Hell's Wolves MC: Complete Series Six Book Box Set

by J. L. Wilder

  Chapter One

  Ten years later...

  “It’s pouring outside,” Harley said, crossing the threshold into the kitchen of the house he shared with the rest of his pack. Everyone was gathered in the kitchen at the moment, eager to see whether he’d brought anything good back for dinner, and he hated to let them down, but he had to show empty hands. “All the animals were hiding,” he explained. “There was nothing to hunt.”

  Amy groaned. “I knew we should have just gone to the grocery store.”

  Harley did not respond. He knew he had the authority to silence her—it would have been easy—but that was a power he hated to use. It was uncomfortable to think about his power over the rest of his pack.

  Even though having a small pack posed a challenge, Harley was glad there were only six members of this chapter of the Hell’s Wolves. If there had been more, he would no doubt have been forced to flex his authority as an alpha. But as things stood, he could leave it to one of his brothers to respond to Amy.

  It was Mark who did. Harley wasn’t surprised. Mark was usually the one to speak up when there was leading to be done. Jamie had said once that even though they were all endowed with equal power, Mark was the real alpha of the Hell’s Wolves. If anyone else had said that, it would have felt like a slight, but Jamie was just acknowledging the truth as he saw it.

  “You know we can’t go to the store,” Mark said now. “We don’t have the money for things like that.”

  “We could afford it,” Amy grumbled. “We’d just have to stop spending money on other things.”

  “You’re not in charge of the budget,” Mark responded.

  “I’m not in charge of anything.”

  “That’s right. Your job is to finish up school and get a job. Start contributing to the income of this household. When you do, you can talk to me about how we spend our money, and not before. Is that understood?”

  “I’m still a member of this family,” Amy snapped.

  Mark’s tone changed. His voice now carried the weight of a command, the weight only a true alpha’s voice could bear. “Enough, Amy.”

  He didn’t need to say anything more. Amy opened her mouth as if to respond to him, but of course, she couldn’t do it. No words came. The command she’d been given might as well have been a gag.

  “That was a little harsh,” Jamie murmured.

  Harley turned to his other brother. Jamie was the youngest of the three, ten minutes younger than Mark and three minutes younger than Harley himself, and although all three men looked exactly alike, Harley often felt he could see more youth in Jamie’s facial expressions than he did in Mark’s or when he looked in the mirror. He was soft spoken bordering on stoic, and even more reticent to use his power than Harley was.

  Mark didn’t argue with Jamie’s rebuke, just gave a slight nod and turned to Reese, who was standing before the stove and stirring something in a large cookpot with a big wooden spoon. “Just soup tonight, then,” he said.

  Reese nodded. “It should be enough,” he said. “I’m making it extra hearty. Potatoes and onions and cheese and noodles—”

  “Is there any meat in it?” Amy asked. Harley knew she knew perfectly well there wasn’t. There was never any meat to be had unless someone brought it back from a hunting trip. They were lucky to have the noodles and cheese, neither of which came from Piper’s little garden out back.

  No one answered Amy’s question. Piper, who had been pouring water into glasses around the table, now pulled down a stack of bowls from one of the high cupboards. She moved around the room, handing one to each member of the pack. Harley joined the line for soup and thanked Reese as he ladled a scoop into his bowl.

  They crowded around a long table to eat. Usually, dinner was the most enjoyable time of the day for Harley. He loved being around the rest of his pack, loved joking with Reese, loved getting into debates with Amy, loved Piper’s earnest stories about the books she was reading and the new plants she was learning to grow. He was proud of all the younger members of his pack, and he loved them like family. He also enjoyed the time spent with his two brothers. What they had made for themselves here was wonderful, he thought.

  But tonight was different. Tonight was not enjoyable. Harley thought it was mostly because of the way Amy kept looking at him—as if he’d let her down. Regardless of the fact that she shouldn’t have mouthed off the way she had, he knew that he’d failed in his responsibility to the pack. Everyone would go to bed not quite satisfied tonight, and all because of him. That wasn’t a good feeling. It was hard to enjoy his soup, even though it was very good.

  Piper gathered the dishes after dinner and went to wash them, and Amy and Reese headed upstairs to make a start on their homework. When the younger generation grew up, Harley knew, things would be different. There would be money then, and they would be able to afford weekly trips to the grocery store. They would be able to hire an electrician for the house, and they’d have heat in the winter and maybe even air conditioning in the summer. And their bikes, the old bikes they kept running with nothing more than spit, string and ingenuity...they’d be able to trade them in, replace them with new and reliable bikes. They wouldn’t have to fear what could happen on a long run.

  It would be a different time for the pack. A better time. But right now, that time seemed a long way away to Harley.

  And he knew that, when it eventually did come, it would bring problems of its own along with it.

  OF THE THREE TRIPLETS who led the Hell’s Wolves’ Idaho branch, Jamie Driscoll was the farthest removed from his animal side. For his part, he liked to think of it as being more in touch with his humanity than the others. It was hard for Jamie to allow himself to be carried away by emotion, the way his brothers could.

  It was a quality that rendered him deeply practical.

