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“Are they? Curious.” Then, “Livingstone.”
“Michelle,” I said, sounding bored.
She was good. She gave away nothing at my disrespect. “And Mark Bennett. Why, this is quite the gathering. All for one little Omega.”
“The third this month,” Ox reminded her, though she already knew.
“Does it live?”
“She does,” Joe said. “She wasn’t a threat. We don’t kill indiscriminately.”
Mark tensed beside me but said nothing.
“No? Ox might say otherwise. As I’m sure you’re aware by now, during your little… sojourn to parts unknown, the blood of many Omegas was spilled upon your territory.”
“You know why,” Ox said, calm as ever.
“Yes,” she said. “Because they were acting in service of Richard Collins, the pathetic little things that they were. Or at the very least, they were trying to capture his attention. And now that he’s dead, well. They have to go somewhere.”
“Why here?” I asked.
She barely looked at me, instead choosing to answer to the Alphas. “Somehow Richard was able to gather the Omegas behind him. They listened to him. They followed him. He wasn’t an Alpha, not then, but he acted like one.”
Joe shook his head. “That shouldn’t have been possible.”
She arched a perfectly shaped eyebrow. “No? Neither should Alpha Matheson here. Before his change, he was nothing but a human.” She had a look of faint disdain on her face. “And yet there was still something about him, wasn’t there? Enough that the pack you left behind chose him to lead. Well, the wolves, anyway.”
“Ox is nothing like Richard,” Joe said, voice clipped. No one talked shit about his pack. I’d seen what Joe was capable of when pushed. Michelle was pushing, though I didn’t know why.
“They’re more alike than you think,” Michelle said. “Ox may not have Richard’s penchant for… chaos, but they aren’t like anyone I’ve ever seen before. And even though his reign ended rather quickly, from what you’ve said, Richard got his wish. He was an Alpha, if only for a moment.”
She was right. Even as I’d watched, unable to stop him, Richard had thrust his hand into Ox’s chest. I’d seen the blood and the wet pieces of Ox falling to the ground. And there had been a brief, terrible second when Richard’s eyes had bled from violet to red. Ox’s pack didn’t talk about it much. How they’d felt Richard bursting through them, even the humans. Where once it’d been love and brother and sister and pack, what remained was nothing but rage and bloodlust, a furious pull into black tinged with red. Richard Collins had taken the Alpha from Ox. Therefore, he’d become the Alpha to Ox’s pack.
Joe had ended that as quickly as it’d started.
But they hadn’t forgotten how it’d felt, brief though it was.
“And you took that from him,” Michelle continued. “You killed him. Richard was the Alpha to the Omegas. When he died, that passed on to you. And oh, they’re fighting it, I’m sure. Resisting the pull. But Green Creek was lit up like a beacon in the dark. Some can’t help but seek you out. Coupled with the draw of the Bennett territory, I’m only surprised there haven’t been more.”
Ox and I exchanged a glance. The rest of the wolves didn’t react. Michelle was dangerously close to a truth she didn’t even know was within her grasp, something we’d kept from her since the day Oxnard Matheson had been turned into an Alpha wolf.
Because she was right. Somehow, Richard had managed to gather Omegas behind him, and though he hadn’t been an Alpha—in fact, toward the end, his eyes had been violet and crazed—they had followed him. They had listened to him.
Alpha to the Omegas was something of a misnomer. Richard Collins had only been an Alpha for seconds before Joe killed him.
Joe’s eyes had burned as bright as I’d ever seen them before he bit Ox, giving the Alpha power back.
And with it had come the Omegas who had amassed behind Richard.
It’d been a whisper at first, in Ox’s head.
But it soon turned to a roar.
There were a few days following Ox’s transition from human to wolf where we thought he was turning feral.
And then it began to spread to others. Elizabeth. Mark. Chris. Tanner. Rico. Jessie. Robbie.
They, too, began to feel it, like an itch under their skin that could never be satisfied. They were… moodier than they normally were. Quick to anger, especially after Joe and Ox mated.
