by J. L. Wilder
“That’s definitely not necessary,” Vince said, thinking that he’d rather have a slightly twisted leg for the rest of his life than go through something like that. “No re-breaking please.”
“I mean, it’s probably fine, given that you’ve been walking around on it,” Griff said. “But we should still check. Just to be sure. Are you having any pain?”
“No,” Vince lied. It was only a little lie, he justified to himself. The pain had been considerably less as the days had gone on. He was sure it was nothing to worry about.
“He’s not in pain,” Dax teased. “He’s heartsick, that’s all.”
“Shut up, Dax,” Vince growled. The last thing he wanted was to talk about the girl in Wyoming.
Earl raised his eyebrows. “Met someone on the road, eh?”
“Not really,” Vince said. “Just a human girl. Nobody special.” It ate at him to refer to her in those terms. There had been something special about the girl, and it felt like doing her a disservice every time he said otherwise. But he didn’t want the others to get the true measure of how much he cared about her and how much she still lived inside his head.
The truth was that he had been unable to think of anything else since they had left Wyoming. The long hours spent on his motorcycle driving back here had given him nothing but time to let his mind wander directly to her. It was infuriating. Usually, long bike rides were one of his favorite things. Usually they helped him to clear his head, to focus on problems that needed solving or simply to enjoy the world around him.
But he couldn’t do any of that now. All he could do was think about her.
When dinner was over, he fetched another beer out of the fridge and made his way out onto the porch, glad that, for the first time in weeks, he would be able to seize some time alone. It was unlikely that any of the others would come out here. Earl would be cleaning up the dinner dishes, and Dax and Ace were likely to park themselves in front of the TV and argue over which show they should get caught up on. Tommy, he thought, would most likely be found either helping with the dishes or relaxing in his bedroom, making the most of his own opportunity for personal space.
But he had misestimated. Griff was already out on the porch, drinking a beer of his own and finishing the cigar he’d started earlier.
“Come sit,” the alpha said.
That was an order. Vince joined him.
“So,” Griff said expectantly. “A girl?”
“She wasn’t anything,” Vince said again. “Really. Just a human I met at a bar. I’ll never see her again.”
“Then why are you still thinking about her?” Griff asked.
“I’m not.”
“Don’t lie to me, Vince.” It was gentle, but it was still an order. “Dax said what he said for a reason.”
Vince sighed. “Okay. She’s been on my mind a bit. But I know that it can’t ever be anything, Griff. She’s a human, and I’m a shifter...it wouldn’t work out.”
“Some shifters do mate with humans, you know. It’s happened before.”
“You’re not telling me that because you think I should do it, though.”
“No, I’m not,” Griff agreed. “The four of you are in a mess, Vince. You have no alpha. Until you solve that problem, you have no future. Unfortunately, it’s not a good time for any of you to run off in search of love. No matter how much you liked her. So put her out of your mind.”
Vince nodded and took a long swallow of his beer.
Put her out of your mind.
That had been an order from his alpha.
He would definitely be able to do it now, right?
Chapter Eleven
2 Months Later
AMY
“Amy! I’m going on my break!”
Amy raised a hand to her coworker, Brian, indicating that she had heard his call and would cover his tables for the next fifteen minutes until he returned. Working as a server was not her favorite thing she’d ever done.
For one think, there was the issue of the customers. When she had been bartending, she had had to deal with raucous barflies from time to time, but at least they were generally in a good mood. If they had ever veered too far into drunkenness or violence, she had had bouncers on hand to eject them from the building.
The customers at the restaurant were different.
And this was a nice place, Amy thought with some bitterness. People should be happy to be here, shouldn’t they? They should be enjoying their night out. They shouldn’t be wasting their time whining about every little thing that went wrong with their meal.
She approached one of her four top tables, glasses of soda and water balanced carefully on a tray, and began to set them down. “Your drinks,” she said, forcing a pleasant tone into her voice. If you couldn’t keep things cheery, she knew, you didn’t belong in the service industry.
“We ordered these almost twenty minutes ago,” one of the women snapped. “What’s taking you so long?”
They had not, in fact, ordered the drinks twenty minutes ago. They had ordered about five minutes ago. Even that was longer than it usually took Amy to deliver drinks, though. She had had to stop and clean up a spill at another table. “I’m sorry for your wait,” she said, not bothering to make excuses. These women didn’t really want to hear about her life. She knew enough to know that.
“Well, I think our dinners should be comped,” another woman said archly. “We come here all the time, you know. We’re regulars.” As if that made them royalty.
“I’m very sorry, but I can’t comp the meals,” Amy said. “I’m happy to comp this round of drinks for you, though.” Of course she wasn’t happy to do it at all. It drove her crazy when people got whatever they wanted just by complaining.
Funny, she thought. A few months ago all I would have cared about was making these women happy. I wouldn’t have even been thinking about the ways in which they were making me angry, or whether they deserved free drinks.
It was as if her whole perspective on the world had changed.