  This practicality, he thought, was probably why Mark had delegated such things as the pack’s budget and finances to him. Jamie kept a ledger of all the money they brought in every week—his salary from the accounting firm where he worked, the money Harley made doing odd jobs, and occasional contributions from Piper’s babysitting jobs. He had told her to keep that money for herself, but she pointed out—and Jamie had to concede—that she had nothing to spend it on.

  If only the other teens in their pack were as easy and accommodating as Piper. She was like him, he thought, with a real sense of priority. Even though she was only fifteen years old, she was the most mature of the younger half of their pack.

  Reese, who had just turned sixteen, was a good kid. Jamie liked him. But he was still more interested in goofing around and having fun than he was in contributing to the pack. That would have to change in a few years, when he graduated from high school. He would have to take on more chores. He would have to learn to hunt, which he’d been reluctant to do, and he’d probably have to see about getting a job.

  Amy, the oldest at seventeen, was nothing short of difficult. Although she could be compelled to obey by Jamie or either of his brothers, she was still hard to control. She questioned everything she was told to do. Nights like this one were becoming more and more common.

  And Jamie, as the most practical of the brothers, had come across a problem.

  He opened the window of the library, where he was consulting the pack’s ledgers, and leaned out onto the porch. Harley was leaning up against the railing and smoking a cigarette. “Put that out,” Jamie said.

  “Fuck off,” Harley replied amiably.

  “I’m serious. I need to talk to you. And Mark. Come in here.”

  Harley raised his eyebrows quizzically and flicked his cigarette butt into the yard. He turned and went into the house. Jamie shut the window and sat down to wait for his brothers’ arrival.

  They came in together. Mark closed the door behind him and took a seat in the armchair, while Harley stood, leaning against the wall. “What’s going on?” Mark asked.

  Jamie turned the ledger to face his brothers so they could read what he’d b
een looking at. “We’re spending more money than we’re bringing in,” he said.

  “Still?” Harley asked. “Even after all the cuts we’ve made?”

  “We just aren’t making enough money,” Jamie said. “Look. Here’s our budget, right?” He pointed to a row of numbers beneath it. “This is food. This is our mortgage payment. This is what we pay for odd expenses, like visits to doctors. And this is the money we’re putting away every month for...well.” He looked around at all of them. “The point is, we can’t maintain a household of this size. Not with the amount of money we’re bringing in.”

  “Amy will be graduating in a year,” Harley pointed out. “She can get a full-time job then.”

  “We can’t be sure Amy will choose to stay with us,” Mark said, his voice a deep rumble. “She hasn’t been happy.”

  “She wouldn’t leave,” Harley protested. “We took her in when she was just a kid. She had nowhere else to go, and we gave her a home. She wouldn’t abandon us now.”

  “We don’t know what’ll happen,” Mark said. “You know how this works as well as I do. When she comes of age, the alpha bonds will break. She’ll have a choice then. She’ll either recommit herself to the Hell’s Wolves, become one of us for life, and get her tattoo, or she’ll leave us forever.”

  “And the other two will follow soon after,” Jamie said, nodding. “But that’s not the biggest problem. Whether they stay or go, whether they find jobs or don’t, we’re going to run out our savings in a few months. Something has to change.”

  “Where else can we cut corners?” Harley demanded. “We’ve already slashed our food budget. Nobody has any spending money, and the kids haven’t had new clothes in over a year.” He chuckled a little. “No wonder Amy’s pissed off. I would be too if I was wearing clothes that didn’t fit me anymore.”

  It was so like Harley, Jamie thought, to laugh at a moment like this. It was at once his favorite and least favorite thing about his brother. He never took anything seriously.

  In answer to his question, Jamie rested a finger on a line of the budget. “Here,” he said. “This is what we have to cut. We have to stop putting money aside.”

  Harley’s eyes cut to Mark.

  “We can’t stop saving,” Mark said. “That’s vital. That money is for our omega, and we need one. It’s the only way we can hope to grow our pack.”

  “Do we even want to grow our pack right now?” Jamie asked. “Money’s so tight.”

  “You know we need to do this,” Mark said. “We need to find someone who can help us carry on our bloodline. And it’s best to do that while we’re young and strong, while we’ll have time to help raise the pups and identify our heir.”

  “Then we need to increase our income,” Jamie said. “It’s the only other choice. You two will have to look at getting jobs again.”

  “Hey, I’ve got a job,” Harley said, holding up his hands.

  “You need to work more,” Jamie said. “You need to get more clients.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  Jamie turned to Mark, but Mark was already shaking his head. “You know what happens,” he said. “You know why I can’t.”

  “I know you have to try,” Jamie said bluntly. “Otherwise, we’re going to be broke.”

  Mark stood up and walked out of the room.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Harley said quietly.

  Jamie shook his head. “Someone had to tell him,” he said. But deep down, he agreed with Harley. He wished there was another way, one that wouldn’t cause his brother such pain.

  MARK HIT THE GROUND running as soon as he burst out the front door of the house the pack shared. He was in the woods in a few strides, his worries left far behind him. He took comfort in the strain of his muscles as he ran, in the way the shadows of the trees swallowed him and the way the earth felt beneath his paws as he dug in and pushed harder, ran faster.

