Page 67 of Omega's Triplets

Chapter Seventeen

To stop running, Markknew, would be suicide. Never mind the pain that shot down his right foreleg with every step. Never mind the fact that he was starting to feel lightheaded. Never mind the fact that the human part of him was growing more and more insistent in the body of the wolf, protesting that they couldn’t keep going like this, that he would kill himself, that he was losing too much blood from his gunshot wound.

He pushed those thoughts away. He pushed away his humanity and embraced the wolf. The wolf knew only that there was a threat behind them and that they had to get to safety.

Amy had pulled slightly ahead of him. She looked back over her shoulder to make sure he was still there, and he dug deeper, ran harder. She was handling the situation remarkably, and he was proud of her, but she shouldn’t have had to do this. He was her alpha. He needed to regain control of things.

She took a sharp left. He followed—

She seemed to disappear.

What?

He stared at the place where he’d lost her. Was he delusional? Was the blood loss getting to him more quickly than he’d realized? Where had his packmate gone?

Then he spotted her. She was human again, her head sticking up from a hole in the ground. She waved urgently, but Mark didn’t need to be told. He dove in.

It was dark down there, and damp, but not nearly so much as he would have expected. It looked as though this place had been occupied before, maybe even tended to.

“Don’t shift,” Amy said in a sharp voice. She was wearing shorts and a crop top. Mark stared in amazement. Where had she gotten those? They’d both had clothes gripped between their teeth when they’d run from the house, but in the scuffle with the Death Fangs, they’d lost them.

Amy approached him now and carefully probed his shoulder. He felt his lips curl back from his teeth in an unwitting snarl.

“Knock it off,” she said. “I’m not trying to hurt you, and we both know you’re not going to bite me. But that bullet’s still in. I need to get it out.”

Mark settled back on his haunches. She was right, he knew, but that didn’t mean he liked it.

Amy moved out of his line of sight, keeping a hand on his shoulder. Mark felt intense pressure, then a stab of pain. A growl escaped him—

“There,” Amy said. “All done. You baby. You can shift now. There’s a pair of pants over there you can wear. I think they’re Harley’s, but they’ll fit you fine.”

She turned around, giving him privacy, and Mark shifted back and yanked on the pants she’d pointed out. He had about a thousand questions racing through his mind—What was this place? How had she known it was here? Why were theirclotheshere?—but he turned his attention first to the bullet wound in his shoulder.

It wasn’t as bad as he’d thought. In the ordinary course of events, he would have wanted to stitch it up, but they were on the run, and he’d have to do without stitches for now. There had been a few more articles of clothing underneath the pants, and he picked up the cleanest looking shirt he could find, ripped off a sleeve, turned it inside out, and tied it tightly around the wound.

“Good?” Amy asked.

“Yeah, you can turn around.” She did so. “What is all this?”

Amy looked a little uncomfortable. “I sort of thought something like this might happen,” she admitted. “When you told us about how you’d taken Maddy from under the Death Fangs’ noses... well, it seemed like there was a decent chance they’d figure it out eventually and come after us. So...,” she waved her hand around.

“So, you did this?”

“I figured it would be good to have a place to hide,” she said. “In case we had to run away from home. In case we didn’t have much of a head start. The entrance kind of angles down, you probably noticed, and I piled a bunch of leaves and shit around it so no one would see it unless they knew where to look. And I stored some clothes here for everyone, and there are a few cans of food too—”

“You stole food?”

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