Chapter 2
E ven after all the batshit crazy things that had happened to me over the last few years, finding a half-naked, soaking wet, panicked omega in the middle of the woods during possibly the biggest storm we’d seen in years shocked the hell out of me.
At first, I thought she was an intruder or—until she opened that smart-ass mouth—even a child. She was tiny. Then, when I got the light on her, I saw just how bad the situation was, and I swear my stomach fell through my body to the goddamned forest floor. She wasn’t a lost hiker or someone trying to invade my land—no, she was on the run from something. There were bruises down the side of her face and scratches on her arms that were still bleeding and looked pretty deep. When she cried that she didn’t want to be in the dark, my heart broke. What the hell had this woman been through?
I took my time carrying her now-unconscious form to the ATV. The ground was muddy and slippery, and the last thing I wanted to do was tumble over while carrying her. Despite wrapping her in a blanket stored in the ATV, we were both completely drenched through by the time I made it to the cabin. Picking her back up, I kicked open the door and went straight in, not bothering to stop when my pack mates exclaimed in surprise.
"Who the hell is that?" Asher asked as I made my way towards my bedroom.
She was cold, too cold. The first thing I needed to do was warm her up. Now that we were out of the rain, her scent hit me in full force. Strawberries. She smelled like the sweetest strawberries, but there was a chemical undertone to her smell. She was definitely an omega, but something wasn’t quite right. Of course, something isn’t quite right , I reminded myself. I’d literally found this omega stranded in the woods in the middle of a storm, looking like death warmed over.
Without bothering to move the blanket, I placed her on my bed. Asher and Dylan were following me, both of them confused, but my focus was on the passed-out omega and not them.
“Where the hell did she come from?” Dylan asked, his pine and oak scent charring slightly with displeasure.
“I don’t know,” I said, reaching down and pulling off one of her shoes. It was a flimsy Mary Jane shoe that was in no way suitable for outside. “I found her in the woods looking like this. I don’t even know how she got there. She’s completely soaked through, though. We need to get her warm.”
Dylan nodded. “I’ll get the fire going in here, then,” he said, moving over to the hearth and grabbing a few logs. The cabin did have some electric heating, but nothing beat a good old roaring fire.
“Is she an omega?” Asher asked.
I nodded. “I think so.”
“Why the hell is there an omega running around in the middle of nowhere? We’re miles and miles from the nearest town here,” Asher said with a frown. “Her pack has a lot to answer for if they let her go wandering around in the rain.”
He wasn’t wrong—her appearance was bizarre, but that wasn’t what concerned me the most. “I’m not sure she’s out here willingly,” I said. “She said she escaped someone, and look at her face.”
My pack mates turned to look at her, and I could see the moment Asher recognised the bruising on her face. “Who the fuck did that to her?” he asked in a thundering voice, the anger rolling off him in waves.
“I don’t know,” I repeated. “I literally just found her. She was crying and begging not to be put back in the dark.”
“Is there any chance that whoever did that to her is still out there?” Asher asked, looking around the room. I knew him well enough to understand that move. He was checking all the exits, considering our security.
He had a point. What if the person who hurt this omega was prowling around out there? We didn’t know what they were capable of.
“Dylan,” I said, “can you check the perimeter when you get a moment?”
My pack mate nodded. “Of course. I’ll make sure everything’s locked up and all the cameras are on properly. We’re probably going to have some power outages, so I will make sure one of the generators is hooked up to the cameras.”
I had managed to remove both of the omega’s shoes and the flimsy, sad excuse for socks that she was wearing. Now, I had to remove whatever the hell was left of her dress. My hands went to the neckline, intending to rip it off, before hesitating. Should I just strip her naked immediately? She needed to be warm. I didn’t want her to freeze to death, but it also felt wrong stripping her completely naked.
“Ash, can you go grab her some clothes?” I said.
Asher nodded. “I’ll grab one of my hoodies. How about that?”
“Perfect,” I muttered.
The omega desperately needed a shower. Her long, wavy masses of black hair were matted and tangled, her nails were full of dirt, and her feet were filthy.
Dylan returned into the room, carrying a pile of towels. “Here, I thought these would help,” he said, handing them to me. His face was tense, his shoulders hunched. He wasn’t happy with the intrusion, which was understandable.
I smiled thankfully at him. “Can you start drying her hair a bit?”
He didn’t bother to reply, simply picking up one of the large towels and sitting on the bed near her head, scooping up piles of her hair and gently drying it.
“This is really tangled,” he said.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “We’re going to have to do something about that. But first, we need to make sure she doesn’t freeze to death.”
This was the last thing I had expected to happen when we’d decided to come away to the cabin for the winter. We all wanted a reprieve from our day-to-day lives, and despite living in a small city, there was something beautiful about living in a cabin in the middle of nowhere for the entirety of the summer months.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t summer. We had stupidly decided to come visit over the winter, when access was difficult. The skies had decided to open, and now we were subject to landslides and a whole litany of other issues.
Working as fast as possible, I stripped her clothing from her body, doing my best to avoid gazing at the more intimate areas as I did so. Her entire body was covered in bruises, and her ribs stuck out in a way that made it clear she was far too underweight. Had she been eating properly? That, combined with the bruises on her wrists and ankles, made me think she had been imprisoned somewhere, kept against her will. My blood boiled at the very idea of it.
Omegas were tiny, fragile. They should be protected at all costs.
