Page 5 of Abel's Omega
“What are you doing fussing around in the corner over there?” Roland snapped.
“Just tidying up. I thought I’d dust tomorrow and having things tidy makes it all go quicker.” That had been the deal—mending, cleaning, cooking. Nothing else. I didn’t think I wanted another alpha to touch me again, ever.
The Alpha’s mate, a beta female named Miranda who ran the Housing Commission, was very happy with the arrangement, as it left her free to pursue other interests once her pack duties were done. That didn’t mean she was kind, or welcoming, but she let me stay, and didn’t much care what I did as long as the house was clean and the meals cooked.
Roland grunted and waved at me to keep on doing whatever I was doing.
I kept puttering around the room until I was able to piece together the whole story. The omega had run away from his own pack and landed in Mercy Hills, where he’d promptly ended up mated. Which was fine, and made total sense. It also made sense that his pack would want him back if Mercy Hills hadn’t paid anything for him—and Mercy Hills was rich, so there had to be something else going on there. What I was having a problem with was that the omega really seemed to want to stay with the shifter who’d so abruptly mated him. Of course, coming from a dirt-poor enclave like Montana Border, ending up mated to a stranger in Mercy Hills might seem okay. No, actually, it definitely seemed okay. I’d do it, if I could be sure they’d take my babies.
But there was something off about that omega’s story. What omega, if he’d managed to live on his own for six years—would willingly go to a pack and ask to be mated? It made no sense at all.
Damn. I was running out of stuff to tidy, and the program seemed nowhere near over. Maybe Roland wouldn’t mind too much if I hung around to watch the rest? I padded silently over to the old chair next to the door into the kitchen and sat, watching Roland for signs that he’d noticed that I wasn’t where I was supposed to be, or cared that I wasn’t. He appeared engrossed in the program, though, and I thought I might have gotten away with it, until I heard the first disjointed mumbles of the baby as he started to wake up. Roland hated it when the baby cried—not so different from Patrick, after all—so I cast one last longing glance at the television and hurried into the kitchen.
“There, there, I’m here,” I murmured, lifting Noah out of the battered cradle and up to my shoulder. “Oh, you smell. Someone needs a change, doesn’t he?” I couldn’t help the smile that curved my lips. I might have hated my mate, but I loved my babies. “Let’s get you cleaned up and then we’ll see if you’re hungry.” I took Noah out into the screened-in back porch where we lived, and laid him on the slab of foam that I now used for a bed. Beatrice played in her corner, fenced in behind her plastic baby gate. She seemed content to bash her wooden blocks together, then pile them up and knock them down. I was grateful that she was a self-possessed little thing and good at entertaining herself, or I might have been in trouble. Two half-wild pups and a month-old-baby were enough. I didn’t need an adventurous toddler as well.
I unpinned the diaper, using the cloth to clean the poo off little Noah’s bum, then rolled it up and stashed it with the rest in a nearby garbage bag. I’d have to get them washed tonight—I was running low, and they were starting to smell, which would create problems with the Alpha’s mate. Noah squealed when I sprayed him with soapy water from a bottle I kept at the head of his bed, then giggled some more while I wiped away the mess that the diaper hadn’t picked up. I checked Noah’s omega line to make sure it wasn’t getting inflamed, and then gave him a last spray, this time with pure water to wash away the soap residue.
With that, and a new diaper, Noah was ready for the world. I laid him on my shoulder and cooed at him some more because it made him laugh, then went to check on Beatrice. She grinned up at me, her two front teeth peeking shyly out from her gums. It wouldn’t be long now before she’d be able to chew her own food, which would make less work for me. Though I supposed I had little Noah here to take up that slack. I bounced the baby, then picked up Beatrice’s stuffed rabbit and shook it at her. She laughed and reached for it, shoving its tail into her mouth and waving her other arm until her ragged pile of blocks tumbled to the floor again.
“Oops!” I said, and helped her pile them up again. She knocked them over and looked up at me expectantly. “Oh, no!” I cried. “All fall down!” She giggled and began chewing on her rabbit again.
