1. Kato #2
He makes an impatient noise. “I don’t care about the moose. Come on.”
“You would if one tried to murder you.”
I turn to my other shoe and Nathan’s there, quicker than you’d expect him to be, fast as fuck for a guy his size.
His big hand clamps around my wrist and his face is in my face and I hear my own breath hitch.
My gaze meets his and yes, this is exactly what I want, what I’m constantly angling for.
Strange how you stop feeling like a person when no one will touch or acknowledge you that way, and equally strange how similar fury and desire can seem—the way they both make your heart race and your breath come short and your pupils dilate, your nostrils flare.
The way they both smell sort of acrid and sulfuric.
And his grip is nothing short of bruising, grinding the fine bones in my wrist together, but that’s okay too.
I don’t mind it. My lips part slightly as I watch him.
His face is a careful curation of anger, handsome features arranged just so.
I want to bump my nose against his and rub our cheeks together.
But that’s not in the script, so he gives me teeth. “I am not doing this with you today,” he hisses. “Either you behave, or I make you.”
To which I would normally respond with something flippant, see how much prodding it would take before he really laid into me—but I’ve caught the scent of something. Something off and other.
I lift my head and turn it into the wind, lips parting. Let that scent brush over teeth and settle on the tongue and I weigh it there, senses opening up. All of Nathan’s heady anger falls away in favor of this: something sweet, achingly so, with a clarity as fragile as snowmelt in spring.
Omega.
But not one I know. Not one that’s pack.
“What is it?” Nathan’s gruff voice breaks in, almost startling me.
“Smell that?” My voice is soft. Like I’ll scare it away, though it’s coming from somewhere far off.
“I don’t—” But he quits his bickering long enough to raise his face to the wind, and just from his expression I know he’s caught it too. He stands abruptly and because he’s still got a vise-grip on me, he drags me up with him. “That’s not one of ours.”
“No.” Now I’m tugging him along. I’m not good for much but this, I can do; I’m a good fucking tracker and I always have been.
The big dog alphas here may be lazy and fat and leave all the hunting to those on the lowest rung of the ladder in their fucked-up hierarchy, but we all shared that duty in my old pack.
It’s old hat to me. I’m not out of practice with it.
Not that Nathan’s half-bad himself. He’s not much higher up than me, after all.
We follow the scent for a mile, maybe two.
Up and over a knoll that’s already covered in billowing fog, from which you would normally have excellent vantage of all the sheep that dot the hillside, and then down into a gulch.
I smell the water long before I see it, a neutral undercurrent to the omega’s cloying scent that’s growing more and more potent the closer we get to its source.
At my side Nathan is wound even more tightly than usual, a coiled spring, but I can’t blame him.
It’s getting to me too, punching at me and leaving me slightly breathless, stomach tight like a clenched fist. It’s reminiscent, almost, of that first rut in late adolescence, scenting an omega’s heat for the very first time—the same jumpy-quiveriness, a sort of unfurling need that intensifies with every step.
This one doesn’t smell like they’re in heat. But the effect is the same.
Nathan spots him before I do, down by the shore of a small pond, his massive strides eating up the ground and leaving me stumbling to catch up. And there he is at last, sprawled across dirt and grass yellowed by the summer sun. The omega.
My first thought, upon seeing him, is that it’s a strange place to leave a statue. My next thought is that statues don’t bruise and bleed.
He lies there entirely naked, small and lithe, his skin as ivory white as marble—where it’s still intact, anyway.
He’s covered in bruises of various ages, purple, green and yellow, and what’s not bruised is gashed and bloody.
Even his curly hair—which is just as pale as his face—is streaked with blood, and his snow-white lashes are still where they fan his gaunt cheeks.
He is so still that if it weren’t for the fact I could hear his faint, shallow breathing and the rabbit-quick beat of his heart, I would think he was dead.
In spite of all that, he’s utterly lovely.
And he smells—he smells fucking amazing. Like home. Like a beckoning. Like something warm and inviting, reaching out and wrapping itself around me, begging me to come to him.
We both move at the same time, but Nathan’s half a second faster than I am. Both of us kneel above the unconscious omega, and Nathan’s eyes have bled to their bright wolf green—just as I know my own have gone amber—as he snarls at me. “Don’t. Don’t touch him.”
“Me?” I snap back in astonishment. “I’m the one who found him!”
“I saw him first.”
“I smelled him first!”
His canines—because his teeth are starting to change too, and in the back of my mind I know that this is bad, how easily we’ve both ceded control in a matter of seconds—are nothing short of intimidating as he bares them at me.
There is a moment where I wonder if we will come to blows, am more than ready to, except that he stops.
Closes his eyes. “Wait,” he says. “Kato, wait. Take a breath.”
Don’t want to wait. Want to claim. Want to stake mine, very specifically, over this omega, because his scent is calling to me like none other—a siren song that I’ve been waiting for my whole life.
I’m digging claws into the dirt and fantasizing about the ways I’ll tear Nathan’s throat out.
But when he opens his eyes again they’ve gone back to their warm brown, beseeching, and it’s enough for me to catch myself.
I bite my lower lip and immediately taste blood.
Nathan’s watching me. “Good?”
“No.” I inhale and shudder. “He—”
“I know.” Cutting me off. “I feel it, too.”
I don’t say anything. I simply sit back and try to return to center, and as I do Nathan begins unbuttoning his shirt. It’s a whole fucking show without him meaning to, probably, sculpted pecs and abs beneath a reddish thatch of hair that’s almost the same color as his wolf.
“He’s badly hurt. I wonder if someone dumped him here.” He tucks the shirt tenderly around the unconscious boy. “We have to take him back to the village. Declan will want to know.”
I don’t want Declan to know. I don’t want anyone to know. I swallow hard. “Yeah.”
Nathan scoops him into his arms—and my possessiveness flares and protests once more, but I manage to tamp it down.
Do not kill Nate. Do not kill Nate.
You would be very, very sad if you killed another alpha.
Understatement. But watching him hold the omega, my chest tightens with fury all the same.