by J. L. Wilder
He carved thick slices of ham and passed them to Charity and Lita, then began to serve the others at the table. “How was work today, Robbie?” he asked.
“Stingy tippers,” Robbie said. “But Melissa came in again.”
“Is that the girl you’re dating?” Charity asked. “Weston told me about her.”
“I don’t know if we’re dating, exactly.” Robbie blushed. “She’s not like us.”
“Yeah, you can’t date a human,” Gino said, reaching across the table for the mashed potatoes. Norma slapped his hand gently, then passed him the dish.
“That’s not true,” Charity said. “You can date a human if you want to, Robbie.” She glanced at Weston. “Every couple has obstacles in their way. If you like her enough, and if she likes you, the two of you can find a way to overcome them.”
“You think so?” Robbie smiled
She answered his smile with one of her own. “Definitely,” she said. “Any girl would be lucky to have you.”
The conversation moved on to a security system Rick had been hired to install at a nearby mansion. He detailed the elaborate property and the many precautions the owners were taking to protect it. Charity listened in amazement to his descriptions, wondering what it would be like to own a home of that size. She imagined it would be very lonely. Even the apartment she’d lived in during her human years had been too spacious. The cabin where she lived with her Hell’s Wolves brothers and sisters was perfect. She loved sharing spaces, crawling over each other, bunching up on the couch to watch TV at night.
It was honestly part of what had made these last few months of her pregnancy so difficult. She had been isolated, away from the rest of the family. Now she closed her eyes and allowed herself to enjoy the familiar noise—their voices crashing over each other, the skin on skin as they bumped elbows reaching for their favorite dishes.
A mild, cramping sort of pain announced itself in her lower abdomen, but Charity tried not to flinch or complain. The last few weeks had featured several pains like this—part of late-stage pregnancy, she knew—but if Weston knew about it, he would panic. She was glad he hadn’t given her an order to update him on how she was feeling. Weston was conscientious about not giving orders when he didn’t need to—he hated taking choice and free will away from his packmates.
The pain passed and she looked up. Weston was watching her carefully. Had her face betrayed something? She said nothing, and neither did he, and after a moment he let his attention turn to something Gino was saying.
The pain struck again. It was sharper this time, and Charity doubled over and cried out softly.
“Charity.” Weston was on his feet immediately. “What is it? What’s wrong? Do you need to lie down?”
“No—I don’t know—something hurts.”
“She’s in labor,” Norma said.
“What?” Charity’s eyes flew open. “It’s a week early.”
“That happens all the time, honey. Those babies are ready now.”
Hands lifted Charity under the elbows and eased her down onto the floor. The pillow that had been behind her back was placed beneath her head.
Weston knelt beside her. “It’s all right,” he said quietly. “We can do this.”
She looked into his eyes, overwhelmed with love and trust, and knew that he was right.
Chapter Twenty
CHARITY
The labor was easier than Charity had anticipated, just as the rest of the pregnancy had been. She had been quickly delivered of eight pups. They had all been cleaned and swaddled, and now they lay beside her on the bed.
She was in awe of them. They were so beautiful. Three boys and five girls. A whole new litter. A whole new start for their family.
When her labor was over, when the babies had been born, Weston had carried her carefully up the stairs, pausing every few steps to kiss her. That journey was a haze for Charity. She had been swimming in adrenaline from the pain of the past few hours and endorphins that had accompanied the realization that her children were finally here.
She had wanted to hold them, all of them, right away.
“You can barely keep your eyes open,” Weston had said softly, kneeling beside her and stroking the hair out of her eyes. “Rest for a minute.”
“But aren’t they hungry? Don’t they need to be fed?”
“Rest. They’re still being cleaned up. I’ll bring them to you when they’re ready, I promise. You won’t miss anything.”
Charity had wanted to protest, but it had been an order. And she was so exhausted...She’d closed her eyes and slipped away into the welcoming darkness.
Now she opened her eyes and thought, I’m a mother.
Of all the ways she had ever redefined her identity, this one seemed the most significant.
When she was seventeen years old, she had discovered she was an omega, and that discovery had prompted her to run away from home and the only family she’d ever known. More significantly than that, even, it had caused her to run away from the love of her life.
When she had returned to the Hell’s Wolves, she had discovered that she was meant to be mated to the true alpha of the pack. She was meant to belong to Weston. That discovery had changed the way she thought about her nature as an omega. She was pleased to belong to him in such a fundamental way.
But now she was a mother. And because of it, her life was no longer just about herself, just about what she wanted and needed. Now she was living for the eight tiny infants beside her.
“You’re awake.”
She looked up. Weston was standing over her. “When did you come in?” she asked him.
“I’ve been here the whole time.”
“I didn’t see you.”
“You were staring at the babies.” He smiled. “Not that I blame you. I’ve been staring at them too. Ready to try feeding them?”
“How long have I been asleep?”
“Only about an hour.”
“They must be so hungry.”
