by Emma Knox
I opened my eyes and looked out the window again. Dominick was still with his people, and I tapped my fingers on my thigh as I felt a thread of impatience. Like he could feel the intensity of my stare on his back, Dominick shot me a quick glance over his shoulder.
They said some final words, then he walked over to me. Our eyes met for about a second before he looked down. In several wide steps, he came to a stop beside the SUV and looked up to meet my eyes.
“Are you still not done?” I asked, because it didn’t seem like the people behind him were ready to disperse.
“They’re getting more of my stuff for us to take. I didn’t know we’d leave so soon, and I figured we’d take a flight anyway so I only had the small suitcase packed.”
“You can still have someone send it all over for you,” I said with a sigh.
His suitcase was already in the car, and so was the little that I’d brought along with me. I had been surprised at the size of the luggage, but this explained that. I could feel the resentment in Dominick’s stare, and I returned it with a calm look.
“We have a long drive ahead of us,” I reminded him. “We could be stuck in the car for hours, and I would like to get back before it’s dark, if you don’t mind.”
Dominick puffed his cheeks a little, and I knew he wanted to complain. He wasn’t happy about the long drive, but while I understood, I wasn’t going to compromise on this. I didn’t like flying, for one. And I loved the Alaskan wilderness so why would I pass up the chance to take it all in on our way back to Fairbanks?
After a long moment, he sighed and his shoulders slumped.
“They were packing an extra suitcase for me. It should be all I need so everything else will be handed to others in the pack that might need it.”
He didn’t say it, but I knew it was because, if he ever needed anything else, it would be my responsibility to provide. I was slowly getting into the mindset, though, so it didn’t bother me.
“Can you ask them to hurry up a bit, then?”
“Do you have food packed for the trip as well?”
“Yeah. I figured there won’t be that many stops on the way anyway, and it would waste too much time from the drive, anyway.”
I’d eaten plenty for breakfast because most of what we were carrying was meant for Dominick. He hadn't eaten much yesterday, so I planned to have him eat full meals for the whole day. Shifters needed healthy diets, and it was especially true for Omegas. An Alpha wouldn’t suffer too much if they went for a bit without food, or food in the right amounts, but that wouldn’t be the same for Omegas. They were smaller, but still somehow burned food faster than Alphas. Also, Dominick was a special Omega. As a lactating Omega, we didn’t have to wait for his heat cycle to have the threat of pregnancy floating over our heads. It could happen at any time, so he needed to be well fed in preparation.
While I was thinking ahead to the future, Dominick’s luggage arrived. I got out to put it in the back with the rest of the stuff, and Dominick went back for more goodbyes. I almost rolled my eyes, but I decided to be respectful instead.
He isn’t just another Omega, he’s my Omega now.
As his Alpha, I needed to think about his comfort. He was still young, and he must have lived a sheltered life, being a lactating Omega. I doubted he’d ever left his pack since the day he was born, I wondered if he’d even been allowed much around humans.
In the end, I let him have more time, while gauging how far across the sky the sun had moved and how much daylight we could hope for. I didn’t necessarily mind driving in the dark, it wasn’t like it would affect my eyesight or anything, but it would be a full moon, and we might run into some wolves running around at night. I didn’t know how I was going to introduce Dominick to my pack—or if I was going to do it at all, since my new house was a bit separated from the pack, in a location that I’d handpicked myself. I didn’t want him to get spooked if any curious wolves started chasing our car the moment we entered my pack’s lands. Not only would most of them recognize my car, it wouldn’t be difficult to catch my scent even in a fast moving vehicle.
Dominick only took a few more minutes before he was done saying his final goodbyes. I was relived we would finally be on the way, but I didn’t let it show as Dominick walked over to the SUV. He hesitated, eyeing the back door, but circled around to take the shot gun seat without me having to tell him. I wondered if he was still trying to avoid me. He had to know that would be impossible from this point on.
“You’re sure you’re ready to leave?” I asked. “You don’t need to use the bathroom or anything?”
It would be a long while before we got there, and I couldn’t say for sure if we would be stopping anywhere. I didn’t plan on it, but considering how late it was already… I could drive through the night, but it was Dominick’s first time spending so much time in a car, and I didn’t want him to be uncomfortable.
“I’m okay,” he said, putting on his seatbelt. Then he looked out the windshield with his arms crossed over his chest.
“All right, then,” I muttered, starting up the car.
I aimed the front of the car toward the road, leaving Dominick’s pack lands behind and starting our trip.
“The distance is a bit far,” I started slowly, glancing at him out the corner of my eye. “So it wouldn’t be practical to come down that often. Well, unless you take a flight instead of drive, in which case there isn’t too much of a problem, but we can talk about that later, okay?”
He nodded his head, but didn’t speak, and turned his head to look out his window. I shot him a glance, then left him alone.
For a long while, there was no sound in the car. I had my mirror open, my elbow braced against the door and holding loosely onto the door handle with one hand, while the other was rested against the steering wheel. The road had a few curves and twists, and I was driving fairly fast, but we didn’t meet any cars on the road for the first hour, and I was pretty confident in my driving skills. I took in deep breaths of the forest smell, and I could feel all the pent up stress washing away as my body relaxed into my seat.
