Kieran

The king’s involvement was a source of irritation for me. I did my best to avoid him, which had been easy for the past couple of years—he’d been giving me a wide berth.

Following Conrad’s scent, we moved carefully, keeping an eye out for any wolves who might be lingering, until we found a woman’s prone body bleeding in the leaves. I kneeled by the body and pressed my fingers to her neck.

“She’s alive,” I muttered. Blood poured out of her stomach. She’d been stabbed.

I inhaled sharply when a different scent hit me. Panic and surprise flooded our bond, and I hissed. “She’s an omega.”

Fuck. What the hell was an omega—an injured one—doing all the way out here? My instincts to race forward and protect her warred with my disgust. I wouldn’t let my alphas get involved with another omega.

I wouldn’t get involved with an omega.

Lucien dropped down to his knees next to me. Betty was still in his arms. “No,” I growled. “Get back.”

“She’s...” Lucien whispered. His alpha genes were starting to take over. She was an omega—he was programmed to help and protect her.

An omega, like Lana. My whole body tensed and heated. Just thinking of that name catapulted me back into the past. The fury on her face. The bodies at her feet. The gunshot.

I shook myself back to the present.

“You’re holding Betty,” I said to Lucien. That seemed to break through, and he took several steps back.

“We can’t let her die,” he said tightly.

No. No matter how I felt about omegas, I couldn’t just kneel by her body and let her bleed out.

“We need to make a tourniquet,” I muttered.

“She’s been stabbed in the stomach,” Lucien said through gritted teeth. “You can’t make a tourniquet for that.”

“Then we’ll pack the wound and see if we can get her to the car.”

“Do you think she can shift? She could heal.”

Against my better judgment, I probed for her wolf. It was there, deep down. I was about to call it forward when I inhaled deeply. My wolf jerked away, and the tug on my body was so strong that I nearly lay down beside the woman and pressed my body against hers.

No. No fucking way. With shaking hands, I reached forward and brushed the woman’s greasy, stringy blonde hair out of her face. She moaned faintly, and her eyes fluttered open.

Help me.

With a snarl, I jerked back and nearly fell into the leaves. Lucien hissed and prepped for danger.

“Alpha?” he asked in a low voice.

“What is it?” Conrad demanded.

I stared at the body. It didn’t even seem possible that she could be here, five hundred miles from where I’d last seen her.

Help me.

She’d haunted my dreams. Ever since I’d first laid eyes on her and felt the pull of our mating bond, I’d been haunted by her and the words she’d whispered to me.

She’d begged for help, and I’d turned my back on her. I’d fucking left her there because what the fuck else was I supposed to do? She was an omega.

It was a cruel fate—maybe everything I fucking deserved and more. Omegas were rarely mated, yet one would be fated for me after everything I’d done—and hadn’t done.

I’d failed to keep my pack safe. I hadn’t protected my wolves. They were dead, and this was how I was being punished—with a mate I’d never be able to trust.

So I’d turned from her and left her to whatever darkness had led her to the underground auctions. Drugs, most likely.

Omegas were pampered by nature, spoiled brats taken straight from the omega schools and crowned princess of whatever pack had shelled out the thousands of dollars to buy them. That kind of life had consequences. She wasn’t the first omega I’d heard of who’d turned to drugs.

Her blood had been with her. I sensed the beta standing next to her and the connection they shared. He’d been there to help her, and she’d tried to run. It was nothing I’d been willing to get involved with. I’d been there for one reason, and one reason only, and it had nothing to do with a mate.

Fate had a twisted sense of humor—here she was, right in front of me.

Dying.

Lucien

With a moan, she closed her eyes, and her head fell to the side. Guilt was a part of Kieran’s personality now. It lurked in our bonds and had become a fixture, but it seared through me stronger than ever as I stared down at the omega.

“What the fuck is happening?” Conrad shouted at me. Even through the bond, he sounded out of breath.

My reply—that I had no idea what was happening—was terse as I stared at the omega. Kieran wasn’t moving fast enough. Every fiber of my being needed to help, so I put Betty down gently.

“Sit here, Betty.” When I was sure that she wouldn’t toddle off, I stripped my shirt to pieces and began trying to pack them into the omega’s wounds.

Blood stained my fingers as it continued to leak from her, and I started to shake. Three stabs. Had they hit any vital organs? Was I only buying her a few seconds before she died in my arms?

She wouldn’t be the first.

I’d caught Lana before she even hit the ground. The gun fell to the grass—so goddamn harmless once it wasn’t in someone’s hands—but the damage had been done. Dead wolves littered the ground around us, and Lana...

She was our omega. She was supposed to heal us. How the fuck had she become so twisted? How the hell had we not seen it?

“Lucien, you’re growling through the bond,” Conrad said. “What’s going on? Are you all right?”

I ignored him. I wasn’t all right. None of us were, even though we’d done our damndest to pretend. Kieran locked himself in his room and stared at his security monitors as if he could somehow use them to look back at the past and see where it all went wrong.

Conrad barely spent any time in the hotel. He patrolled and patrolled and went off on his fact-finding missions. I could scarcely fucking relax whenever I wasn’t near Betty. Hell, I could barely relax when she was near—our only beta. And now there was an innocent dying, and I wasn’t sure I could save her.

