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Victor was the clever one, but he was also a little weird. Well, not really. He just didn’t fit in the Last Chance mold. He’d experimented with different personas, like he was trying to find something that fit, the thing that set him apart from his brothers. Like the punk phase in his senior year, complete with tartan pants, too many chains and guyliner. It didn’t stick, but did result in Xander getting into a bunch of fights.
Nothing escaped Victor’s whirling brain. It was Victor who worked out I had dyslexia when I was ten, even though my teachers all assumed I was just behind because of my past. He’d told his parents, and Mrs. Yale had talked to Ma and Pa. She’d been the town librarian, and had made it her personal mission to make me love reading by ordering dyslexia-friendly books for the library, despite the fact the library only had a tiny budget.
She’d succeeded. I’d spent hours beside her on the couch as she taught me to read. When she died a few years later of a heart attack, I’d been devastated.
When the guys had left less than a year after that, I’d been lost and heartbroken. Between one night and the next, they were gone. No goodbye. They never answered my calls or texts. And they never came back.
I shook my head, mentally shying away from that barely healed wound in my chest. I’d been so surprised when Will answered. One, because he still had the same cell number, and two, because I was so used to getting his voice mail, I could recite it verbatim, even after all this time.
I shook away the hopelessness that felt like it was consuming me. He’d answered when I needed him most—that was all that mattered now.
The sun was dipping dangerously low when the ears of my furry companion perked up. We’d come to a truce, me and McKnight. He even let me pet him now. We were basically fast friends, despite the fact that I might still get an infection from his claws, the shithead.
Anyway, he was my McKnight in shining armor when he stalked slowly out of the den, looking left and right. I prayed it was help he could hear, and not a fucking bear. Or worse, one of those grizzly-polar bear hybrids. A pizzly. Stupid name for something that would eat your damn face clean off. The logical part of my brain said we were way too far south for pizzlies, but faced with a night out in the wilderness, logic was losing the epic battle against hysteria.
The first sign that it wasn’t man-eating wildlife was the full-body shudder that crawled across my skin. It wasn’t a fearful shudder—no, it was something else. My newly awakened Omegaknewthere was someone outside, and that someone was an Alpha.
She also wanted to crawl out of this den and get to know them, in the biblical sense.
McKnight made a low growling noise, and I curled tighter into a ball. I wasn’t ready for this, wasn’t ready for the whole Alpha-Omega dance. Had this guy sniffed me out on the wind?
“Zaley!” someone shouted, and the relief that washed over me stole my breath. It chased away those newly awakened feelings, chased away every thought except the fact that I was saved.
I crawled out of my den, pushing McKnight gently out of the way, and he batted at my hand grumpily. Didn’t matter that my knees were getting cut up by the forest debris, or that the scrapes on my palm stung as dirt was ground into the wounds. I was going to survive this nightmare.
I stood up, looking around in the waning light of the forest. “Victor?” I yelled, my voice echoing off the mountains. More shouts sounded, but I couldn’t get a handle on the direction. “Will? Victor?” I didn’t know if they’d called in Xander. I wasn’t even sure if he’d returned to Last Chance with the other two. Last I heard, he’d been doing personal security for rich people.
My question was soon answered when one of them burst through the underbrush. I knew from the scar dissecting his left eyebrow that it was Xander, because he’d got it falling out of a tree trying to rescue me when I was nine.
He stopped dead in the small clearing, his eyes going wide. “Hey, Xander.” The man in question didn’t say anything, his lips slightly parted and his chest heaving.
His brothers soon appeared behind him. “Holy shit, Za-Za, you’re naked,” Will gasped, already whipping off his hooded sweatshirt and throwing it at me with his eyes scrunched shut.
Victor was pale. “She’s Omega.” They all stilled, the tension between us enough to make McKnight hiss, although he didn’t run off, standing his ground instead.
It was then that the odd tingling sensation in the base of my skull overcame my natural relief at being rescued.
“You fuckers are Alphas?”
Oh, I was pissed.
CHAPTERTHREE
“Put the fucking swearshirt on,”Xander growled, and I jammed it over my head. Not because he was an Alpha who growled at me, but because I was cold. Yeah, we were going to go with that brilliant piece of denial.
“Why didn’t you tell me? Is this why you guys left?”
They did that fucking triplet thing that always pissed me off, sliding their eyes at each other and having a silent conversation. In the end, it was Will who answered. Will was always the one they used to deliver news I wasn’t going to like. You couldn’t be mad at Will; he had that golden retriever energy and a good heart to back it up. But that wasn’t going to save him now.
“Yeah. We thought it was for the best.”
I opened my mouth to give him the Spanish Inquisition, including the thumbscrews but in more important locations. Ballscrews? But Xander cut me off.
“We can discuss it later. Right now, we have to get the hell off this mountain before it's dark and we’re stuck up here.”
I noted the camping gear on Victor’s back. “You brought a tent. I don’t think it will be that bad. We’ve camped before.”
Victor’s face softened as he looked at me with something that might have been pity. “Things are different now, Zaley.”
