—it had been weeks since she’d logged into her account. She flipped through the profiles of the men she’d matched with, hoping one of them would catch her eye.
But none did. Oh, they were good looking enough, she supposed, but their messages were so inane. Hey, girl! one of them had written, and Charity wondered if this was a greeting he copy-pasted into the chat windows of every woman he matched with. Several of them had made lewd suggestions, and one had even sent a naked picture of himself.
Assholes.
She tossed her phone down in disgust. What was she supposed to do with these men? She couldn’t possibly be expected to settle for any of them. Was this really all there was? Did her whole new world, her new life, consist of disgusting perverts and vapid idiots?
They were just so...human.
And the frustrating thing was that Charity had wanted to be human. She had wanted to embrace her human side fully, to live in an apartment in a city and have a job and feel like the master of her own fate for once in her life. She had wanted to leave her wolf side behind and forget all about it.
And now she missed it desperately. She ached for it every day.
Even on the days she was happy in her new life, there was a wildness inside her that yearned to break free. It was like an itch she could never scratch, always at the back of her mind, always clamoring for some kind of relief or satisfaction.
She had tried to tame the feeling. The only thing that seemed to help, even marginally, was running, so every night she did three miles around her neighborhood. Her runs exhausted her, and by the time she got back to her apartment, she was usually able to sleep without any trouble. But she always woke up feeling just as restless and itchy as she had the night before. It was impossible to quell the wildness for any prolonged period of time.
It was the wolf inside her, she knew. It ached to burst forth, to stretch itself, to howl at the moon. And Charity—human Charity, waitress Charity—was refusing to let it.
It had been six years. Six years since she had shifted. Six years since she had gripped the earth with paws instead of feet. Six years since her nose had taken in the full spectrum of scent, she was able to smell in her animal form. It might as well have been part of another life. Charity had believed that as time went by it might grow easier to go without those feelings, to ignore the wolf that lived in her heart and her gut. Instead, it had only gotten harder. The tension seemed to be mounting inside her. One day, she was afraid, she wouldn’t be able to suppress it any longer. The wolf would burst forth.
God forbid that happens while I’m at work, she thought wryly, although she didn’t think that was likely. Work was a decent distraction from the constant clamor of the wolf. She felt relatively human when she put on her uniform and memorized complicated drink orders and socialized with her coworkers. It was only after hours that her human facade began to slip.
With a sigh, she got to her feet and went into the kitchen. Charity was not a good cook, and most of the food she kept in the house was of the instant meal variety—microwaveable pot pies, frozen pizzas, and little pre-mixed salad bowls that she could add croutons and cheese to before shaking them up. She chose one of these for her dinner tonight. The bowl even came with a little fork attached to the lid, so she wouldn’t have to get any dishes dirty. She mixed up the salad—it was the work of only a few minutes—and took it into her bedroom to eat.
At times like these, she really missed her family. Her pack.
Dinner time with the pack had always been an event. There had been meat every night, hot meat, fresh off the stove or out of the oven. There were starches—buttery mashed potatoes or bowls of rice seasoned to perfection with herbs and spices. And there was company. Everyone ate together, always, crowding around the table, fighting ov
er the bowls as they went around, sharing stories of their days.
For all their flaws, she thought, the Hell’s Wolves had done dinner right.
And they were probably sitting down to a meal right now, she thought. Maybe some nice venison steaks, or maybe pork or ground beef. Or pasta, drenched in sauce and with nice, thick, juicy meatballs. One of the wonderful things about being part of a pack was that there was always somebody who knew how to cook. There was always somebody who knew how to do everything important. It was just a function of having so many people around.
Charity liked being independent. She liked fending for herself and knowing that she had earned the money that put the food on her table. But it would have been nice, too, to feel as though someone had her back.
Like Weston. Weston used to have her back.
The thought of her childhood sweetheart was more painful than any other memory—more painful, even, than the thought of running wild in wolf form. She tried never to think of him. Because the truth was that Weston was the one thing Charity hadn’t wanted to leave behind. It had broken her heart to do it.
She and Weston had fallen in love young. It had been entirely unexpected. Although they’d grown up together, Charity and the rest of the young girls had been kept separate from the boys of the pack throughout much of their childhood. Most of her interactions had been with the women of the pack. The boys her own age had regarded their female counterparts as objects of curiosity, and more than once she’d spied them peeking through her bedroom window, trying to get a look at her and her sisters.
In her teenage years, the restrictions around the girls had loosened somewhat. Her alpha, Karl, had warned them to guard themselves and advised the boys to keep their hands off. It hadn’t been an order, but by and large, it had been obeyed. They would face the alpha/omega ceremony when they turned eighteen, after all, and the two most vital roles in their generation would be decided. One young man would be declared the rising alpha, with the power and the knowledge to one day take over the pack. And one young woman would become the omega, the bearer of the next litter of pups.
Theories and speculation abounded. All anyone knew for sure was that the alpha and the omega would not have come from the same litter since an alpha couldn’t be a biological match with his own sibling. It was generally agreed upon that the new alpha was likely to be a biological son of Karl’s. But then who would the omega be?
Charity had taken no part in these speculations. They didn’t concern her. It was nothing they had any control over. Whoever was chosen would be chosen. She would respect and obey her new alpha, just as she respected and obeyed Karl now. In the meantime, she’d had more interesting things to occupy her attention.
Things like Weston.
Her first love. Her only love.
They had sat together in the woods, avoiding the house, avoiding Karl, who would only order them apart if he knew they were together. This kind of pairing off before the alpha/omega ceremony was deeply discouraged. After all, either one of them might be selected as the pack’s new alpha or omega, and it was too much to hope for that the ranks would go to both of them.