She made her way back to the POS machine and pulled up their ticket, absently keying in the commands that would give them the drinks for free. As she did so, she slipped her cell phone out of her pocket and fired off a text.
Work is driving me crazy.
The phone buzzed with a response before she even had a chance to return it to her pocket. It was as if Veronica had been waiting to hear from her. Any word from any animal hospitals yet?
Nothing. I shouldn’t have even bothered applying.
Of course you should! You’ll be a great vet!
She wasn’t qualified to be a vet yet, though. First there would be years of work as a technician. But at least she would be working with animals instead of people. Animals were simple. They made sense. They had basic needs and desires that Amy could understand and meet.
People were crazy.
The dinner order came up for one of Brian’s tables, and Amy loaded it onto her serving platter and ferried it over to the family that was waiting for it. As she did, she heard snorts from across the restaurant. She tried her best to keep herself from looking, but eventually she couldn’t help it—she looked up.
The women who had been angry about their sodas were staring at her with ugly looks on their faces. “I don’t know why that table gets their food before we do,” one of them said loudly.
That’s not even my fault! Amy thought. Everyone got their food when the kitchen put it up. Still, she could see her tip dwindling away to nothing.
Bitches, she thought angrily. Tables as difficult as you to deal with should have to tip me more than anybody else, not less.
But two months ago, this experience would have caused a spiral of self-doubt. Amy would have been left wondering if she was really a terrible server, if her boss hated her, if she was going to be fired. She would have felt helpless and terrible about the job she had been hired to do, and it would have been that much harder to drag herself in the next day.
Now things were
different. Now Amy didn’t feel a shred of self-doubt.
She just felt righteously angry.
SHE ARRIVED HOME AT nine o’clock on the dot, exhausted from the hard day’s work.
The other servers on her shift had been planning a trip out to the bar across the parking lot from their restaurant, and Amy had badly wanted to join them. But she couldn’t. She knew that. Not with things the way they were.
At least she had a proper home to come back to. She had moved into this apartment six weeks ago, thankful to be leaving her parents’ house behind. She had known she would miss them—she did miss them—but it was also good to have a space of her own again. A place where no one was surprised when she let the dishes pile up or threw her dirty work clothes on the floor.
These were little rebellions. But even little rebellions had a way of satisfying the urge that had grown within her.
Being nice, being good, had never gotten her anywhere. She had ended up married to a man who had cut and run at the first sign of trouble. The world wasn’t nice, so why should she be nice?
She ran her fingers over the tough skin that had developed on her wrist where she’d been scarred by the bite of the wolf. That was what being nice got you. Bitten. She had been nice to that wolf, trying to free him from his trap, and he had turned on her.
Yet she didn’t regret that, she found. There was a chance that the wolf was still alive. It hadn’t been nearby when her father had found her in the woods, so maybe it had lived. If it had, Amy would consider it worth the effort she had been to in saving it.
Besides, her scar was cool looking.
You could see the circle its teeth had made around her wrist. It was impossible to hide. Her boss at work had insisted that she wear long sleeves or wrist guards, the way her coworkers with tattoos had to, but everyone she worked with had seen the marks.
Amy thought they were impressed.
They should be impressed. I was bitten by a wolf and I lived to tell the tale.
A year ago, she would have regarded her own story as a cautionary tale, a warning about what happened to girls who disobeyed their fathers and went into the woods alone at night. Now, though, it was proof of her own strength. It was a demonstration of what she was capable of.
She went to the refrigerator, took out a bottle of sparkling raspberry water, and twisted off the cap.
Then she went into the nursery.
At least, what would be the nursery.
Right now it was just an empty, unused room full of boxes she hadn’t got around to unpacking yet. But eventually she would have to paint it a soft color and fill it with baby things.
Amy couldn’t believe she was pregnant.
It seemed like she must be dreaming it. All that time she and Chris had tried to conceive, and nothing had happened. He had left her over it. And now...now she hooked up with a stranger one time, in an alley, no less, and she’d gotten knocked up.
She actually hadn’t believe it at first. She’d made her doctor repeat the test three different times. When it kept coming back positive, she had asked him if there was any way it could be a mistake.
Misunderstanding, he’d handed her a pamphlet about alternate options for dealing with surprise pregnancies.
But Amy had thrown that pamphlet away as soon as she’d gotten home. This baby was her miracle, maybe the only one she’d ever get. Of course she was going to keep it.
The only furniture in the room so far was an inexpensive rocking chair she’d gotten secondhand. Amy placed her sparkling water on top of a stack of boxes and settled herself in the chair. Propping her sore feet up on another box, she closed her eyes and imagined her future.
She imagined sitting in this room with her baby cradled in her arms, sleeping against her chest. She imagined low lights dancing on the ceiling—maybe some kind of projector that played constellations for him to look up at when sleep wouldn’t come. She imagined drifting off to the sounds of classical music—of course she would always play classical music for him, to help his brain develop.
