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“But she’s unmated? Della?” Cal pressed, not yet willing to let the topic go now that he’d taken the risk.
“Oh, yeah.” Riddick reached for and drained his cup. “Hunt talks to her. They go way back, I think.” He pitched his voice low to evade any eavesdropping Alpha ears. “Some brothers like to call them Mommy and Daddy when they got an itch to bitch and moan.” He affected the speech of a bemoaning Alpha. “‘Mommy says we gotta get the poison ivy cleared off the path before the young ‘uns get into it.’ ‘Daddy’s not happy about the state of the east pasture.’ Shit like that.”
Matteo guffawed. “Too bad for her, there’s a new mommy sleeping in daddy’s bed now.”
“This daddy would be more than happy with two mommies.” Riddick laughed, stretching his arm out to clink cups with Matteo.
Cal’s spine seized up in instinctive, jealous alert. Mommy and Daddy? What did that mean? They went wayback? Had Della beeninvolvedwith Hunter? Since when? And for how long? And if she’d been with Hunter, was he the only one? Or were there others?
Disgust pulsed in his temple at the visual his brain vomited up of Della being passed around like the Pack whore. Not that he had anything against whores—if that’s what they wanted to do, who was he to judge?—but he did object to sharing,especiallywhen it came to what was his. Suspicious, he scanned the party, looking for the dozens of Della’s former lovers hunched in the shadows.
He tugged his collar to the side, trying to coax some cool air on his heated neck and return to the land of reason rather than paranoid fantasy. When they’d been close, not a single whiff of Alpha musk tainted her heavenly scent. No one had touched her any time recently. Granted, half the Pack had been away for the last three months, so if she had a lover, maybe they hadn’t yet—Cal grit his teeth—reconvened.
But no, that couldn’t be it. If he’d been fucking an Omega, and he’d been away for three months, hesure as shit wouldn’t be sitting at a bonfire socializing and calmly waiting to make sweet, tender love to her in the quiet of the night. No. He’d be railing her up against the nearest building at the first available opportunity. Forstarters.
Somewhat mollified, Cal tuned back into the conversation between Matteo and Riddick, unsurprised to discover it had strayed in a decidedly more vulgar direction. Simon sat looking quietly amused, but their laughs grated across Cal’s eardrums like a chorus of braying donkeys. He knew they were fucking around, getting drunk, shit-talking, and bonding, but he didn’t like any of it. Not the suggestion Della had been sleeping in Hunt’s bed, not the idea she’d been rejected and replaced by Kess, and especially not Della being the inspiration for Riddick’s dirty threesome fantasy.
Cal hungered for more information, but held his tongue. Plenty of time to sort it all out because, while his decision to join this Pack and try to make a home here for himself and his friends was so far a good one, he now had another, much more important reason to make this work: he had a reluctant Omega to woo.
CHAPTER THREE
Della
Morning frost crusted the newly sprouted grass, crunching and scrunching under Della’s feet on her cooldown walk back to her cabin. Cheeks still warm from her run, she turned her appreciative face into the chilled wind. The brisk northern air grounded her in her surroundings, reaffirming that she’d left the fires and droughts and destruction of her native California long behind. Even now, a century later, a longing for home sometimes ate at her. She’d loved her state, but after TheEnd, it ceased to be hers. Now, she took comfort from the rich, dense evergreen forests, their strangeness calmly reminding her that not everything beautiful had burned.
As she cut across the grass at a brisk pace, her joints moved like well-oiled machine parts. Despite a night of restless, poor sleep, the run energized her body. Despite being twice their age, none of the aches and pains of advanced age had ever plagued her in the way they plagued her grandmothers once they entered their elder years. In some ways, her current health surpassed her life before TheEnd, when she spent her days dashing from one meeting to the next, surviving on coffee and cocktails and the occasional greasy slice of pizza consumed in three heartburn-inducing bites.
Running wasn’t her favorite activity, but she’d taken it up after years of an inability to fall back asleep after one of her many flaming nightmares. Only nightmares hadn’t deprived her of sleep the night before—it had been him. She hadn’t forgotten—how could she when her body buzzed for hours after their impromptu meeting?—but she’d filed the episode away as the drunken misadventure of an Alpha not yet assimilated to their community. Nothing unusual and certainly nothing to lose any more sleep over.
