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

by J. L. Wilder

  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.

  Most days, Weston tried to forget she had ever existed. That was difficult but thinking about he
r was even harder. It was painful, remembering what the two of them had once had.

  What they’d almost had.

  But no one had spoken about Charity in years. “Why are they talking about her?” he asked. The question came out sounding sharper than he’d intended it to.

  Robbie seemed to understand. “I’m not sure, exactly,” he hedged. “I came up here when I realized the direction the conversation was taking.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Which is...oh, you don’t really want to hear it, do you?”

  “I’m going to find out anyway, right?”

  Robbie sighed. “Hawk wants us to try and find her,” he said.

  Weston inhaled sharply. “What do you mean, find her?”

  “I mean...well, it seems like he’s organizing some kind of search,” Robbie said. “He wants us to see if we can figure out where she went.”

  “We’re not going to be able to track her,” Weston said. “She left six years ago. Even if there was a trail—which there won’t be, it’ll be long dead by now—I’m sure nobody remembers her scent well enough to follow it.” He didn’t think that even he would have been able to do it, and he certainly knew her scent better than any of the other members of the pack.

  “No,” Robbie agreed. “We can’t track her. I think he wants us to look for her, you know, the human way.”

  “What, file a missing persons’ report?”

  “Well, no, of course not,” Robbie said. “We couldn’t do that. She went missing six years ago. We’d be laughed out of the police station if we tried it. But I guess the feeling is that she might still be nearby.”

  “What would make Hawk think that?” Anguish gripped Weston. What if that was true? In his darkest moments, when he’d thought of leaving the pack and trying to find Charity, he had always managed to convince himself that it would be hopeless. That she was miles away, in another city by now, probably even in another state.

  But what if she wasn’t?

  What if she was here? What if she had been here this whole time?

  God, what if he could have just driven to the next town and asked around? What if finding her would always have been that easy? And was it possible that when she had left, she had expected him to do just that? Was it possible that she had spent the intervening years wondering why he had never come after her?

  No. That wasn’t Charity. She wasn’t like that. She wouldn’t play games with him in that way. That was one of the things he’d loved best about her. She had always been very upfront about what she wanted, very honest about her feelings.

  But then, he had never thought she would leave him either. And she had done that. She had disappeared without even saying goodbye.

  Most likely, he thought despairingly, she had never really cared about him that much at all. If she had, she wouldn’t have found it so easy to leave.

  Robbie had clearly taken note of his distress. “You should sit down,” he said, guiding Weston back into his room. Weston went willingly, feeling incapable of thinking for himself. He sat on the edge of the bed, and Robbie sat opposite him in the desk chair.

  “Hawk says she didn’t have any money when she left,” Robbie said quietly. “She didn’t have a bike or a car. It would have been hard for her to travel. And she wasn’t feeling hunted because Karl wasn’t like that. He wouldn’t have sent members of the pack after someone who left of their own free will.”

  “Sure,” Weston said quietly.

  “So, she’s probably still really nearby,” Robbie concluded.

  “Do you think so?”

  He was quiet for a minute. “It makes sense,” he admitted.

  “But why would Hawk want to go after her now?” Weston asked, feeling desperate.

  “I don’t know,” Robbie said. “Do you hope he finds her? Or would you rather he didn’t?”

  That was fraught. Part of him was already jumping for joy, internally, at the prospect of seeing Charity again. He had been so happy with her, so hopeful about the future. And now everything was such a mess. It was easy to let himself believe that if Charity came back, things would start to feel all right again.

  But Weston couldn’t deny that he was also angry at her. And it was a kind of anger that might not heal. Even if she returned full of apologies for having left him in the first place, could he ever really overlook that she had left? Could he ever look at her without reliving that awful morning when he had realized what she’d done?

  And then, his own personal feelings about the matter aside, there was another, more disturbing question. “What does Hawk want with her?” he asked Robbie. “I mean, why is talking about searching for her now?”

  “I don’t know,” Robbie admitted.

  “Because, like, she’s been gone for six years,” Weston said. Speaking the words brought it home to him in a new way. Six years. She had been gone for a quarter of his life now. The two of them had only been together for a few months. Those months had been wonderful, almost magical. But they were such a small slice of time.

  “He can’t possibly want her for any good reason,” Weston went on. “Right?”

  “It is kind of hard to picture Hawk having good intentions about anything,” Robbie agreed.