She imagined transitioning from baby supplies to toddler toys. Sitting on a foam mat with her child and putting together a simple puzzle. Cuddling in this rocking chair and reading books together. Helping him to sound out the words as he got older.
She rested a hand on her stomach, thinking about it.
She didn’t think anybody else could see the little swell there yet, but Amy knew her own body, and she could feel it. Things were changing. Something was growing. It was miraculous. It reminded her every day that there had been no mistake, that the doctor’s diagnosis of her pregnancy had been real. She really was going to be a mother.
And Chris could have had this with me, she thought.
But could he have? Could she ever have become pregnant with Chris? They had tried so hard, after all, and nothing had ever come of it. She had even been told that she couldn’t get pregnant by her doctor at the time.
We should have gotten a second opinion.
Of course they should have. But it had felt so true. It had tallied so neatly with everything they had experienced over the last year. It explained why they hadn’t been able to get pregnant, didn’t it?
What had changed?
Could it be that the tests had been wrong? That didn’t seem likely.
Could it be that the problem had been with Chris, and not with Amy? But his test had revealed no issue.
Maybe I just needed a different man. A man who could give me something with a little more strength and power in it than what Chris had to offer. Maybe that man at the bar could do what he never could.
Amy wished she had gotten his name.
Of course, it was liberating not to have to worry about what anybody else thought as she set forth on this new adventure. It was good that she didn’t have to waste time wondering if there would be a custody battle, or if he would pressure her to terminate her pregnancy.
But at the same time, she would have liked her child to have a chance to get to know his father.
I’ll just have to be as good as two parents, she thought firmly. I can do that. I can be all the parent this baby needs.
Chapter Twelve
VINCE
Everything should have gone back to normal after their failed search for an omega. But somehow, it didn’t.
Vince took to spending his nights out on the porch, beer in hand, staring up at the stars and wondering what the future held for his pack. Things had been so much easier when he had be young. He had followed Griff’s orders unquestioningly. Blindly. He had never been required to think about what was best to do.
But things had begun to feel different lately.
He supposed it was because Griff’s term as alpha should have ended. Griff had been expecting to step down, to hand the reins to Ace. And he hadn’t been able to do it.
Whatever the reason, it was clear to Vince that Griff’s orders were becoming softer, somehow. More flexible. Less firm. Just tonight after dinner, Griff had casually ordered Vince and Dax to box up the leftovers for tomorrow’s lunch. It was a thoughtless order, one that had been given a thousand times, one that Griff had probably only phrased as a command out of habit rather than a desire to enforce his will.
Maybe that was why Vince hadn’t felt compelled to obey.
He had obeyed. The idea of going against Griff’s orders, even when they were so casual, was too frightening to contemplate. Going against Ace was one thing, but to defy Griff would be drawing a line Vince wouldn’t be able to come back from.
Griff was his alpha. Vince didn’t want that to change.
So he had taken the food to the kitchen alongside Dax, and he had wrapped it in wax paper and boxed it up and put it in the refrigerator for tomorrow.
But the whole time he had been doing so, he had been aware of the fact that there was nothing compelling him to obey.
It was strange. It was like finding out that gravity didn’t exist and that he was only standing on the surface of the earth because he
wanted to. That he could fly away if the urge to do so struck him.
It made him feel as though he might fall.
The screen door slammed shut behind him. Vince didn’t turn around. He didn’t much want to talk to whoever it was right now.
“You bailed out of there,” Tommy said.
Now Vince did glance back. Tommy was holding a beer of his own. He came to the railing where Vince was standing and leaned against it, facing the house, his back to the yard.
“Just wanted some space, I guess,” Vince said.
“You want me to go?”
“No. You can stay.”
Tommy nodded and took a swig of his beer. “You’ve been in your head lately,” he said. “Ever since we got back from our trip, really.”
“That was months ago.”
“Yeah, I know. I’ve been trying to decide whether or not to say something about it.”
“And you decided you would?”
“I wasn’t going to,” Tommy said. “But I don’t know. You seem unhappy.”
“Isn’t everybody unhappy?”
“You mean, like, existentially?”
“No. I mean everybody here in our house. Everybody in our pack.” Vince pushed off from the railing and made his way over to one of the seats on the far end of the porch. Tommy followed. “Look at Ace lately. He’s been storming around like he’s looking for someone to punch the daylights out of.”
“He knows something’s wrong,” Tommy said sagely. “He thought he was going to be the new alpha, but with every day that goes by—”
“It gets a little more obvious that that’s not going to happen,” Vince said. “Yeah. That’s what I’m talking about.”
“Why did we think it was going to be him in the first place?” Tommy asked.
“I mean, you were just a little kid when it happened,” Vince said. “But so was I, really. Dax probably remembers better than any of us. From what I can remember, it was just that he started bossing everyone around. And, you know, Dax was the oldest, so when Ace started taking the leadership role, everyone just figured it was because he was going to be the alpha.”
