by J. L. Wilder
“You think she’s an omega,” Weston whispered.
“I think she’s an omega,” Hawk agreed. “I think she knew what she was, and she ran because she was afraid of who she might get stuck with when the alpha was announced.” He shook his head. “Poor kid should have toughed up and stuck around for a few days. She would have been fine once she realized it was me. I’m sure she was just afraid it would be someone like Robbie.”
Weston bristled. Robbie might have been a bit chubby and emotional sometimes, but he was the kindest member of the Hell’s Wolves.
“Robbie could never be an alpha,” Rick scoffed.
“No, he couldn’t,” Hawk agreed. “But Charity wasn’t that bright, was she?”
Weston had to bite his tongue. Charity had been very smart, in fact. Her wit used to keep him in stitches. Hawk was being sexist, he suspected.
“I think she’s probably living in the city,” Hawk said to Weston. “We’ll find her and bring her back here. Let her know that it’s all right, that I’m the one who made alpha, so she can stay with us.”
“Why are you just doing this now?” Weston asked. “How come it never came up before?”
“We were talking it over,” Hawk said. “Trying to figure out why no omega ever emerged. I mean, it doesn’t make sense, does it?”
“Doesn’t it?”
“For an alpha as powerful as I am? Of course, there should have been an omega. Somebody should have submitted. But nobody did. And then all the girls just left. Well, something must have happened, right? Something we never understood before. And then I remembered that Charity actually left before the ceremony.”
“I was the one who remembered that,” Rick said.
Hawk ignored him. “We never knew what made her leave,” he said. “I always kind of looped her in with the other girls leaving. It seemed like they all decided together. Like it was one event. But Charity leaving first means it might actually have been two separate events. She might have left for a totally different reason. And I could only think of one thing that would have driven her to leave.” He grinned. “She’s definitely the omega. I’m just surprised none of us ever realized it before.”
So that was it. “You want to bring her back and mate with her?”
“Of course,” Hawk said. “It’s my right as alpha. And it’s her duty. Besides, we hardly have any women in this pack. What are we going to do, make Gino and Lita have seventeen children?” He laughed at his own feeble joke. “That’s hardly likely. If you want a strong back, you need an omega. Everybody knows that.”
Weston felt on the verge of saying that if you wanted a strong pack, you needed to respect your packmates and not force them to rob liquor stores, but he managed to hold himself back. Still, his brain was buzzing. Was he really going to see Charity again, after all this time? Surely not. Surely, they wouldn’t actually be able to find her. It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Wouldn’t it?
“I want you with us, Weston,” Hawk said. “Robbie, you’ll stay behind. But Weston, I need you to be part of the team that goes into the city to find her. You’re one of our best trackers.” He regarded Weston expectantly.
That wasn’t an order, Weston realized.
He hadn’t been forced.
He couldn’t say no, of course—if he did, Hawk would realize he hadn’t given an order, and he’d correct himself. But he could say yes and then fail to follow through. He could ride with them to the city, split off from the pack, and go get a drink or something. He wasn’t under any obligation to actually look for Charity.
But he didn’t want to thwart Hawk’s instructions. Not this time.
Weston wanted to be the one who found Charity.
He wasn’t sure if he actually wanted to see her or not. In fact, he thought he probably didn’t. It would be hell to face her again after all this time. But at least he had what might amount to some answers. They had worried, back before she’d left, that she might be the pack’s new omega, or that he might be the alpha, and that their new roles would come between them.
She shouldn’t have left, he thought. Or she should have told me. I would have gone with her. He had to assume she had left him behind because she hadn’t wanted him to come. She hadn’t cared for him the way he’d cared for her.
But if anyone other than Weston found her, she might be hurt. And that was the last thing he wanted. He had to take some control over the situation while he could.
“Okay,” he said to Hawk. “I’m with you.”
Chapter Four
CHARITY
“We’re going out tonight,” Bethany announced. “I need a girls’ night.”
Charity didn’t look up from the silverware she was wrapping in napkins for tomorrow’s lunch service. “You always need a girls’ night,” she pointed out. “You say that every Friday evening.”
“This time is different,” Bethany insisted. She untied the uniform apron all the servers at the restaurant had to wear while they were on shift and threw it down on the table. Then she threw herself into a chair with equal force and drama. “I think Brian is going to break up with me.”
“But you always think Brian is going to break up with you,” Hallie said, sounding utterly mystified. Hallie was the youngest waitress on staff, just barely eighteen, and always carried an air of surprise that she was allowed to hang out with her older colleagues. Charity found her sweet.
“This time is different,” Bethany said again.
Charity highly doubted that this time was any different. Bethany’s boyfriend Brian was a philanderer and a scoundrel, but he always seemed to come crawling back to her after he’d done wrong. If they ever did break up, Charity thought, it would be because Bethany had finally summoned the courage to pull the trigger. Brian would never be the one to do it.
And she wished her friend would break up with him. Bethany could do so much better. She was beautiful, and she was incredibly smart—she had a college degree—and even if she was a bit of a neurotic mess a lot of the time, she was also kind. Any man would be lucky to have her.
