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Playing dumb, I ask, “What’s this?”
“It’s for you. I meant to grab yours from your cabin, but in the rush of everything, I forgot. While you were sleeping this morning, I went out and get you a new one. Do you like it?”
Do I like it? Put it this way… “It’s better than breakfast.”
“So you’ll keep it?”
Food has a special meaning to shifters that makes it so I can’t accept meals from West without giving him the wrong idea. This music player, though?
I can take that from him.
“Yes.”
“Thank the Luna.” When I raise my eyebrow at him, already pulling the player out of the box, he adds, “I’m trying to do this right, Helene. I’ve already fucked up plenty, but even if the only way I can make you happy is giving you something to drown me out, I’ll take it.”
He’s not exactly wrong. We didn’t fight often when we were in a relationship, but whenever West’s heavy-handedness got on my nerves, I’d plug my headphones in and crank up the volume.
I’ve never left Hickory, but that doesn’t mean I’m cut off from the rest of the outside world. Music is my vice, and while I’m not very familiar with human artists, one of these charmed music players will have a variety of supe-only stations.
My favorite artist is a vampire pop singer. They may be our ancient enemy, but Callandra cansing. Already fiddling with the dial, I can hear one of her greatest hints—I’ve got your blood in me (gimme more)—blaring out of one of the buds on my new headphones.
I smile, though it’s short-lived when I notice that the guarded expression on West’s face has softened.
“Helene?”
“Mm?”
“Sing for me?”
A pang gets me right in the chest. Silly Helene. How could I forget for even a moment that Weston Reed is a calculating Beta. He gave me the music player as a kindness, only to ask me for something in return.
A song.
My brother has always thought of me as his little songbird. Canari. But he’s not the only one, is he?
As an omega, I’ve always been more sensitive than other shifters. There’s a reason I’ve always been so coddled and protected. A shifter pack follows the temperament of the Omega. If I get upset enough, Hickory becomes a powder keg ready to explode.
But I wasn’t always the Omega. I didn’t get the post until I was sixteen, and before then, the only one who cared how I felt was Bishop.
Or so I thought.
It happened back when my brother was seventeen. Already so big and fierce—even if he hadn’t quite grown his beard in yet—when he discovered some of the shifters in my age group were making fun of me for singing my silly little songs to myself, he tracked them down and scared the piss out of them. Sending so many cruel little wolves running, there was one who stayed behind to comfort me.
The first conversation I had with Weston Reed was when a twelve-year-old beta shyly told me that he loved my voice.
Later, I could pinpoint the moment I handed my heart over to West to that day.
And that wasn’t all.
My brother and West weren’t close then. The age gap was too much, West twelve and Bishop seventeen. But that was about the time that my brother started keeping an eye on the young beta, taking him under his wing. By the time West was seventeen and Bishop twenty-two, they were closer than brothers.
Of course, that’s why West waited another two years before he confessed his feelings for me. Torn between his loyalty to Bishop and his love for me, he kept his emotions to himself until he finally blurted out ‘I love you, Lane,’ and the rest was history.
Back then, he was so afraid that Bishop wouldn’t think he was good enough for me. It took me reminding West that a mate gets to choose—not her overprotective older brother—before he stopped caring what Bishop thought about us.
Not that he had anything to worry about. If there was one male in all of Hickory that Bishop didn’t mind courting me, it was West. Even after I agreed to mate Rafael, following in Bishop’s footsteps, I think I disappointed him by not choosing West.
If I knew then what I know now… well, things could have been different.
