“Red,” he said quietly. “Your eyes are red.”
“Fuck,” I breathed and everything snapped into place.
I NEVER thought about control.
Before.
I never thought about how much it took to actually be a wolf. Thomas and the others had always made it look so easy.
The only time I’d ever seen anything close to a lack of control had been the night Joe had first shifted.
Years. It’d been years since that night.
So I hadn’t thought about it much.
Now it was all I could think of.
I lay in the clearing with my head in Joe’s lap, his hand in my hair, both of us unconcerned with my nudity. The grass was cool against my heated skin. I was listening to his heartbeat, taking a breath for three beats, letting it out for five.
The wolf in me still gnashed, its hackles raised, but it was calming under the touch of the Alpha.
We didn’t speak for a long time.
I didn’t know what he was thinking. I didn’t understand the smells coming off him. They were bright, these smells. Kinetic. They burned my nose. But underneath them was Joe. It was smoke and earth and rain. It was the smells I always had associated with him intensified a thousand times over. I wanted to bury myself in them, roll around in them until his scent covered me.
But the silence ended. It had to. There was too much to say.
He said, “Osmond is dead.”
I grunted, having figured as much.
“Gordo killed him. The others in our pack took care of the rest of the Omegas. The humans that were taken made it to the garage, they were safe. We found them huddled together in the back of the garage underneath one of the lifts. Gordo… did something to them. Altered their memories. They weren’t hurt by it. They just… won’t remember. This. The Omegas. Us. You. None of it. They’ll heal. They thought they were in a car accident. It was odd, really.”
Convenient. Maybe too convenient. I didn’t know just how far Gordo’s magic ran or what he’d had to do in the years since he’d been gone, but there’d be time. Later. Now I just needed to hear Joe. To be near him.
I tried to find words, any of them, to say something. But all that came out was a garble of sounds, more wolf than man. Joe’s hand stilled briefly in my hair, but then resumed, blunt fingernails scratching my scalp.
He said, “I should have known that something was wrong.”
His voice was even. Carefully restrained.
“I should have known,” he said again.
I wanted to ask how he’d found out, but—
He heard it anyway. Somehow. “You closed the bonds. For everyone. I called you. Your phone went to voice mail. I called Gordo. He didn’t answer. I went to the shop. The others followed me because they knew, Ox. They knew something was wrong.”
A slight crack in the tone. Anger spilled through, tinged with something that tasted like pain. Or sorrow. I didn’t know if there was a difference between the two.
I pressed my face into his lap, trying to stay calm.
“Gordo knew,” he said. “He followed you. Said something wasn’t sitting right. And he just… he knew. I didn’t. But he did. He—”
My hands were claws.
“You foolish man,” he whispered. “You stupid, foolish man.”
I whined at him, begging him not to push me away. Not now. Not ever.