Silently, I worked on the next stab wound as her scent wrapped around me. My wolf howled inside of me. Save the omega. Find the threat. Eliminate it. Protect the omega. She was a slip of a thing. All skin and bones, the white dress she wore turning more and more red by the minute. How much more blood could she lose?

I hated the voice lurking in the background. Was she innocent? Was there a reason someone had tried to kill her?

Had she betrayed someone, too?

What if I couldn’t save her? How many more dead omegas would it take before my wolf went insane?

“Last wound,” I said tersely to Kieran as I tried to stave off the desperation and focus. “Get the car. If you want Conrad back, you better call him now.”

My alpha was torn. I knew he wanted Conrad to catch who had done this. We all did, but he also didn’t want to leave us alone. In his eyes, we were just as vulnerable as his dead pack members had been.

“Returning,” Conrad broadcasted, and I heard the growl of frustration. He hadn’t caught the would-be killer.

The omega stirred again, and her eyes fluttered open. She held my gaze for just a few seconds, but it felt like an eternity. Her scent wrapped around me and clung for dear life. Defenseless. Innocent. No one had been here to protect her. My wolf howled in fury.

But I didn’t dare let it out. Instead, I watched Kieran as he jogged back. Wordlessly, he bent down to lift her, and I heard the smallest of whimpers come from him. It wasn’t her weight—I’d seen Kieran bench press four hundred pounds without breaking a sweat.

This was something else entirely, but he was actively stemming the tide through our bonds and not letting us in.

Darkness always lurked inside him, and I had a bad feeling that today, this omega had ripped it wide open.

Conrad

She was so small.

Eyes glued to the omega in the hospital bed, I watched the machines beep and light up. My uncertainty grew. Did the doctors even know what the hell they were doing?

What if these machines weren’t working? What if she was dying right now, and everyone thought she was on the mend because some hundred-thousand-dollar machine wasn’t working, and nobody knew?

How could someone hurt an omega like this? In most cases, wolves were wired to protect an omega. Who the hell in their right mind would try to kill one?

Other than us.

We’d never told anyone the truth about Lana. Not even King Cyrus, although he’d probably guessed. Everyone else assumed our old omega had died with the rest of the betas.

Omegas were precious and rare. It took someone perverse and twisted to hurt an omega like this.

Unfortunately, wolves with darker tastes weren’t hard to come by. I feared what would happen to Kieran if we didn’t find some way to get him some help. What would happen to all of us—no matter what Kieran turned into, Lucien and I would never leave him.

We had to protect her. What if the would-be killer comes back? He could come back, because I couldn’t catch him. In fact, he was damn likely to come back—trying to kill an omega was punishable by death.

I was fast. In the two years since we’d lost our pack, all I’d done was train. Push myself to be better. Harder. But the fucker had too much of a head start. I knew I was close, but when Kieran called me back, all I could do was obey.

“When was the last time the goddamn doctor checked on her?” I growled and started back to the hall, but a gasp brought me up short.

She was awake.

I didn’t need to communicate through the bond. Lucien and Kieran would have felt it. Both of them were staying as far away as they could.

They assumed I’d be the most immune to her because I hadn’t been all that enamored with Lana.

My reaction to this omega was nothing like my reaction to Lana.

The woman blinked and moaned a little as she started to shift. Her gaze didn’t seem to focus anywhere, but she tried to roll to her side before she whimpered in pain.

My wolf pulled desperately and howled at the sound.

“This is Candy!” Betty said, toddling toward the omega on the bed.

Immediately, I put my hand on Betty’s shoulder and started to pull her back. Wolves in pain often didn’t react well, and I had no idea what they’d pumped into the omega.

Although they rarely shifted, I knew nothing about this one. I wasn’t about to let her hurt Betty, even if that wasn’t in their nature.

It sure as fuck shouldn’t have been in Lana’s, and look where that thinking had gotten us.

The omega’s hand shot out, and she grabbed Betty.

“Don’t...hurt...her,” she said as she struggled to sit up. “Please.”

It wasn’t hard to pull Betty out of the omega’s grasp in her weakened state, and I narrowed my eyes as I fought the tide of emotions rising in me. Please. The word nearly sent me into overdrive.

“Candy,” Betty repeated, holding her bear out.

“Betty!”

The omega’s eyes landed on me, and sheer panic swept over her face. She bolted upright. I could smell the adrenaline pulsing through her as she started to pull at the needle and tubes attached to her.

“Stop,” I ordered as I swept Betty into my arms and carried her to the door. “We need a doctor in here!"

Another scent hit me, and I snapped my head around and stared at the omega as she continued to fight with the machines. We hadn’t smelled it before, maybe because she was so close to death, but it was there, plain as day.

Her alpha bond.

The omega belonged to another.

“Conrad, no,” Kieran ordered. He could feel my wolf about to rip out of me. “Pull it together.”

Pull it together.

I felt him getting closer, and it calmed me a little. I couldn’t explain my reaction. Of course she belonged to another—it wasn’t like omegas ran around rogue.

But I did know that whoever had claimed her didn’t deserve her and had taken something that wasn’t his.

But God, she couldn’t be ours. She could never be ours. Kieran had already made his decree after both he and Lucien had been covered in Lana’s blood.

We would never welcome another omega into our pack.