Page 19 of Omega's Bears

Chapter Twelve

The moment seems todrag on forever. The shock on their faces freezes me where I stand, and I know—I just know—that Jack has told the others about what happened between us. Suddenly, the fact that the whole thing was entirely instigated by him feels irrelevant. I’m consumed by guilt. I feel as if I took him out into the woods to seduce him behind Ryan’s back, playing both men against each other, and now I’ve torn the family apart.

I need to think of something to say. But there’s nothing. I open and close my mouth a few times helplessly. I should just apologize, throw myself on the ground at their mercy, but I don’t want to start out that way. Especially since, as a pesky and unhelpful voice in the back of my mind keeps reminding me, I’m actually not sorry at all. I liked being taken by Jack. I want it to happen again. And to my great surprise, that hasn’t changed the way I feel about Ryan at all. Standing there, looking at him, I find myself just as attracted to him as ever.

I need to figure out some way to make this right. I kind of do resent Jack for having put me in this position. This is all his fault, I realize suddenly. He knew that Ryan had imprinted on me. When he imprinted too, the two of them should have talked it out. Or he should have had some kind of conversation with me after we were together and let me know what was expected. Or he should have broken the news gently to Ryan, or not told him at all. I don’t know what the right solution would have been, exactly. But I do know that Jack is my alpha and that I depend on him to act with reason and intelligence, and ever since he imprinted, he’s been doing neither.

It’s his fault I’m in this terrible position. He’s the one who’s put me here. But there’s nothing I can do about it now. I’m going to have to say something to these boys. They’re all staring at me. They’re waiting.

But just as I’m about to speak, Luka breaks the silence. “Cami. What the hell?”

My heart sinks. If Luka’s angry at me, gentle-natured Luka, who has no stake in this at all, I can only imagine how Ryan must feel.

But Luka laughs. “Did you go fishing?”

It’s only then that I catch sight of my fish, lying on the floor in front of them. “Yes,” I say, feeling shell-shocked and unsure of what’s coming next. Is Luka laughing at me? Am I in trouble for going out fishing? “I thought...I thought you’d like something different.”

Ryan lets out a laugh that’s more of a roar. It isn’t his angry roar, and it isn’t a warning. It’s a joyful sound. He crosses the cavern in two strides, scoops me into his arms in a massive hug, and twirls me around. “I didn’t know you could fish!”

“I didn’t either,” I admit. “I never tried it until today.” He sets me down and I step back quickly, still shivering with adrenaline and the fear that I was about to be exposed. It seems clear now that Jack hasn’t told Ryan anything. My eyes dart to him, but he’s turned his back to me now, screwing the cap off the water skin I brought back and taking a long drink.

Luka, meanwhile, has moved my fish to the flat rock where meat is prepared for cooking. He pulls out a knife and offers me the hilt. “You ought to be the one to clean it,” he says. “It’s your catch.”

I shake my head and take another step back. “I’ve never cleaned a fish before. I wouldn’t know what to do.”

“Then it’s time you learned,” Jack says, still not facing me. “Luka?”

Luka nods. “Come on over.”

There’s no avoiding it. I’d rather not take the knife to the fish—now that I’m in human form, it’s a lot harder to forget that it was a living animal, an animal that I killed. I’d rather sit on the opposite side of the cavern, the way I usually do when food is being prepared, and imagine that the meal that comes to my plate was always a steak and never a deer or a rabbit. I think of the salmon fillets I’ve eaten in my life, pink and square and flaky, and then I think of the silver wriggling fish with the wild eyes that I pulled from the river today. Even though I know the two things are the same, it’s hard to reconcile. I don’t want to be involved in this process.

But the men are watching me, and I know this is the next step in becoming a true Hell’s Bear. When I first arrived here, I never thought I’d be able to learn to live outdoors and off the grid the way they do. Now I think I might prefer it to the sheltered and comfortable life I used to know. I’ll never stop missing my old clan, and I’ll never stop wishing they were with me, but I have to admit, I’m grateful that I’ve had the opportunity to experience this new lifestyle. I remember wondering, once, why the Hell’s Bears would choose to live the way rumor told us they did. I remember Berto telling me dismissively that they were wild. They were renegades. They didn’t care about being part of society.

Now I’m wild too. And I kind of like it.

And at least it will be Luka teaching me how to clean the fish. Things with Jack are so fraught right now that I don’t know if I could even sit next to him without catching fire, and every time I look at Ryan, I feel consumed by guilt, as if I’ve betrayed and lied to him. With Luka, at least, things are still simple.

I sit beside him on the floor of the cave and take the knife he offers me. “I’ve never done this before.”

“So you said,” he says with a smile that immediately puts me a little more at ease. “Don’t worry. It’s easy. I’ve done it dozens of times; I won’t let you go wrong.” He wraps a cloth around the fish’s tail and hands the bundle to me. “Here’s where you hold on. You don’t want to try to grip the fish itself or the spines might cut your hands.”

I nod, trying not to look too nervous, and grip the tail as instructed. Luka shows me how to use the edge of the knife to catch the scales and flick them off the body of the fish. I get the hang of the technique soon enough, but I can’t help flinching every time I run the blade over the fish’s body. It feels violent, horrible, as if I’m skinning the animal, which I suppose I basically am. Because I’m so uncomfortable with the process, I’m going incredibly slowly.

After a moment, Luka takes the fish from me and scales for a minute himself. “Just keep going,” he says quietly. “Don’t get caught up thinking about what you’re doing, okay? It’s very natural. Every animal eats. This fish ate other fish while it was alive. Now you eat the fish.”

“Nothing eats me,” I point out.

“Perks of being an apex predator. It’s not like you designed the system, and starving yourself won’t change it.”

“I don’t really have a problem with eating the fish,” I admit. “Preparing it like this just makes me feel bad. Like, it was just out swimming in the river and now I’m scaling it with a knife? I feel like a serial killer.”

Luka regards me for a moment. “You’re very empathetic, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know,” I say. I’ve never thought of myself as particularly empathetic, but it does make me glow a little bit that Luka thinks so. Maybe my problem isn’t that I’m too soft. Maybe it’s just harder for me to dissociate from the feelings of this fish than it is for other people. It’s a charitable interpretation of my reluctance to scale the thing, at any rate.

“Don’t worry about it,” Luka says. “I’ll clean the fish. You don’t have to do it.”

“Jack wanted me to.” It’s hard to resist the pull of an alpha’s command.

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