Movement caught the corner of her eye, and she turned to see Hunter striding across the settlement at a fair clip. Alone.
The excitement of opportunity whizzed through her veins. She hadn’t expected to see him out and about in the village, especially without his Omega, so soon after his return. As leader of the Pack, his presence was always in high demand, and she’d secretly feared that private conversations would be impossible with his new mate added to his long list of obligations. Catching him alone gave her hope that maybe he hadn’t changed all that much in his time away and even greater hope that he might be sympathetic to her pitch.
“Hey!” Della yelled, jogging to catch up. Acknowledging her with a chin tip, Hunter slowed his pace, but only barely. “Where’s the fire?” she said through puffing breaths.
“Got a few things to take care of, then I need to get back to Kess.” His voice, always abrupt and to the point, sounded like it had been scratched over sandpaper on its way out of his throat. His hair pitched a fit in a wiry, tangled mess on top of his head, accompanied by the tiny, fresh claw marks that snaked up his neck.
Was all Alpha-Omega lovemaking that intense? And, if so...yikes.
Della frowned, annoyance prodding her guts. Of course, he needed to get back to Kess. Stretching her hips to match his long strides, she crushed the inconvenient resentment under her heel. She didn’t need to worry about that now. She needed to focus. “Anything I can help with?”
He glanced down over his shoulder and paused, hands on hips. “Maybe. Logan said there’s been some trouble with the food stores, things going missing. Have you seen anything suspicious?”
Della’s chin jerked back. This was news to her as well, and disturbing news at that. The settlement’s head cook, Logan, was a good cook and an excellent manager. If he said things were missing, things were missing.
She wiped a bead of sweat from her hairline. “We’ve never kept the basement locked,” she said thoughtfully. “Never had to.” Hunter gave her a knowing look, an acknowledgment they were thinking along the same lines. If someone was stealing food, then something somewhere in the settlement was off. Some problem they weren’t aware of. Some need going unmet. She dropped her hand to her side. “I’ll ask around the Omegas, see if anyone has been taking extra for some reason. I think Marie is expecting again, but I don’t understand why anyone would feel the need to steal...”
Across the central clearing, Della’s gaze fixed on the steady stream of Alphas, Omegas, and children (affectionally called pups) trickling into the mess hall for breakfast. Morris Hill boasted a dozen children, ranging in ages from newborn to fifteen, an impressive number of offspring considering they all came from only three Omegas.
After the nuclear devastation of a brief but cataclysmic world war, environmental catastrophes mounted. With each new disaster, more was lost. Disease spread, violence surged, and lack of infrastructure made medical care a distant memory. If the hospitals weren’t flooded, burned, or razed by earthquakes, then no medical staff showed up to work, or too few did. On top of that, no sterile supplies were available, and the staff was attacked by violent, roving gangs who wanted nothing other than to sow more chaos in their failed society.
Children died, women miscarried, and those who managed to carry pregnancies to full term barely survived delivery or postpartum. Della passed a hand over her cobwebbed womb. It had emptied its precious contents shortly after the fires, erasing the last trace of her husband left in the world. She’d barely even grieved for the child she’d never have. Not that the loss didn’t carve out the last piece of her heart, but back then, grief was a luxury no one could afford. Not when the world crumbled and the screams of orphaned children and the sobs of aggrieved families drowned out her pain, leaving her with the worst thing of all, her utter and total helplessness.
So, even after almost twenty years in Morris Hill, it was bewildering to walk around and see happy, thriving families. Even more astonishing to witness Omegas give birth year after year and not suffer birth complications or any ill health effects either. More than once, she and Hunter marveled over it in low, hushed conversation, speculating on the rhyme and reason of it all. However it happened, their population grew every year, and now with two new, unmated Omegas in the Pack, more children might be on the way by next summer.
Except, in the interim, they presented a different challenge.
When Rue and Zorah, whom the Pack had discovered during their travels, were escorted to Morris Hill, Della deduced the oversight in the community plan immediately. Without anywhere to put them, Zorah had been housed with a mated Alpha-Omega pair and to help out with their brood of pups, which turned out to be a fair solution.