“They’ve had a pretty busy first hour of life.” One of the infants was slightly red in the face, squirming and fussing. “He looks a little upset,” Weston said, picking him up. “Should we start here?”
Charity accepted the baby and held him close. He seemed to know what to do instinctively, latching onto her engorged nipple like a professional. He suckled for a moment, and just as Charity began to worry that nothing would happen, she felt the flow of her milk begin. She smiled up at Weston, feeling a strange surge of pride. “It’s working.”
He sat down on the bed beside her, wrapped one arm around her shoulders, and cupped their son’s head with the other hand. “Think we could get two going at once?”
“We should probably try,” Charity agreed with a little laugh. “I guess I’m going to have to get used to feeding them that way, so that nobody has to wait longer than necessary.”
Weston helped to settle another one of the babies—a little girl this time—in Charity’s left arm. To help her balance the two of them, he arranged a pair of pillows on her lap. “How’s that?”
The baby girl was fumbling around, trying to find Charity’s nipple, her mouth opening and closing adorably. “Poor thing,” Charity said. “Help her, will you?”
Weston slid a hand beneath his daughter’s head and guided her to the right spot. “There you go,” he said as she latched on and began to suck in earnest. “Not as quick as your brother.”
“Don’t you give her a hard time,” Charity mock scolded him. “She’s doing a great job, aren’t you, baby?”
Weston chuckled. “She needs a name,” he said. “We can’t just call her baby.”
“I know,” Charity sighed. “I can’t even think about names right now, though. It’s such a big decision, and they’re so new. Can’t we wait until we know them a little better?”
“Don’t worry,” Weston said. “Robbie came up with an idea, actually.” He held up the baby he was currently rocking and showed her wrist to Charity. There was a ti
ny piece of pink string tied around the chubby appendage. “We’ve got different colors on each one so that we can tell them apart,” he said. “We can refer to them by their color until we pick the perfect names. That way you won’t feel like you have to rush it.”
“That’s so smart,” she said. “Robbie was so nice to think of it.” And to her surprise and mild embarrassment, tears filled her eyes.
Weston plucked a tissue from the box beside the bed and carefully dabbed her tears away. “It’s all right,” he said quietly.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m getting so emotional.”
“You just gave birth to a litter, Charity. You’re allowed to be.” He grabbed a sports drink from the bedside table and held it up for her to see. “Replenish some electrolytes,” he said. “You’ll feel better when you do.”
Her hands were full, so she allowed Weston to hold the bottle to her lips and tip it slowly back so she could drink. He held a hand beneath her chin to ensure that if any spilled, it wouldn’t fall on the babies in her arms. He’s thought of everything, she marveled. He’s going to take such good care of us. There couldn’t possibly have been a better mate anywhere in the world. She couldn’t have asked for a better father for her children.
He exchanged the babies in her arms for two others and helped them begin to feed. Once they were settled in and sucking away, he took the two who had just eaten and carried them, one by one, across the room.
“Where are they going?” Charity was surprised to find she felt an actual physical ache as distance grew between herself and her babies.
“Just here,” Weston said, smiling back at her. He was settling the babies into one of the four cribs positioned around the room. “They’re ready for a nap.”
“Are they okay?”
“They’re fine. Just full bellies.” He returned to the bed and sat down, careful not to jostle the four babies who were still waiting for their turn to be fed. “Do you think four cribs are enough?”
“Definitely. It’ll be good for them to share. They’ll feel better having their siblings around them,” she said. “I always felt better when we were growing up here knowing that I was sharing a room with all my sisters.”
“I used to like that too,” Weston admitted. “It was only after Hawk took over that I started wanting a space of my own.”
“Do you think they might ever come back?” Charity asked him.
“Who?”
“The rest of the pack. The ones who left.” She looked up at him. “Our missing brothers and sisters. Now that Hawk’s gone, do you think it’s possible they could come back and be happy here?”
“I think they could,” Weston said. She heard caution in his voice. “He’s the reason they left, after all.”
She nodded. “He’s the reason I left, and I consider myself lucky that you all came and found me.”
“But they have no way of knowing he’s gone,” Weston pointed out. “Even if they would be willing to come back and join the pack again, how could they possibly know that it’s safe to do so?”
Charity bit her lip.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Weston said. “I’d love to have them back. I miss them as much as you do. And I want our babies to grow up with all of their aunts and uncles in their lives.”
“Couldn’t you call them?” she asked.
“No. We didn’t get phones until after they left.”
“There’s no way to get in touch, then?”
“I’m afraid not.”
She nodded and exhaled slowly. “We’ll have to go after them, then,” she said.
Weston’s eyes widened. “Go after them? What do you mean?”
“We’ll do what Hawk did,” she said. “We’ll put the word out that we’re looking for them. We won’t put a bounty on their heads, but we won’t need to, because they’re not afraid of us. And we’ll go out looking for them ourselves.”
“Oh no,” Weston shook his head firmly. “Absolutely not, Charity. You’re not going out anywhere. Not until you’ve taken a nice long time to recover from giving birth. And maybe not even then! I don’t want these babies to be without their mother.”