Also, if she left Brian, maybe there wouldn’t be so much pressure to go out every weekend. Charity liked her friends, but she always felt out of place on these girls’ nights. There was no equivalent to them in the shifter world in which she’d been raised. The closest point of comparison was her early childhood, when she’d been surrounded by girls and women at all times, forbidden from interacting with the boys her own age. And that wasn’t a particularly pleasant memory.
Bethany hung onto Charity’s arm like a child begging for ice cream. “Please, Charity,” she said. “Please come out with me tonight. I’ll do anything.”
“I need to get some sleep,” Charity protested. “I open tomorrow.”
“That’s not for hours. Besides, you know you’re not going to go home and go right to sleep. You’ll watch reality TV for at least three hours first. You might as well spend that time with me.”
Charity sighed inwardly. She should have known better than to tell the girls at the restaurant about her reality TV obsession. There was something about those shows that appealed to her—probably the fact that so many of them featured packs of people living in a house together. That was a familiar dynamic, and one she missed now that she was on her own. But of course, her human friends would never understand that. They tended to think the whole thing was shallow and stupid.
“I want to go out,” Hallie said, bouncing a little on her seat.
Bethany raised an eyebrow. “Don’t you have a curfew?”
“No.”
“Yes, you do,” Charity said. “You were complaining about it two days ago.”
“Okay, fine, I do. But so what? I’ll blow it off. It’s not like my mom can do anything to me.” Hallie puffed her chest slightly. “I am eighteen now.”
Bethany smirked at Charity. She seemed to get a kick out of the idea that being eighteen meant anything special and was always deriding Hallie about her
insistence that she was an adult now. But Charity could relate. She had been on her own since she was Hallie’s age. Of course, Hallie’s parents were of the regular human variety, and they probably just wanted to see their daughter stay out of trouble and transition safely into independent living. It was a far cry from the situation Charity had been in when she was seventeen. If she hadn’t left, she would be mated to someone against her will right now.
She would probably be mated to Hawk.
And Bethany thought her boyfriend was bad!
“Angela!” Bethany called across the empty restaurant. “Kate! Isa! We’re all going out tonight!”
Angela, Kate, and Isa popped up from behind the bar. Charity knew there was a tiny spot in one of the corners that was out of view of the security cameras, and the three of them had probably been doing a few shots back there. They were tousle-haired and looked as though they were already more than ready to party. “Excellent,” Kate said. “Where are we going?”
“Pub crawl,” Isa enthused. She had been pushing for just such an activity for the past several weeks, ever since the new Irish pub at the end of the block had opened. “We can start at O’Flaherty’s and hit The Silver Grasshopper, Jack’s, Pour Henry’s...”
“We can’t take Hallie to a bunch of bars,” Charity objected. If she was going to go along on this excursion, she was going to try to at least exercise some common sense and control.
“Sure, you can,” Hallie said. “I have an ID.”
“See, she’s fine,” Isa said. “Let me see your ID, Hallie.”
Hallie pulled it out and Isa came over to examine it. “Well?”
“No one could hope to tell it from the real thing,” Isa declared, passing it back to Hallie. “She’ll be totally fine.”
“Excellent,” Angela said briskly. If the group of girls who worked at the restaurant could be said to have an alpha, Charity had often thought, Angela would be it. She was the oldest and had been working there the longest, but there was more to it than that. She had the same kind of born in leadership quality that Charity remembered having noticed in Hawk. It was a sort of magnetism, a way of getting everyone around her to listen to what she said and to follow her lead. And her confidence was an unbreakable thing, a sight to behold.
Now she hopped up onto the bar, swung her legs over, and dropped down on the other side. “Everyone wrap up your closing duties and let’s get going,” she insisted. “It’s still happy hour at O’Flaherty’s, and if we get a move on, we can catch two-dollar shots.”
The last thing Charity wanted was to do a bunch of shots and have to stagger home wasted, but she had to admit it had been a long time since she’d been out with the girls. Maybe it would do her good. “Let me just finish these last few silverware bundles.”
“We’ll help you out,” Angela said. “Won’t we, girls?” And moments later, she, Kate, and Isa had pulled up chairs and were helping to bundle up the silverware. This was a perfect example of Angela’s leadership ability, Charity thought. It was also the kind of thing Karl had been great at as an alpha, back when she was growing up with the pack. He had a way of getting everyone to do things without making them feel forced, letting them feel as if it had been their own choice to do what he wanted all along.
The girls visited their lockers, put away the things that belonged at work and picked up the things that didn’t. Charity exchanged her uniform apron for her purse and her sensible, comfortable shoes for a pair of nice wedge sandals. “Keys away,” said Angela firmly, and everyone who had driven that day hung up their car keys in their lockers, to be collected the following morning. Cabs would be arranged to get them home that night, or they would walk.
Hallie was practically jumping up and down. “My first real pub crawl!”
“Okay, but you’re going to have to reel it in a little,” Kate laughed. “Go up to the bouncer like that and he’s going to know you’re only eighteen.”