  “I don’t really want her under his thumb,” Weston said. He was angry with Charity, but he didn’t hate her. “I mean, she clearly doesn’t want to belong to the pack at all. And if she didn’t even want to belong to Karl’s pack—”

  “She would hate living under Hawk. Yeah, I see what you mean,” Robbie sighed. “I don’t think we’re going to have a whole lot of choice about it, though.”

  “He’s giving orders?” That was no surprise, really.

  “Yeah,” Robbie said. “He’s got half the pack down there already, and he’s handing out assignments. I thought you should know. Maybe you want to go out the window or something.”

  It wouldn’t be the first time Weston had climbed out his attic room window to avoid facing the rest of the pack. There was a convenient tree near the house that allowed him to climb down and disappear into the woods without being seen. He could spend the day there, and unless Hawk asked for him by name, all the assignments would be handed out by the time he returned. He could try to avoid the hunt for Charity altogether.

  But what if they were planning on doing something awful to her if they found her? He wouldn’t put it past Hawk to have that kind of plan. And if that was the case, the only way Weston could help would be if he was directly involved.

  “No,” he told Robbie. “I should go downstairs.”

  “Are you sure?” Robbie asked. “He hasn’t asked for you yet.”

  “He doesn’t seem like knows, does he?” Weston asked. “About me and Charity, I mean.”

  “No. Your name hasn’t come up at all,” Robbie said. “Did you ever tell anyone other than me?”

  “No,” Weston said. “But that doesn’t mean nobody found out. They spy.”

  “Yeah, but they don’t really keep secrets,” Robbie pointed out. “If they had dirt on you, they would have said something ages ago, probably.”

  Weston nodded. “All right,” he said. “I’m going down.”

  “I’ll go with you.” It was a mark of their friendship that Robbie so readily followed Weston down the stairs toward the kitchen. Weston knew that Robbie hated being sent on Hawk’s missions just as much as he did. And Robbie had liked Charity, certainly, and probably did not want to see her killed, but he hadn’t been in love with her. And she had left a long time ago.

  In the kitchen, Hawk was holding court. He looked up when Weston and Robbie entered. “Good, you’re here,” he said. “Make sure your bikes are in good working order. We’re going into the city this evening.”

  This evening? So soon? “What’s in the city?” Weston managed to ask, as if he didn’t already know.

  “Omega,” Gino said, flashing a massive and sickening grin.

  That did surprise Weston. “Omega? You think we’re just going to fin
d omegas walking around in the city?” That was incredibly unlikely. Omega wolves were even rarer than alphas. Every pack had an alpha—even if two or three rogue wolves grouped up together, one of them would emerge as alpha eventually—but not every group had an omega. The Hell’s Wolves were a perfect example of the latter phenomenon. They had certainly expected to have an omega—or maybe that had just been blind hope. Weston had been awfully young at the time, after all. But when the alpha/omega ceremony had taken place and Karl had handed the reins of the pack to Hawk, no omega had emerged. No one had been chosen.

  When a new alpha was named, the omega of his generation—if there was one—would be instinctively drawn to make a show of submission. These displays often led immediately into mating. Weston could still remember watching Hawk leer around at the young women in their pack, waiting for one of them to give a sign.

  None of them had.

  The smile had slowly disappeared from Hawk’s face as he’d realized he wasn’t going to get an omega. A few weeks later, the women of their generation had begun to disappear from the pack. Only two females remained now: Gino’s girlfriend Lita, and, of course, Norma. All the others were gone, and so was any hope of an omega for Hawk.

  Which was just fine with Weston. He didn’t think Hawk deserved a chance to mate and to pass along his genes. He supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised that Hawk felt differently about that. But really, had Hawk lost his mind? They weren’t going to be able to just find an omega in the city. Even if there was one, she would belong to another pack. She would be heavily guarded, well-protected. There was no chance the Hell’s Wolves would be able to bring her home.

  “Don’t be crude, Gino,” Hawk said. “Of course, we’re not going to find omegas walking around the city. Not omegas plural, anyway.”

  Weston realized what Hawk was getting at a moment before he said it. His heart sank into his stomach like a stone.

  “We’re hunting for Charity,” Hawk said. “You remember Charity, don’t you Weston? She was one of the very first to leave the pack, all those years ago. She left before I even became alpha. Why do you suppose she would do something like that?”