The Omega's Heart (Wilde Creek Four) (2 page)

* * * * *

The following morning, she knocked on her
father’s study and waited for him to acknowledge her. She opened
the door and found him behind the massive desk. He didn’t look up
at her when she stepped onto the beige and red wool rug.

“What?” he said gruffly, the pen flying over
a yellow legal pad as he wrote swiftly.

“I wanted to let you know that I’m going to
Heidi’s bridal shower. It’s Saturday night in Redlin, and I’ll be
home Sunday night.” She’d thought calling the bachelorette party a
‘bridal shower’ would sound better to her dad.

“No.”

She blinked. “What? She’s my best
friend.”

He lifted his head slowly. His eyes were ice
cold, and a shiver threatened to wiggle down her spine. “I said no.
Go to your room.”

Alarm bells went off in her mind. She was
twenty-five, not a child. Arguing with her father was not something
she was going to attempt, though. Dropping her head until she
looked at the rug, she showed her father her submission to his
authority, though everything inside her shouted at her to
rebel.

He dismissed her with a grunt and she walked
quickly out of the office. She didn’t know what was going on, but
coupled with what she’d experienced with Shred and the overheard
conversation of the day before, she had a bad feeling that
something was going to go down after the full moon. She wasn’t
about to stick around and find out what. Stopping at Stacy’s room,
she gathered a few of her favorite belongings and set them in the
center of the quilt, and then folded it up. Inside the precious
bundle were Stacy’s diamond brooch, her favorite dark pink scarf,
and her diary, which she’d kept under her pillow. Honey held the
bundle against her chest and walked upstairs to her bedroom,
closing and locking the door before heading to her closet to find a
bag and pack.

Because she knew her father read her texts,
she sent a message to Trixie apologizing. “Something’s come up with
the pack and I can’t come, sorry!”

She was still leaving, though. She just
wouldn’t go to Redlin, or anywhere her father might suspect. She
definitely didn’t want to be around two days after the full moon,
whenever the ‘pure’ thing showed up.

She shivered again as she remembered her
father’s dispassionate glare. He looked at her as if she weren’t
worthy of being in the same room with him, as if she were beneath
him. Even though she was a female in his pack and therefore an
unranked omega, she was still his daughter. She wondered if that
meant anything to him. If it ever had.

Chapter 2

Jeremiah Kincaid took a drink of beer and
looked around the bar. Poke’s was packed, the Saturday night crowd
a mixture of wolves and human. He looked for new faces in the crowd
but didn’t see any, and mentally sighed at the prospect of another
Saturday night alone.

Adam Cruz sat down heavily on the bench next
to Jeremiah, stifling a groan as he reached for his beer. He and
Adam had been friends for a long time. They were both pack members
and had grown up in Wilde Creek together. They’d shared similar
futures at one time — planning to shift and take their place as
protectors within the pack. But Adam was severely burned when he
was fourteen, and when he shifted during his sixteenth year, the
damage to his human body was severe enough that his wolf form was
stunted as well. He couldn’t run as fast as the others in the pack
or defend himself or others, so he was made an omega. Jeremiah
thought Adam was lucky sometimes; at least he was able to shift.
Jeremiah had spent his sixteenth year waiting anxiously to shift.
Then his seventeenth year came, and he still hadn’t shifted. Every
full moon that passed was another nail in the coffin of his
future.

He was a
non
, a full-blooded wolf who
was unable to shift. It was a quirk of DNA, like hair or eye color,
and he had no control over it. In the old days,
nons
were
often killed or banished, so he could be thankful he lived in the
present with a pack that didn’t hold onto all the old ways.

“I just got a text that Acksel wants the
elders’ driveways shoveled in the morning,” Adam said. He played
his fingers along the bottle, swiping at the condensation.

Jeremiah sighed. “I’ll pick up the blowers
tonight and gas them up, and then we can meet up in the morning.
Whose house do you want to do first?”

Adam made a face. “No one’s. I want to
fucking sleep in for a change.”