“Baxter!” Miranda stood in the doorway. “We had an agreement.”
I bowed my head. “I’m sorry. The baby woke up and then he needed to be changed. I was just going back in to finish.”
“You were playing with your pups.” She sniffed derisively. “You’ll have time to play when you’ve done your chores.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and stepped out of Beatrice’s play area. Miranda followed me into the kitchen, watching closely as I tucked the baby back into the cradle and dragged it over by the sink. If I didn’t, Noah would fuss, and the Alpha would stomp into the room yelling, and then both babies would be crying.
Noah squawked a bit at being put down, but settled as soon as I got a foot under the cradle’s rocker and started it swaying back and forth.
I could see my two older pups out the kitchen window, playing in fur-form. Fan, bigger than his sister, jumped on her, pinning her to the ground with his greater weight. I watched for a moment, but when Fan started chewing on his little sister’s ear, I rapped on the window and shook my head at the young shifter. Fan let go of Teca’s ear and ran off to grab a stick and savage it furiously.
I watched for another few minutes, my hands working away at the last of the dishes automatically. As I scrubbed at the bottom of a pot, working at what seemed like years’ worth of burnt food, I wondered if things might have been different if Fan had been given a different name, and how much influence the names actually had on a child’s personality. Fan seemed to take his name’s meaning—lethal—as seriously as if it was a label that had been pinned on him.
These past five months had been hard on him. Going from Alpha’s son to the local orphan, and from being well-to-do in the pack to having nothing—I don’t know if he was picking up on my frustration, or if it was his own that he took out on the other pups. But I was beginning to dread the knocks on the door, the parents coming to complain about Fan biting their little one, or breaking things of theirs. Stealing, destroying. It never seemed to end. I felt like a failure, because what little time I had left, between keeping house for the Alpha and the odds and ends of cleaning a few neighbors hired me for out of pity, had to be split between the four of them. More often than not, the only time I had to spend with him was when I was dealing with his misbehavior, and that wasn’t helping things either.
Which meant that now I had an aggressive little alpha wolf on my hands, and I had no idea what to do about it or if it was already too late, but the future I saw for Fan if I didn’t figure something out scared me.
CHAPTER SIX
Finally, a few minutes of peace and quiet.
Abel, Alpha of the Mercy Hills Pack, settled down onto his favorite sheltered bench, the one hidden in a small patch of shrubs in the corner of the L-shaped building that held both the pack’s administration and Abel’s own company, GoodDog Software. He pulled out his phone and loaded his mostly finished Alpha Hunt game.
With the practiced ease of the man who’d designed it, he started moving through the levels, watching for anything that didn’t work right, that did something it shouldn’t. He made it all the way up to the twenty-first level before his little wolf icon balked at a door it should have been able to pass through, and he pulled out a notepad to record where the problem had happened.
“Abel!” Mac’s voice echoed off the walls surrounding him.
Abel winced and wondered what crime he’d committed that he couldn’t escape his responsibilities for even half an hour. That was all he wanted—thirty minutes to sit someplace and play a game. It wasn’t like it was even entirely not work related—it was his own bloody game, that he’d made, and was hoping to start selling. They needed to come up with the money to pay for Jason somehow, and it was the only thing he had anywhere near ready to go.
With a sigh, he shut the game down and put his phone away. “Hey, Mac.” He moved over to make room for his friend on the bench beside him. “What’s up?”
“Jason and I have been talking—”
Abel held a hand up to stop him. “What crazy plan does he have now?”
Mac frowned at him. “He’s trying.” The bruising around his eye, left over from when the Montana Border shifters had rammed their car a week ago, had seeped down onto his cheekbone, staining the skin an unappetizing greenish-brown. But that had been the worst of his injuries. Duke had taken the brunt of it all, with a broken wrist and a spectacular black eye in the fight afterward. Abel himself had caught a fist or two, which had left him with a thigh that still ached where Orvin had kicked him, and what Jason cheekily said would be a ‘rakishly sexy’ scar over one eye.
