Chapter 7
ROWAN
“So, everyone is okay with this but me? Living like this?” I grumble from my desk in the home office. Ash lays on top of the desk in front of the right monitor, purring like a motorboat.
It’s been a week since Ryland told us about the scent match, and no one is doing anything.
Travis sees Blair at work, acting like nothing has happened, because Blair hasn’t brought it up.
Ryland hasn’t been back to the rescue based on Travis’s orders.
“No one is okay with this,” my brother says from his desk on the other side of the room. “But she was terrified when she saw me. We have to handle this delicately.”
“By pretending she doesn’t exist?” I stop typing and swivel my chair to him. “So, you get to meet her, and I don’t?”
Travis gave me strict orders to not go to the rescue until he gave me the okay.
It’s ridiculous, but he’s my pack leader, and I’m trying my best to trust him on this.
Travis, despite walking around with a permanent scowl on his face, is a good guy. He knows Blair better than the rest of us, and the last thing I want to do is fuck up a scent match.
But it still aches.
“She wasn’t happy to see me, Row,” Ryland sighs, his attention still on his screen. “She panicked. Ambushing her at her place of work is fucked up.”
“I’m not trying to ambush her,” I say. “I just don’t know why nothing has happened since the match.”
“Patience.”
“I don’t have patience.”
“I’m aware. But if you can’t do it for us, do it for her.
” Ryland turns his chair to me. Maybe I’m not the only one this is affecting—dark circles are under his eyes, and his stubble is thicker than usual.
“I want to go back to that rescue every damn day, just to scent her. You weren’t there—you didn’t see the way she looked at me at first. It was like she had seen a ghost. Like she was terrified. ”
“But at least you’ve seen her,” I grumble.
Like a creep, I’ve been on the Furs and Purrs website, staring at the picture of a smiling Blair under the staff page.
She looks like a ray of sunshine, literally. Her hair is golden and falls in a shiny curtain around her shoulders, and her skin sun-kissed, like she’s been basking at the beach all day.
And her eyes…
Her eyes crinkle with pure happiness, her smile wide and elated.
I wonder how long ago the photo was taken.
By the way Travis and Ryland have described her, she’s not the cheery, carefree person in the photograph.
She’s smart, sweet and beautiful, but guarded.
“I don’t know if I made the best first impression on her,” Ryland continues, scratching at his stubble.
“It was awkward. We mostly talked about the cats, and then she left. Trav says it took him months for her to even talk about herself at Scents. He says she’s very good at keeping conversation surface-level. ”
I frown. “It’s still not fucking fair.”
“We’re brothers. You’re likely her scent match, too.
If you show up at her work and she doesn’t expect it, it’s going to make her freak out again.
” Ryland runs a hand through his messy brown hair, exasperated.
“She hasn’t even mentioned me to Travis,” he murmurs.
“She hasn’t mentioned any of it to him.”
Ash trots across my keyboard, closing one of the windows, and I pluck him off the desk and place him gently down on the floor.
Despite Ryland’s awkward moment at the rescue, I’ll be forever grateful that he came home with this behemoth of a cat.
While Ash likes Ryland and Travis just fine, he sticks with me most of the time, following me wherever I go.
He watches me work in the office, usually perched on the cat tree in the corner of the room, slow blinking in bliss.
He’s a great companion, and I love that fucker to bits.
I reopen the program that the cat closed and restart my playthrough of the indie horror game that was sent to us through one of our developers.
“If she’s that jumpy, I can’t imagine she’ll like what we do,” I mutter, disappointed.
It only takes a few moments for a ghost-like entity to appear on the screen with a garbled scream, and even Ash scampers away at the unpleasant noise.
“Those sound effects are shit,” Ryland comments.
“Yeah. I’ll give them the notes.”
My brother watches as I navigate through a haunted house, solving simple puzzles until I reach another jumpscare.
I think he’s forgotten about my comment until he says, “I don’t know. Who even knows if she’s into video games,” he chuckles humorlessly.
Another disfigured human face fills the screen with a high pitched, grating sound.
Ryland flinches. “Okay. They really need to fix that.”
“Probably used some free sound files,” I murmur. “But holy shit.”
Ryland and I run our own indie video game company, Wicked Bytes. We’re one of the lucky few people that worked hard and fell into the industry at the right time. It’s enough to make us a decent living, but difficult to explain to anyone that isn’t into gaming.
Not everyone is excited about haunted toys that come to life and go on murdering sprees.