After wrapping her in several blankets, I ran a towel over her legs, trying to dry her body as much as possible. I wasn't sure if it would be enough to keep her warm, but I hoped it would be enough to stave off the worst of the cold. The last thing I needed was her developing hypothermia and dying on my watch. Hell, the weather was hard enough for me to deal with, and I was easily three times her size. She was minuscule, and the cold had probably seeped through to her bones within minutes.
While I continued drying her off, Asher focused on the bruising on her arms. "Carter, there's a lot of swelling here," he said as he gently moved the joint. "I'm not sure what's happened, but it could possibly be broken."
I cursed mentally. We were nowhere near a hospital, and there was no way to leave anytime soon, given the state of the weather.
"What can we do if it is broken?" I asked.
Asher grimaced. "There isn't much. I can probably splint it, but that's all, really. I'm hoping, once she wakes up, I can ask her how she got this injury. It's possible it could just be a dislocation or a nasty sprain."
I nodded, a movement I had done several times in the last few minutes. I was desperately hoping it was nothing more than a sprain. Despite Asher's background as a medic, he wouldn't be able to do much in the cabin. Mentally, I ran through the supplies we had, but I didn’t know much about that—anything medical was Asher’s perview. I knew he kept a small stash, so I turned to him.
"Hey, have you got anything for pain here?"
Asher tilted his head to the side. "I think I have something we can give her, but I don't want to give her anything until we've spoken to her."
A frown covered my face as I looked at my pack mate. "But if she's in pain now—look at this bruising. She's going to be in agony."
"She's going to be in pain, but I need to ask if she's had any allergic reactions to pain medication in the past. Imagine if I give her something strong and she has a bad reaction to it. Then we are well and truly fucked. I only have a small amount of epinephrine, and we keep that on hand because of Dylan."
Dylan had an allergy to peanuts, so we tended to keep everything with peanuts out of the cabin. It wasn't a severe allergy, but he'd gone into anaphylaxis once or twice over the years, so Asher liked to be prepared, and we had EpiPens in the medicine cabinet. He had even taught me how to use them. So, even though Dylan hadn't had an allergic reaction in years, we were all well-versed on what to do.
As I dried her legs, I noticed the vicious cuts on the soles of her feet, which gave me pause, because she had been wearing those flimsy shoes.
"Hey, Asher," I said. "Can you check out her feet? They look pretty slashed up."
My pack mate looked up from the elbow he was moving and nodded before walking around the bedframe and lifting one of her tiny feet to inspect the injuries.
"These look pretty superficial," he said after a moment. "I'm going to take a look at her face first, I think, and then come back to these. There's nothing urgent about this, but the bruising around her eye looks pretty nasty."
I turned to look at her face. I had been avoiding looking at the deep purple and blue bruising that surrounded her left eye, but I couldn't deny it for too long. The bruises were giant. There was no way they were made by a woman. It was obvious that it was the impression of a man's fist against her skin. The idea that some bastard could lash out at something so small and fragile made my stomach turn violently. I was about to open my mouth and say something when Dylan walked back into the room, his face etched with a scowl.
I wasn't too concerned about his facial expression. He tended to wear a scowl most of the time, including when he was deep in thought.
"Are we all secure?" I asked.
Dylan nodded as he stood at the end of the bed, crossing his arms, watching us with an intense expression as we dried the tiny omega.
"Who do you think did this?" he asked.
"I don't know," I replied. "Clearly some asshole of a man."
Dylan nodded. "I've triple-checked all the locks, and all of the cameras are now running on generator power, so we are secure. I've also set up mobile notifications, so if anyone steps within a mile of our land, we will know about it."
I nodded, relieved that we were going to be somewhat secure while we figured out where the hell this tiny omega had come from.
Dylan cleared his throat before speaking again. "I also took the liberty of taking some of the firearms out and placing them in easier-to-reach areas," he said as he turned around, slowly showing off the bulge in the back of his waistband, where he had clearly placed his firearm.
I hated to admit it, but getting the firearms out was probably a smart decision. We had no clue who was out in the woods. We had bought the cabin with the idea that no one would be around for miles, and over the years, we had never come across a single soul in the woods—other than the odd person who had gotten lost off a camping trail nearly twenty miles away. And even then, that was during the warm, sunny months. During the dead of winter, when the monsoons would hit, we were always on our own.
"Thank you," I said as I turned my attention back to the omega.
Dylan observed her for a moment before speaking. "She's so small," he commented. "Too small."
I nodded in response. "Her ribs are sticking out far too much. She's going to need to be fed properly."
Dylan hummed in agreement. "That's something I can do. I will get some of the beef out of the deep freezer and put it in the slow cooker. She needs some good food."
Asher chuckled lightly. "What if she's a vegetarian?" he asked, looking up at us with a smirk.
Dylan made a startled noise, like the idea that such a cute omega could be a vegetarian was completely abhorrent to him. We were very much meat-and-potatoes guys. We liked a good steak or chicken. Once, as a joke, we had gone to a vegan restaurant in the city, and I'm pretty sure Dylan had been eternally traumatised from the experience.
The alpha in question was furrowing his brow as he glowered at the small omega, like her mere presence was now offensive to him because she could potentially be a vegetarian.
"I'll make some extra vegetables," he said. "And some protein shakes. Yes, that'll be good. Protein shakes will work," he muttered to himself as he wandered out of the room.
Asher and I looked at each other before bursting into laughter. It was nice to have a moment of hilarity among the severity of the situation we found ourselves in.