My wolf wanted to come out and run, and I thought what a pity it was, to be in the area and not have a chance to let go and run for a bit. When was the last time I even went out for a run? I’d stopped going out with the rest of the pack because the elders kept hounding me about finding an Omega already, and the Omegas in the pack that I’d already rejected tried to get closer to me to entice me. I’d even had one come after me knowing they were on the edge of their heat, when that was the time Omegas were supposed to go into seclusion, because an Omega in their heat cycle would attract any Alpha in the proximity, to the point of fighting other Alphas to have the Omega.
A lot of packs these days were ‘modernized,’ though the word the elders would use was humanized. In my grandparent’s time, there was nothing odd about Alphas fighting over an Omega in heat. I just wasn’t interested in that kind of bullshit, so when another Alpha in the pack attacked me because they were overcome by instincts and wanted the Omega, I’d run off, fuck an Alpha’s pride. That had been nearly a year ago, and since then, I’d gone on plenty of drives, but it wasn’t easy finding land to just run around in.
I should have asked for some time for myself when I came down. It’s too late now, anyway.
Before, I had been too busy so there was no time, and I never intended to stay after we got married. Maybe next time, if Dominick ever wanted to visit.
“Does your radio not work?”
I turned to look at Dominick, surprised he’d spoken, but turned back toward the road quickly as we came up to another curve in the road. Still, I sent him sideways looks.
He wasn’t looking at me, instead his eyes were trained on my radio with such intensity it was as if he thought it would turn on from his stare alone. My lips twitched, and I looked at the radio as well. It worked, definitely, but when I drove, it was to relax. So, when I was alone, I almost never had the radio turned on. I hadn’t even thought about it and wond
ered if Dominick had been suffering in that silence.
“Um, the radio works. I have a few CDs, not sure it’s anything you’d be interested in, though. This road is pretty remote so I don’t know if any radio stations will work…”
“Oh,” he said quietly, then looked outside again.
Keeping an eye on the road, I opened a compartment underneath the radio where I had several CDs stored inside. All of it was music I had in my phone or in my computer, or my MP3 player, so the CDs lived in my car, mostly unused. I rifled through, frowning as I looked at the titles.
Shit.
The age difference between me and Dominick wasn’t so big a thing in the shifter world, but in this respect, I felt it very acutely. A lot of the music I had, was stuff that had been produced before he was even born that I grew up listening to, and I doubted it was anything he’d have interest in. I didn’t have a lot of modern day stuff, not because I didn’t like it, but I could listen to that stuff if I turned on the TV or radio, so I didn’t collect it. I shot another glance at Dominick, but he was acting like nothing in the car affected him.
After a bit of a search, I found something promising. Looking at the cover of the CD, I pursed my lips. It wasn’t something I’d bought myself, though I couldn’t remember who exactly gave it to me. It was full of a bunch of slow songs, but at least they were all made in the last decade or so, so I put it in the player and waited for it to start. I grimaced a little as the music replaced the previous tranquility, but I sucked it up. I kept the volume low, but my hearing was perfect, so even if I left the volume at its lowest setting, I would still hear it perfectly.
It had been nearly an hour since we set off, and there were still several hours left on the route. I kept glancing at Dominick after that, and he seemed to relax against his seat that I wondered just how tense he’d been the whole time.
There was another long stretch of silence between us, and Dominick stayed quiet, and I thought he was acting shy, like last night. Or, maybe because of last night? There was no way to tell.
After a while, though, he spoke again, but I wasn’t as surprised this time.
“Is this the kind of music you like?”
I shot a curious glance at him, wondering why he was suddenly talking to me, but I answered, “I don’t not like it, but it’s not exactly my favorite,” I said with a shrug. “This was a gift from a friend. Do you dislike it? I could find something else for you to listen to.”
“It’s fine,” he said quickly.
He turned to look at me, the same time I turned to look at him, and our eyes met. We both looked away immediately, but it felt like the air in the car suddenly turned awkward.
“Um,” Dominick started, his voice quiet, facing outside the window. “So, I wasn’t told that much about you and what you do?”
“Oh,” I muttered, frowning. But then the expression cleared. He was willing to talk to me, at least, and I was going to look at it like the blessing it was that we were making steps forward so quickly. “Well, I work at a military base in Fairbanks. I teach combat classes and other stuff like that, I’m not actually in the military. It would be impossible because there’s no way I could check in with no issues.”
“I heard they do blood and other tests like that?”
I nodded. “Yeah. There’s no way I could get past it with my shifter blood, but my job doesn’t require that of me, I just need to be qualified, and I am. I started doing taekwondo when I was five and I’ve added different martial arts styles as I got older. If I was a normal human, I would have tried out for a few competitions, but I had to be pretty careful.”