“Were you at least able to tell her what you do for work?” I ask Ryland.
“No. She barely knows my name.”
A burst of anger flares through me. “How did you fuck up that badly?”
A warning growl sounds in Ryland’s chest, one that I rarely hear him make.
But I don’t care. I’m too frustrated that I still haven’t met my scent match.
“Don’t take this shit out on me,” he warns me.
I scowl. “So, it’s okay for you to show up unexpectedly at the rescue but not for me to?”
“Don’t be a dick, Rowan.” By his tone, I know I’ve made my point. A flicker of guilt flashes across his face before he turns away from me and back to his monitors.
I scoff. “Right.”
But I continue to stew inside, forcing myself to finish the playthrough of the horror game. It’s just a demo, but it needs a ridiculous amount of work, and after I finish emailing my summary with notes, I realize what the painful weight in my chest is.
Loneliness.
Terrible, aching loneliness.
How long have I waited for a scent match? I’ve yearned for an Omega for years. Ryland and I have stubbornly waited for a match, refusing to settle for just any Omega we found attractive.
When we met Travis, he had the same mindset, and we formed a pack.
Hell, at thirty-six, I was starting to believe that this could never happen to me.
But Blair exists and was made for us.
Yet, nothing has happened.
I’m fucking helpless, and it infuriates me.
“I’ll going to grab supplies for Ash,” I grumble, standing from my desk. “I’ll be back later.”
“He has plenty of stuff,” Ryland counters. “What more does he need?”
But I ignore my brother.
I just need to get out of the packhouse.
It suddenly feels too cramped in here.
I was crawling out of my skin back at the packhouse, ruminating in the frustration and loneliness of the scent match situation.
We should be happy, but the three of us are suffering in silence.
Ryland has always handled his emotions better than me. Even growing up, he was calm and practical, while I was the one having breakdowns over minor inconveniences.
I was the one that would punch a wall when something went wrong.
I was the sibling that would go from screaming in a fit of rage to weeping on the ground, tearing my hair out.
I feel a lot, but now I have better ways of handling it.
One of those ways is pampering my cat.
Pets Express has a shit ton of cat supplies, more than enough to spoil Ash.
Which is exactly what I plan on doing.
Another thing I learned? Put negative energy into something positive, and eventually, those feelings fade away.
At least for a little while.
I grab a cart from the front of the store and wheel it down the main aisle, scowling when I see the message scrawled in chalk on a black sign.
Kitten Adoption Event this Saturday! Furs and Purrs Rescue 11:00-4:00
Hopefully by Saturday, I’ll at least be on speaking terms with Blair, so I don’t have to avoid a damn pet store at the request of my pack leader.
Travis isn’t wrong, and neither is Ryland, which is why I haven’t openly gone against what they said.
But I’m still pissed as hell about it.
I travel down the cat toy aisle, picking up anything I think Ash might be remotely into. There’s a crinkly computer shaped plush toy and a catnip-filled ghost. I pick up a laser pointer and a remote-controlled mouse, then head down the treat aisle.
Soon, the cart is full of enough treats and enrichment to keep Ash entertained for a long time.
I also add another cat tree, because why not?
By the time I exit the store, my chest is lighter, and the overwhelming loneliness and frustration has settled. It’s manageable now, and I’m hoping I can get through the rest of the day without lashing out at my brother.
Maybe I’ll even apologize to him, too.
Just as I load the purchases into my car and shut the door, high-pitched, stressed cries fill my ears.
At first, I think it’s a bird, but I narrow my eyes and continue to listen.
The cries don’t stop.
I follow the sound behind the pet store building and warily approach a dumpster.
Did some piece of shit put an animal in the dumpster? I’ll kill them.
Panic rises in my chest, unraveling the calm that I worked so hard to achieve.
I turn the corner, ready to dumpster dive for whatever creature is in there, but stop abruptly.
The cries aren’t coming from the dumpster.
They’re coming from an open empty case of soda, where furry heads peek up and let out shrill, needy sounds.
A box of kittens sits in front of the dumpster.
Pets Express tells me to go to Furs and Purrs, but not before one of the cashiers hands me a small paper bag with a can of kitten formula.
“We can’t do much here,” she says, “but tell Furs and Purrs we sent you, and they’ll take care of you.”
My throat tightens.
There are three kittens in total, white with cute faces and ridiculously loud pairs of lungs. They mew and whimper in the passenger seat while I try to offer them comfort in one hand while steering with the other.