  Mark Driscoll was always most at home in wolf form.

  Had he not been born a triplet, he thought, he would still have been the alpha in his generation. Most days, he felt more like a wolf than a man, and he caught himself walking around scenting the air, looking for danger. He was fiercely protective of the rest of his pack and would have done anything to keep them safe and well fed.

  But getting a job?

  The fact that he couldn’t hang onto a job was humiliating. It felt like a slap in the face to have Jamie bring it up so casually, as if it were just something Mark had chosen not to do. As if he was being lazy. The truth was that Mark would have loved to be able to hold a job, to bring home a paycheck to his family the way Jamie could. But every time he was employed, he ended up quickly getting fired.

  Harley’s theory was that it had something to do with being the dominant alpha in their little triumvirate. It was rare for a pack to be led by three alphas—so rare, in fact, that Mark had never heard of it happening before his own family. The only other instance he knew of that resembled his own was that of his grandfather—or perhaps grandfathers would be the better term, since it had never been clear which man had sired their father.

  Whatever the reason, Mark had never been able to tolerate being subordinate to someone else. Any job he managed to get went south because he wasn’t able to submit to the authority of a boss or supervisor. Things would roll along well enough for a few days or weeks, but eventually, the boss would say something Mark disagreed with, and he wouldn’t be able to keep his mouth shut. He had to make his voice heard. He had to do things in the way he felt was best. It wasn’t a choice. It was a visceral need, like hunger or lust or the need he felt now to run through the forest.

  In the best of cases, Mark would simply be fired from his jobs. But things had gone far worse than that in some instances. His animal self was never far from the surface, and it tended to emerge when he was provoked. More than once, he’d had to run sprinting from an office building, diving around corners, desperate to get out of sight so that he could shift freely.

  More than once, he’d almost been seen.

  It would have been nice to get a job. He knew that. It would have gotten his pack out of the bind they were in. But he didn’t think he could stand the humiliation that would come along with trying and failing again. He didn’t think he could force himself, again, to try to submit to someone who shouldn’t have authority over him.

  A job was not the answer. But there would have to be an answer. He would have to think of something else, some other way to solve the problem Jamie had pointed out.

  And Jamie’s proposed solution wouldn’t do. They couldn’t give up on their plan to purchase an omega.

  Mark’s family was pureblood for generations. He and his brothers were descended from alpha/omega matches as far back as anybody could remember. It was that careful breeding that had strengthened the alpha gene in their family, allowing all three of the identical triplet boys in his litter to be born with it. And if the brothers were careful to breed with an omega—a strong omega, one capable of carrying litters from multiple fathers—the gene would be passed along.

  The only problem was, it was hard to find omegas, and even harder to find good strong ones who hadn’t been used or diminished themselves by going on the run. Most omegas had lost a good deal of their health and strength by the time they reached breeding age, unless they had been raised within a pack. And the Hell’s Wolves didn’t have one.

  So, they were going to have to buy one.

  And that would take a lot of money. Mark and his brothers had been saving up for two years now, putting aside as much as they could from every paycheck. That savings would give them enough to live on for a while, if it came down to it...but then, they would have to sacrifice the idea of getting themselves an omega.

  Unless they could figure out another way to get one. Unless they could figure out how to do it without paying, and without compromising quality.

  These thoughts chased each other through Mark’s head as he ran in the pale light of the rising moon, and
by the time he returned home, sweaty, exhausted, and human, he had the beginnings of a plan.

  Chapter Two

  “Girl! Up!”

  The bars of the cage in which Maddy lived were rattling. She opened her eyes to see one of the Death Fangs glaring in at her. She didn’t know his name—she didn’t know any of their names—but in the dim light, she could see that it was the one with the red hair and the scar on his face. Good. She feared him less than most of the others, although she never would have described him as kind.

  Kindness felt like something that had happened to Maddy once in another life. She could remember her childhood, of course. She remembered the big house she’d grown up in and the well-manicured yard where she’d been allowed to play. She remembered having clean clothes and as many books to read and movies to watch as she could have asked for. Most of all, she remembered the feeling that she was special, that she was more important than the others in her pack.

  In those days, being an omega had felt like being a princess. Now, it was more like a curse.

  The bars of her cage shook again, and Maddy got to her feet. The cage she lived in now was an improvement over the one she’d been given when she’d first been sold to the Death Fangs by the boy who had kidnapped her from her yard. That cage had been small and free-standing, and Maddy hadn’t even been able to stand up in it, even though she had only been thirteen years old at the time. Since then, she’d been moved into a cage that was more like a room—more like a jail cell, really. It had concrete walls on three sides, and the front was formed of iron bars. She had a cot in here, and a working toilet, and even a sink.

  Sometimes, when things were bad, Maddy forgot herself and actually felt comfortable in these surroundings. It could be worse, after all. The cage she’d been in before had been worse. And then there were the yearly auctions. Every year, the oldest omegas the Death Fangs had captured were put up for auction. Maddy had no idea what became of them, but she didn’t imagine it was anything good.