“Right, okay, how’s this?” Hallie affected a serious expression, heaved a sigh, and allowed her shoulders to slump. “Having three children is no picnic! Why, I never get a moment to myself! Have any of you filed your 1040s yet?”
“And just who is that supposed to be?” Isa demanded.
“My mother!”
“Maybe aim for a middle ground,” Charity advised.
It was less than a five-minute walk to O’Flaherty’s, and because they served food as well as liquor, Hallie’s fake ID wasn’t required for entrance. That seemed to take the wind out of her sails a bit, but Charity thought it was probably for the best. Better to give her a chance to relax a little before she had to try passing herself off as a genuine twenty-one-year-old. The six of them got a table at the back of the place and Angela ordered two rounds of shots to get the evening started.
The shots arrived, and in short order, the girls were on their way to being drunk. Isa and Angela left the table and went to play a game of darts, and Bethany began to unload the story of herself and Brian on the rest of the table.
“I just know he’s seeing someone else,” she complained, accepting one of Charity’s shots and knocking it back quickly. She made a quick face. “Maybe we should get a chaser.”
“But who would he be seeing?” Hallie asked, breathless with excitement. This was as good as a soap opera for her, Charity thought. Hallie was the only one in the group who seemed as unlucky in love as Charity was. Brian was a mess of a boyfriend, yes, but at least he was something. Kate and Isa were roommates and had a revolving door of one-night stands—they were forever regaling their coworkers with tales of their conquests. Angela, meanwhile, had been in a steady relationship for the past four years, and they all expected her boyfriend to propose at any moment.
“He could be seeing anybody,” Bethany said. “Probably one of those bitches he works with, though, I’ll bet you anything. Little tramps. Not one of them a day over nineteen.”
“Is that bad?” Hallie asked anxiously.
“It’s not bad to be young,” Kate said. “It’s bad that Brian is fooling around on Bethany with a younger woman. It means he’s only interested in women up to a certain age.”
“Do you think that’s true?” Bethany sounded agonized.
“Listen, Bethany, he doesn’t deserve you,” Kate said earnestly. “He’s a jerk, and you could do a million times better.”
“She’s right,” Charity agreed. “You’ve got to leave him. You can’t let him keep doing this to you. Either leave him, or else lay down the law and tell him if he doesn’t clean up his act, he’s going to find himself dumped.”
“That’s easy for you two to say,” Bethany sniffled. “You don’t know what it’s like to be in love. You wouldn’t think it was such an obvious choice if you’d ever really loved somebody.”
“Well, I hope I never do if it turns me into a complete doormat,” Kate said and threw back her second shot. “We need more drinks. I’ll buy the next round.” She got up and walked off to the bar.
Bethany watched her go. “Did I make her angry?” she asked.
“It wasn’t the most tactful thing you could have said,” Charity admitted.
“Are you angry?”
“No.” How could she expect Bethany to know that she had loved someone once, that she had decided to walk away from a life with someone she cared about? She had never told them any stories about her past. It would have been nice, she thought suddenly, to have been able to talk to someone about everything that had happened. Maybe she would feel more over it if she’d ever been able to air out the pain. But her friends were all pure human. No one in her life was a shifter. How could she possibly tell them her stories? Too much would have to go unsaid.
Kate returned with the drinks. She seemed to have shaken off Bethany’s comment, and she passed dirty martinis around the table. Hallie examined hers with an air of frank curiosity, took a tiny sip, and made a face.
“You don’t have to drink it,” Kate assured her.
“No, I’ll drink it,” Hallie
said. “Just takes some getting used to is all.”
Charity closed her eyes and shook her head. At the same time, she couldn’t help wondering what it had been like when her old friends in the Hell’s Wolves had started drinking for the first time. Karl had always been very strict about underage smoking and drinking—you could do what you wanted when you were of age, he told them firmly, but children in his pack would take care of themselves. Because the rules had been the same for everyone, there had been no peer pressure, no one friend more advanced and worldly than the rest who had introduced them to alcohol at a young age. They had all been perfectly clean and sober up until the point when Charity had left them.
Her packmates—those of her generation—had belonged to two different litters and had, therefore, had two separate birthdays. She imagined they would have delayed the party until the younger group, her own, turned twenty-one. But when that day came, it would have been uproarious. There would have been a party with the older pack members first, of course, where they would have been served beer or wine or something classy like that. Then they would have gone into the woods with a bottle of whiskey or tequila to really cut loose.
Charity felt a sharp pang, suddenly, at the realization that she had missed that. Her brothers and sisters had come of age without her.
It always surprised her when something like this happened. Her thoughts of pack life and even of Weston were a dull, constant ache, something that never really left her and rarely had the power to surprise her. But sometimes some thought or memory of her old life would spring up as if from nowhere, taking her completely by surprise, knocking her back on her heels.
Her stomach rolled. She thought she might be sick.
She had given up so much to save herself from the omega’s fate.
Hallie, Kate, and Bethany were staring at her. “Charity?” Bethany said. “Are you okay? You look sort of green.”