Jeremiah couldn’t help but glance around,
wondering if any of the wolves near them had heard Adam’s angry
tone. No one seemed to notice, and Jeremiah breathed a sigh of
relief. He and Adam were basically at the beck and call of the
alphas — Acksel Moore and his human mate Brynn. Some omegas had
jobs outside of the pack; Acksel’s sister Eveny worked for Ferrity
Construction, and Doc, the pack physician, ran a clinic from his
home for pack members. But most omegas worked for the pack in
whatever way they were asked. Sometimes Jeremiah got to do cool
things, like make home repairs, but other times he felt like a
glorified servant, running errands for the ranked pack members.

Jeremiah looked at Adam, who was staring
intently at the beer bottle. “Everything okay?”

Adam snarled. “Aren’t you fucking tired of
it?”

“Sometimes,” he admitted.

“Yeah, well I am. Before my dad got all tied
up in gambling and screwed up his life, he was a high-ranked male
in his day. He could have been alpha. But he had to go and fuck
with the wrong people and ruin
my
life.” Adam’s hand
clenched around the bottle and Jeremiah wondered if it would
shatter.

As quickly as his anger appeared, it receded.
Adam drained the bottle and slammed it hard on the tabletop. “I’ll
see you at Dade’s at six.”

Jeremiah nodded, watching as Adam slipped
from the booth and walked stiffly to the exit. Dade was Acksel’s
father, so clearing his driveway first made sense. Jeremiah
wondered what was going on with Adam. At least he was able to
shift. Jeremiah would give just about anything to be able to shift,
even once. To know what it was like to run in the woods on four
paws, feel the wind through his fur. Instead of hunting on the full
moons, he was relegated to fixing dinner for the alphas and their
guests, running errands, and basically being the pack whipping boy.
He should be grateful for what he had, but all he felt lately was
bitter. He’d even talked recently about leaving. He could take
banishment and find his own way somewhere else, live among humans
and forget he was ever part of a pack.

Luke, Eveny’s human mate and the owner of
Poke’s, stopped in front of the table and picked up Adam’s empty
bottle. “Is everything okay, Jeremiah?”

“Yeah, thanks.” He finished the last bit in
the bottle and Luke took it.

“Be careful out there, it’s a mess
tonight.”

“Thanks, you too.”

Jeremiah tossed a few dollars onto the table
as he stood. Tugging his coat on, he wove his way through the crowd
and headed outside. The bitter January wind licked at his face, but
he ignored it. Fortunately, like most shifters he ran warmer than
humans, so he wasn’t as bothered by cold temperatures as they were.
He turned on his truck, extracted the window scraper from behind
the front seat and scraped the windows free of ice and snow, and
then he headed to Wilde Creek Auto to pick up the trailer and snow
blowers which were kept in a storage building there. After
attaching the trailer to his truck, he covered the blowers with a
tarp to keep the snow off them, and stopped to fill them with gas
before heading home.

He lived in the home he grew up in, a
three-bedroom Cape Cod on a quiet street. It had been built by his
dad as a wedding gift for his mom; they lived in it until Jeremiah
turned seventeen, and then his dad left and joined another pack. He
said that he wanted a fresh start, that it was
time to move
on,
but Jeremiah hadn’t been asked to join him. He’d been
ashamed that he had a son who couldn’t shift. The partial shifting
that Jeremiah could do — his body bulking slightly, claws and fangs
emerging, and even fur on his arms and legs — was an embarrassment
to the family, and his dad chose to walk away instead of staying
and supporting him. His mom stayed until he finished high school
and turned eighteen, and then she joined his dad. She wasn’t
ashamed of his
non
status, but she missed her mate and
Jeremiah didn’t blame her for that. It wasn’t her fault that he
couldn’t shift, it was just fate.

He parked in the driveway of his home and
walked up the covered front porch, stomping the snow from his boots
as he unlocked the front door. Stepping into the warmth of the
house, he shut the door and unlaced his boots, setting them on the
rug to dry and hanging up his coat. Passing by the dining room,
which he’d converted into a weight room, he walked through the
family room to the master bedroom. After dropping his clothes into
the laundry basket in the closet, he climbed into bed and set his
alarm for five a.m. so he could meet Adam at Dade’s.