The words were flowing out of me, coming a little fast, and I wondered if it showed just how eager I was. I had been introduced to it pretty young in a class where I mixed in with human children. Because of it, I’d had to be extremely careful during training, especially as I grew and my shifter heritage became more and more apparent. I was pretty used to controlling myself around humans so I could pass as one of them, which was why I was allowed to take my job. I had known that if I couldn’t be careful and avoid suspicions, the Alpha of my pack wouldn’t have allowed it. As long as I pulled back some force and moved a bit slower, I passed just fine while still seeming qualified for my position.
“You like fighting a lot?” Dominick asked, a note of curiosity in his voice.
“When you say it like that, no, I actually don’t like a lot of fighting. I don’t like violence, and my love for what I do has nothing to do with violence. You could say…it’s the one thing in my life that I’m passionate about; the way the body moves and the control one can have through strengthened muscles is beautiful. And I still think so, even knowing I’m much stronger than the humans I learn from and teach.”
This was something I had always been cautious of, but I didn’t think of it as a limitation like some shifters in my pack did. I did a lot of personal training when I was alone, and I was one of the strongest and fastest wolves in the pack. I knew it probably had more with what I did in my human form instead of just my genes, but the pack didn’t see it that way, and the elders of the pack didn’t see it that way, so they’d involved themselves in my private life because of it. Like shooting oneself in the foot, only there was no way I could regret something I cared about.
“I’ve…never really had a job,” Dominick confessed, his voice a little quieter.
“Wait, really?” I asked, frowning over at him. “Like…ever?”
Even if a pack was protective, it wasn’t usually to that extent. It was rare to find a pack isolated from humans in the current time, so pack members getting jobs when they were sixteen was pretty common, if they wanted to, at least. Dominick didn’t sound like he would be against the idea, he probably just didn’t have the opportunity. He really must have been too sheltered before.
“Really. Since I was fifteen, they…well my family to an extent, some older Omegas in the pack and the Alphas meant to look after us, I guess you could say like our babysitter. But anyway, they’ve had me taking care of the pack’s young and assisting the lactating Omega.”
When he got to that point, I understood what he meant. It wasn’t so much that he was sheltered, but because he had something that made him useful to the pack, they gave him less freedom to exploit that usefulness. It was something all packs did, and it was seen as acceptable to give whatever you could for the pack, but they didn’t have to take it to such an extreme.
Dominick continued. “Because I don’t need to have gone through a pregnancy in order to produce milk like ordinary Omegas, something I didn’t even know until I was told to do so, I tend to be around a lot of the pack’s pups.”
“Do you like being around pups?” I asked.
He was quiet for a long moment, then he said, “I don’t mind being around them. I mean, I’ll be having pups of my own eventually. I just don’t have time for much else because of it.”
I pursed my lips at that, thinking I would have to lend a hand a lot when it came to our own pups so he wasn’t doing it all on his own. I would have to figure something about my job…but that would come later.
We went on to chat about most everything in our lives—music, growing up, our favorite hobbies. It wasn’t like we lacked the time, so we talked about it all. And the more we talked, the more Dominick relaxed, and I got to see more than just his cold expression.
I was physically attracted to Dominick when I first saw him, but now, seeing him smile, his eyes soft, as he talked about all the good things he liked to do, I was becoming emotionally invested since I got to see that he wasn’t just the spoiled brat I’d initially thought.
Chapter 5
Dominick
I didn’t know how long we’d driven for. I didn’t have a phone, or a watch, but the sky slowly growing dark let me know that we’d traveled for quite a bit of time. We would have been there already if we’d just gone by plane, but at least the drive was useful, so I couldn’t even complain about it.
For most
of the drive, John and I had gotten to know each other. Once we started chatting, the conversation just flowed naturally, and I’d learned to let my guard down around him pretty quickly. I’d figured my first impressions of him had been pretty biased. Like I’d told him, no one had given me much information about him besides his name, and I’d even had to ask which pack he came from.
I knew absolutely nothing about him, but I’d judged him based on gossip I’d eavesdropped on before, and by his actions and words. But he had technically been in the same situation as me, the only difference was because he was an Alpha. I’d seen myself as the more disadvantaged of the two of us, when that wasn’t really fair.
As we walked, though, I got to know more about him. What he liked, what he disliked, the things he’d liked growing up, his taste in music and hobbies. He’d told me his age, and I realized we had a bit of an age gap between us, but it wasn’t that big a deal. After we were done with the first music CD, he’d let me look at the other stuff he had, and while most of it wasn’t music I was familiar with, I was still able to find sounds that I loved.
Sometime while we were talking, I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, John was shaking me awake. My eyes fluttered open, and I realized I had my neck twisted against the seat so the side of my head was pressed against the headrest. I stretched my body out as I yawned, and rolled my neck to get the crick out of it. I frowned, and looked over at Dominick.
It was totally dark outside. It didn’t hinder my eye sight, but it meant I should be asleep. Aside from the nights I ended up running in my shifted form with the other Omegas, I rarely stayed up so late. And even then, we usually ended up asleep in a pile before midnight, then got woken up early in the morning to change and head back home, only to fall back into bed again for a few more hours.
Still, even though I could see, I had no idea where we were. Aside from going into the town near home a few times over the years, and the nightly runs, I hadn't really been out much, and definitely never this far from home.
