A nightstand held a collection of pill bottles, a glass of water, and a battered paperback with a bookmark three-quarters of the way through.
My grandfather was sitting up in the bed, not lying flat. He was thinner than I remembered, his shoulders slightly hunched beneath a flannel shirt that had once fit properly. But his eyes were sharp when they met mine, lacking the cloudiness I’d expected. This wasn’t the look of a man who was fading—it was the look of a man who had been waiting and thinking, who had made calculations and reached conclusions.
“There you are,” he said, his voice stronger than it had been on the phone. “Took you long enough.”
“Traffic,” I said, the single word carrying more weight than its three syllables should have been able to bear.
He nodded, understanding the shorthand. “Sit down,” he said, patting the edge of the bed with one age-spotted hand. “I’ve got something to say and it needs to stay between the two of us.”
I pulled the wooden chair from the corner of the room—the same one that had sat beside his bed when my grandmother was ill, the one I’d slept in during the final nights of her life. I set it close to the bed, where he could see me without raising his voice, and sat down, hands resting on my knees.
My grandfather’s face was a map of his life—wrinkles carved by decades of Nebraska sun, a scar along his jaw from a childhood accident with a barbed wire fence, the slightly crooked set of his nose from a long-ago fight outside a bar in Omaha. But his eyes were clear, focused on mine with an intensity that made the rest of the room seem to recede. Whatever he was about to say, he’d been holding it for a long time.
The chapter ends with my grandfather’s face—steady, deliberate, carrying the specific weight of a man about to say something he has held for a long time.
“I need you to listen carefully,” he said, his voice dropping to just above a whisper. “What I’m about to tell you changes everything.”
Chapter Two
~ Decker ~
The silence between us stretched taut, my grandfather’s words hanging in the air. The small room suddenly felt even smaller, the walls leaning in.
I kept my expression neutral, waiting for him to continue, though my gut had already dropped to somewhere around my boots. When the old man made direct statements, they tended to land with the impact of concrete blocks.
“I’m not dying,” he said finally, his voice low enough that it wouldn’t carry beyond the closed door. “The phone call was a lie.”
My jaw locked, teeth grinding together. I kept my face still, but my hands went flat on my thighs, pressing down to stop them from curling into fists. Six hundred miles of driving, eight years of absence, and the words I’m not dying.
I almost said something—was on the edge of asking what the fuck he thought he was playing at—when I caught the look in his eyes. Fear. Raw and unmistakable, cutting across a face that had never shown it in all the years I’d known him.
The anger went sideways, dissolving into something harder to define. I’d seen fear on people’s faces before—hundreds of them, in dozens of places—but never here. Not on him.
“I’m listening,” I said, my voice coming out steadier than I’d expected.
The story came out in pieces. My grandfather’s best friend of more than fifty years, a man named Earl Arnold, had a grandson named Jasper. An omega.
“He showed up on Earl’s doorstep six months ago,” my grandfather continued, the words coming faster now that the hardest part was out. “Battered nearly beyond recognition. They’d laid him off from the hospital in Omaha—budget cuts,they said, but we all know what it really was. Then the trouble started in town.”
I knew exactly what “trouble” meant in this context. I’d seen it before—the cruelty that was reserved for omegas in places like this. Sometimes it was unplanned, the random violence of men who’d been drinking and didn’t like what they saw. Sometimes it was calculated, a systematic effort to drive omegas out or keep them in line.
“Some people want to hurt him for what he is,” my grandfather said. “Others want to claim him by force. Earl’s too old to stop it—too frail—and Jasper’s trapped.”
He wanted Jasper out of Nebraska, tonight, taken somewhere safe. He’d thought of Montana—Black Butte, specifically.
“You’ve got a job in Montana, a place there, which means you’ve got connections, a place to keep him until he can get settled. Earl and I have money saved—enough to pay his way until he can find work. And you—“ He looked at me directly, no apology in his gaze. “You’re the only person I trust to do it.”
I sat with that for a moment, turning it over in my head. It wasn’t just that I didn’t know Jasper—had never met the man, had no idea what he looked like or what his situation actually entailed. It was that walking blind into a stranger’s situation—with no intelligence, no sense of the opposition, no plan beyond “get in and get out”—was exactly the kind of mistake that got people killed.
“This isn’t an extraction,” I said, flat and direct. “I don’t have a team. I don’t have backup. I don’t even know what the threat looks like or how many people I’m dealing with. You’re asking me to go in blind and come out with someone who’s got no reason to trust me, and you’re giving me less than twelve hours to pull it off.”
My grandfather didn’t argue. He didn’t try to minimize the risks or convince me it was simpler than it looked. He just held my gaze, letting the fear in his eyes do all the talking. It was the first time in my life he’d asked me for something I couldn’t do with my eyes closed and one hand tied behind my back, and he knew it.
“It’s not just a favor,” he said finally. “It’s personal. Earl’s the only friend I’ve kept all these years. The only one who didn’t care what your father said about you, who didn’t take sides when things went bad. He stood by me when most people wouldn’t even say your name.” He paused, hands working at the edge of the blanket. “I’d do it myself if I could.”
The unspoken end of that sentence—but I can’t—hung between us. My grandfather, who’d fixed my broken arm in the barn rather than take me to the hospital because he knew what questions would be asked. Who’d taught me to drive the tractor at ten and shoot at twelve, who’d never once made me feel like I was something broken that needed to be fixed.
“I’ll do it,” I said, the words coming out before I’d made a conscious decision. “But I need information. Address. Description. Who we’re looking for. What we’re up against.”