“Oh, relax,” she said, laughing. “I didn’t mean me personally. I thought we could send the boys. Gino and Rick are good trackers, aren’t they? Not as good as you, of course, but we need you here.” She held out one of the babies she’d been feeding. “I think this little girl’s all done.”
Weston accepted the baby and carried her over to one of the empty cribs. “Gino and Rick are good,” he conceded. “But I don’t love the idea of splitting up the pack.”
“The pack’s already split,” Charity pointed out. “We’ve been split for years, ever since we came of age. It was Hawk who drove us all apart, who came between us and ruined the family we used to have. We can’t let him keep driving us apart now that he’s gone. We have a chance to heal those old wounds.”
Weston leaned over and kissed her gently on the forehead. “I think you’re getting sentimental because you just gave birth.”
“Maybe I am,” she said. “That doesn’t mean that I’m wrong, though.”
“No,” he agreed. “It doesn’t.”
“Will you think about it?”
He sighed. “To be honest with you, Charity, I don’t think I need to think about it. It’s a good idea. You’re right, we should be trying to get our family back. We should be fighting for the unity of the Hell’s Wolves.” He laughed a little. “God knows we could use the extra hands, now that we’ve got all these babies.”
She hardly dared to believe what she was hearing. “Are you saying you’ll do it?” she asked. “You’ll have the pack look for the ones we lost? You’ll put the word out?”
“I’ll do it,” he said. “I only wish I’d thought of it sooner.”
Charity’s heart soared. If this worked, they would have their family back. They would finally be together again, as they’d been before she had left the pack. Hawk’s damage would, at last, be fully healed.
IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, Charity slept when she could, although it seemed that she was almost always being jolted awake by the cry of one or more of her children. The time seemed to go by in a blissful fog, and Charity felt—in a surprisingly pleasant, soothing way—as if she were spending most of her time underwater. She was only half awake most of the time, lying propped against pillows as Weston or Lita carried baby after baby from their cribs to her arms, allowing her to feed them before they returned to sleep or to lie on their backs, babbling at the ceiling.
Gino and Rick were quickly dispatched on their mission to find the lost pack members. They called in every evening to report on what they’d seen that day, and although these reports were discouragingly vague, they did become a touchstone for Charity—she could tell what time of day it was each time the phone rang.
She also liked knowing where in the country Gino and Rick were. “We’re in Illinois,” Rick said over the phone one day, and Charity remembered when she and Weston had crossed the Mississippi River on their flight from Hawk. Another time, Gino reported that they were in Colorado Springs, and Charity thought of the beauty of Boulder.
Her body had recovered from childbirth, for the most part—just as she was made to give birth, she had realized, she was designed to bounce back quickly. Three weeks after their birth, Weston managed to get all the babies to sleep at the same time, and Charity seized the opportunity to spend several long, luxurious hours in the bath. When she was done, she wrapped herself in her bathrobe and returned to find her bed stripped and remade with fresh sheets and a piping hot omelet on a tray. Norma.
She smiled and sat down to eat, picking up a book to read while she did so. It felt like forever since she had had even a moment to herself.
As she finished up her meal, Weston came into the room. “Good omelet?”
“Amazing. Be sure to thank Norma for me.”
“I will, but she’s just so happy to do anything she can for you and the babies
.” Weston grinned. “Honestly, I think she sees it as you doing her a favor.”
“We don’t deserve her.”
“No, we do not.”
“How are the babies?”
“Awake. Playing with their feet.”
“I’ve been wondering,” she said. “Do you think one of them is an omega?”
He frowned, sitting down on the foot of the bed. “I would say that’s likely,” he said after an interval. “What makes you wonder that?”
“Well, I wonder everything about them,” she admitted. “I wonder if they’ll be good at sports. I wonder if they’ll be more wolf or more human. I wonder if they’ll get jobs someday, like Robbie. Like I did.”
“Me too,” he said. “I wonder if they’ll be any good on a bike.”
“But I keep coming back to the omega question,” she said.
“Would you prefer that we had one or that we didn’t?” he asked.
“It’s funny,” she said. “If you’d asked me that a year ago, I would have absolutely said that I didn’t want any child of mine to be an omega. I would have said it had caused me a lifetime’s worth of trouble, and that I’d never want my daughter to have to go through that.”
“How do you feel about it now?” he asked.
“Now...it’s almost crazy, but now I feel like it’s the best thing that could possibly happen to a person,” she said. “Provided she has the right mate, of course.” She reached out and took Weston’s hand in hers. “You’ve always taken care of me,” she said. “You’ve always made sure I had what I needed and that I was safe and comfortable. I think being cared for like that is a unique omega experience.”
He nodded. “If we have an omega for a daughter,” he said, “we’ll guard her carefully. We’ll make sure nobody ever treats her badly. And she’ll be lucky because she will have been raised by an omega mother who knows exactly what she needs.”
Charity smiled up at him. “How do you always say exactly the right thing?”
“I get lucky.”