What are we going to do? they’d whispered to each other in the dark, clutching each other’s hands, feeling somehow very adult and very, very young at the same time.
They would just have to wait it out, Weston had decreed eventually. Once the ceremony was over, once the ranks had been decided upon, they would be free to act. They would be able to do whatever they wanted. They would finally be able to declare their love and be together openly.
And so, the days had begun to crawl by. But as Charity’s eighteenth birthday drew near, she had begun to notice confusing, incomprehensible feelings.
Feelings of longing.
Feelings of lust.
It became painful to stay in a room with Weston. She loved him as much as ever, but she had begun to ache for his body in a way she couldn’t quite describe. She felt almost magnetically drawn to him.
She had thought, at first, that it was a normal attraction.
Then, one day, she had noticed that the boys in the pack seemed to become more alert when she entered a room. They raised their heads and sniffed, the way they did in wolf form when they’d caught an intriguing scent. She had never seen a human do that before.
That was the day she’d begun to suspect.
She couldn’t be sure. She had never been sure. But if she was the omega...who would be the alpha?
She didn’t know. She couldn’t know. But there had been talk, and one name seemed to come up over and over. Hawk. It was what people expected, it seemed. Practically a foregone conclusion. Hawk would be the new alpha unless something very surprising were to happen.
So, she ran.
She ran because she knew that Weston would never be able to watch her with someone else. He would challenge Hawk and try to win her back. And as much as she loved Weston, as much faith as she had in his ability to fight for her, she had known Hawk all her life too. He was wild and violent, and he never held back. It was one of the things, they said, that would make him a strong leader.
But it would have made him terrible to face in single combat. Weston would lose the fight. He might even lose his life. And as much as it would kill him to see her given to Hawk, it would destroy her even more completely to see him killed.
For both their sakes, she had to get away.
A week before her eighteenth birthday, a week before the ceremony, she had crept out of the cabin in the night, thanking God that Karl had never thought to issue an order forbidding them to leave. Maybe he had never thought it necessary—no one had ever run away from the Hell’s Wolves before, as far as she knew—or maybe he simply didn’t want to keep people against their will. Either way, she knew an order would have stopped her. But she was able to leave the house and make it to the edge of the forest, and the highway.
She had hitched a ride into the city. Her first few nights on her own had been some of the most frightening of her life. She had slept under a bridge with a few other homeless people, all of whom had—mercifully—ignored her. During the days, she had gone from business to business, applying for jobs, scrounging and begging for enough change to buy meals in between. She had eventually managed to find a bed in a downtown homeless shelter, but that had been frightening too. At least she’d had a roof over her head and a guaranteed warm meal every night.
Things had changed when she’d gotten her job at the restaurant. She’d saved up for a few weeks and managed to rent her little apartment. Her first trip to the grocery store had felt magical. All that food, and she could choose whatever she wanted. Microwave dinners had been a novelty back then. Eating by herself, in the quiet of her apartment, had felt decadent.
The homesickness had set in slowly. At first, it had been manageable. She’d simply picked up a book or a magazine each time she’d begun to think of her pack or to wonder how Weston was doing without her. She hadn’t even been able to say goodbye to him. She hadn’t wanted him to get in trouble when her absence was discovered, and besides, she knew that Karl—and the new alpha, eventually—would be able to force him to tell anything he might know about her whereabouts.
He would think she had left him. That she hadn’t cared.
He would have moved on by now. He wouldn’t know that she still loved him, still dreamed of him. That she still longed for him.
Good, she thought. Better that he didn’t think of her. Better that he had found happiness with someone else.
But she hoped he was all right. She hoped the pack was all right, that Hawk had turned out to be a good leader.
She missed them. A part of her always would. But she had made her decision. She had chosen a human life. The only thing she could do was to embrace that choice fully, to throw herself into being human every day. And she would just have to keep trying to ignore that constant, steady ache in her soul that cried out for something else.
Chapter Three
WESTON
> The liquor store holdup went off without a hitch. Of course, it did. Weston was nothing if not skilled at this, a fact that made him feel absolutely wretched. He went straight to bed after delivering his ill-gotten money to Hawk and lay awake for hours, thinking about the look on Hal’s face as he’d trembled and handed over all the money in his register.
God. Weston really hoped he had insurance or something. Causing an insurance company to lose money didn’t make him feel nearly as sick and evil as stealing from a family man did.
Eventually, finally, he slipped off to sleep. When he awoke, he felt as disoriented as if he was breaking a fever. The sun seemed higher in the sky than it ought to be. He looked at his phone and realized with a start that he’d slept until almost one. That never happened. Hawk wasn’t exactly strict about his pack members rising early, but he was loud and inconsiderate, and there should have already been music booming through the cabin at this time of day.
It was too quiet.
Something must have been going on.
With a heavy sense of foreboding, Weston got out of bed and dressed quickly. The worries of the night before were mercifully driven from his mind as he turned his focus to what could be wrong in the pack today.
Robbie met him in the hall, his expression inscrutable. “You might not want to go downstairs,” he said.
“Why not?”
“They’re talking.”
“So? Talking about what?”
Robbie took a breath, and Weston could tell he was steeling himself to deliver unpleasant news. “Just say it, will you?” he asked, his anxiety peaking.
“Charity,” Robbie said.
Weston’s stomach swooped. Charity.
Robbie was the only one of the Hell’s Wolves who knew how Weston had felt about her. It was the most closely guarded secret of his life. He hadn’t even been able to open up to Robbie about it until Charity had left and had left him with a broken heart and a head full of questions about what could have gone wrong.