The house was empty. Silent. The room was
dark, the bed cold and empty. Not that he’d expected to walk into
the house tonight and find the woman of his dreams waiting for him;
he was a realist after all. But he did wish that things were
different. That he wasn’t alone, an outcast among his people,
always on the outside looking in. Adam was clearly feeling the
weight of their status too, considering how upset he’d seemed
earlier.

He’d been considering leaving for a while
now, and maybe he really would. He hated being thought of as
less than
just because he couldn’t shift. He’d started
working out in his late teens, determined to be a powerful male,
but no matter the muscles or the training he had, he was never
asked to guard the mates, patrol around Wilde Creek, or help out in
any way other than in service of the others. The protectors, those
ranked males who were under the alpha in authority but had
authority over all omegas, thought less of him because he couldn’t
shift. He’d won many fights against them in human form, but it
didn’t matter, at least not to them.

Some omegas liked their status, but like
Adam, Jeremiah had had the status thrust on him. Maybe now it was
time for a change. He shook his head at himself and stared up at
the dark ceiling. He’d been feeling off for a few weeks now, and he
couldn’t explain it. Maybe he’d just had enough of being an omega,
and his inner wolf, no matter how lacking in actual fur and claws
he was, appeared to be telling him it was time to move on.

It wasn’t too much to ask that he be able to
find a mate and have a family, was it? He knew that she-wolves
didn’t want to be with him because they were afraid that his
non-shifting genes would be passed on to future generations. A
human woman might not care, though.

Deciding to think about it more in the
morning, he rolled over and closed his eyes, drifting away to
sleep.

Chapter 3

After the house got quiet Thursday night,
Honey slipped silently down to the first floor with her bag slung
over her shoulder and her purse tucked under her arm. In college,
she’d heard some of the wolves talk about their alpha’s homes as if
they were fortresses, with security patrols, and some even with
high fences and guarded gates. Her father didn’t believe in guards.
In his opinion, he was too much of a badass for anyone to bother
coming into his home to mess with him or her. So far, that had
proved true. The safest place she’d ever been was within the walls
of his home… until now.

She knew that she could actually go to Redlin
and stay with her friends, but that wasn’t far enough away. Her
father could send pack members to grab her as soon as he figured
out where she was. No, she needed to get far away. Far enough that
he wouldn’t know where she was and wouldn’t be able to find her
before the full moon.

To throw her father off a bit, she placed a
note on the kitchen counter, telling him that she was going to the
bridal shower and that she would be home on Sunday night as she’d
said. What he wouldn’t know, though, was that she was going in the
opposite direction, as far away from Wyling River as she could get.
She’d find a safe place to stay for the full moon and then she’d
keep going. She’d thought to come back in a few weeks, but now she
wasn’t sure she’d be welcome. She was deliberately going against
her father’s word, which as alpha carried a lot of weight. He could
punish her severely for leaving.

Disappearing seemed like a good plan. She’d
left her cell phone on her bed before she came downstairs. She
didn’t like being without her phone, but she could get a
pay-as-you-go phone somewhere for any calls she’d need to make. She
didn’t doubt for a minute that she was doing the right thing.
Something was up with her dad, and it was happening two days after
the full moon. Whatever it was, she sure as hell didn’t want to be
there when it went down.

She slipped through the back door easily and
walked to her car, tossing her bag and purse onto the back seat and
sitting behind the wheel. Turning on the engine, and without
waiting for it to warm up, she backed smoothly out of the driveway
and out onto the street. She was leaving Wyling River behind. Maybe
for a few weeks, maybe forever.

* * * * *

Saturday afternoon, as exhaustion blurred her
vision and her back ached from sitting in the car for so long, she
pulled into the parking lot of a grocery store and turned off the
engine. Resting her head on the steering wheel, she yawned loudly,
wondering what her next step would be.

She’d been sleeping in the car for a few
hours here and there, but she really needed a place to stay. As a
precaution, she hadn’t used her credit cards and had brought only
the cash she’d been able to get out of the ATM in town before she
left. That wouldn’t last long.