It probably had something to do with the fact that this was where Paul, Eli’s father, had reamed us a new asshole when we were kids.
He’d always disliked us, and we’d expected that hatred to pass onto his son. Hate begat hate, after all. But Eli had been the exact opposite. Supportive, helpful, encouraging.
Always had been.
Was the woman in my arms why?
Had the Mother been waiting to tie us together all along?
I didn’t usually believe in superstitions. Mostly because I was a living, walking one. The pack, on the whole, hated me and my brother because we were twins, so I knew most of the lore in our world was bullshit since I wasn’t evil. I wasn’t this obnoxious abnormality that should have been put down at birth because I’d dared to share a womb. So why would anything else be true? I’d never expected a mate of my own, nor for Ethan, and I’d never been granted one at our covenant just like Eli, but the mate bond was something I had faith in.
How couldn’t I?
A gift from the Mother wasn’t anything to sneer at on the regular, but a woman who got you? Who knew you bone deep?
That was more than a fucking gift.
I headed toward the fire, settling on my knees as I lay her down on one of the many fur rugs on the floor. She sighed, instantly soothed by the heat, and when she rested her head on my lap, I was a fucking goner.
I mean, man, she’d already had me twisted into knots, so much so that, last night, even after a long ass day, even after what had gone down with her at the carnival and the adrenaline of trying to stop chaos from falling on the pack before it was too late, I hadn’t been able to sleep.
Not one wink.
All night long, I’d been thinking about her. Her weirdness, who’d hurt her, why they had hurt her, her coloring…
Now, here she was, fucking breaking my heart by doing shit like that.
Sure, as wolves, we were tactile and affectionate by nature, but not to strangers. Not really.
She released a chuffing sound, then almost dug her nose into my fucking crotch before settling down even more and sagging, as though any and all of her tension could dissolve from her being, now that she was here.
Warm.
Safe.
I cut my brother a look when he slouched behind me, taking a seat on one of the armchairs in front of Eli’s desk. He’d twisted it around so he could watch over her, and when Eli took a seat on the side of the desk, perching his ass there to look us over as well, I just sighed and slumped a little.
“This is gonna be messy,” I predicted.
“All the good things in life are,” Eli muttered.
And he wasn’t wrong.
The next week was weird but good. Sabina didn’t shift, but she slept. A lot. We didn’t reveal her to the pack, mostly because we weren’t ready to announce how we’d come by her. Not without us implicating ourselves in something we hadn’t fucking done.
The two-dozen-strong council, after hearing and experiencing the omega’s death, as well as the rest of the pack, were quiet, and though we felt the grief just as much, we were working too many hours to really mourn Merinda’s passing.
The day after the attack, as predicted, the carnival had disappeared. There one moment, gone the next. Though we hadn’t scented anything that night, in the aftermath, it had been even harder because there were even more unusual scents hanging around.
The only thing we could say with any certainty was that we hadn’t scented a strange alpha. But they could have used something to mask their essences, and in all honesty, that wouldn’t be shocking, considering their intent.
Ethan spent a couple of days in the next town to the west, and I went to the east, meeting with the alphas there to try and ascertain if they had a problem with us on the guise of business. Eli sent us with some trumped-up missive that gave us a reason to visit, but we found nothing in those packs, nothing that could help us, at any rate.
And finding that I hated being away from Sabina wasn’t something I considered to be a lesson well learned.
I spent those two days longing to get back to her, and from what Eli said, she’d pined for us as well. Yelping in her sleep more, being restless rather than rested as