Page 70 of Omega's Triplets

Someone howled as he plowed into Max, and the gun went off. The sound of the shot rang in his ears. He couldn’t stop to see what had happened. Max shifted beneath him as Jamie took him down, and suddenly, it was not skin beneath his claws but fur. Not a human face, fragile and easy to damage, but a snapping, snarling wolf.

Jamie couldn’t back down.

He slashed at Max with his claws, raking him across the chest, just as Max scored his face with a slash of his own. He closed his jaws around the other wolf’s foreleg and wrenchedhard, and Max’s growl ended in a whine. The leg was broken. Jamie jumped back, looking around frantically, taking stock of the rest of the field. There were two more of them, and his omega was here, pregnant and defenseless...

Onlynotdefenseless, as it turned out. Reese must have shifted while Jamie was fighting Max, because now, he stood several feet away, holding Max’s gun on the Death Fangs’ alpha. The man had his hands up. Jamie allowed himself to shift too, seeing how the tables had turned, and moved closer to the rest of his pack.

“Jesus fuckingChrist,” Rocco whispered.

Max shifted back and huddled at the base of a tree, cradling his injured arm.

Harley stepped forward, fangs bared, snarling. Jamie grabbed Maddy and pulled her close, wrapping his arms around her. She was shivering.

“Get out,” Reese said. “Leave us alone. Forever. Or we’ll kill you. Don’t think I won’t do it.” \

Harley punctuated these words with a snarl so vicious it felt, to Jamie, as though he had literally ripped the air.

And still, the Death Fangs hesitated.

Jamie understood. It was a matter of pride for them. They couldn’t admit that they had lost. That they had been beaten. They couldn’t accept that Maddy, who they still saw as property, had been stolen from under their noses, and that they hadn’t been able to take her back.

There was only one way to get them to leave her alone.

“She’s been spoiled,” he said.

Everyone in the clearing looked at him. Maddy’s eyes were wide.

He wrapped his arms more tightly around her, hoping against hope that she would understand what he was doing, and that his words wouldn’t wound her. “She’s damaged goods,” he said. “Worthless. Nobody would pay for her now.” And he lifted Maddy’s hair from her neck and displayed three prominent scars—the bite he’d given her last night and the other two, older, from Mark and Harley.

“No one wants a used omega,” he said quietly.

It didn’t change anything. He knew that, and if the Death Fangs wanted to, they could see it that way too. Maddy had still been one of theirs, and she had still been taken from them. The fact that she was now used... well, they’d known that all along, hadn’t they? They’d known she was pregnant. They would have never thought the Hell’s Wolves had taken her to mop the floors.

But seeing those marks...

It gave them the room to surrender without losing face. It gave them the ability to walk away and to say they had done so by choice, because they didn’t want Maddy anymore. They wouldn’t have to admit they’d been beaten. They could tell a different story.

If they wanted to.

Everyone could walk away unscathed.

It was Jamie’s greatest skill—his ability to reason, to understand, to think. To be human. It was the thing he brought to his pack in greater amounts than either of his wild, animal brothers.

Now, he held his breath and pulled Maddy into him and prayed it would be enough.

---