Page 8 of Racing the Storm

After all, we had no military to fight them, no resistance to overthrow the government. We were historians and scholars and doctors and lawyers. We were spouses and parents and school teachers and pharmacy workers and restaurant owners.

My life changed—twisted into something ugly that nearly killed me the night my mate was murdered. We’d met when we were sixteen, shared our first heat and rut together at seventeen, and bonded that same night. Our parents were furious that we’d gone so far. It was difficult enough to exist as we were—mating without hesitation with any gender of Wolf—trying to blend into human society who believed that just added another layer to our monstrosity.

But Galen and I were happy, and it was hard to care, even if we couldn’t hold hands in public. We had a small ceremony, his parents gifted us a little one-bedroom cottage on the edge of town. We finished school together; he started up his little accounting firm, and I went on to attempt to mold teenage Wolf minds—or at the very least, convince them that learning wasn’t actually torture.

And life was nice. It wasn’t perfect, and I felt the walls closing in on us as the months crawled by and more laws were put into place. But I never thought they could really touch us. Those long nights I spent deep inside Galen during his heat, staring into his eyes, I felt untouchable. He’d smile at me with his slightly crooked canines and his soft blond hair that swept over his forehead, and I’d believe in forever.

The only conclusion the police ever came to about his death was that he was murdered by humans. I felt it, when the attack began. I felt his pain ripping at me through the bond. I was on my knees in the middle of the supermarket, gasping for breath. Someone managed to get me outside, but by the time they dragged me to the stone bench, I was only half-conscious.

He died somewhere in that time—in those impossibly short minutes between the front door and the shop wall. And it felt like someone was ripping my lungs out.

I woke in the hospital on a ventilator four days later with a doctor telling me it was a miracle I survived. I didn’t have the voice to tell him that surviving was torture. That living with the carved-out, empty space where Galen had been was a fate worse than death.

I would have allowed myself to waste away if it hadn’t been for that first bomb—and for the news that an army was recruiting. It was our chance to get revenge. We likely wouldn’t survive—Wolf armies across the globe were rising up, but we were small in numbers compared to the humans, and we had no training.

But we had natural weapons, and speed, and we could survive the most terrible conditions.

Hate fueled me, but by the time the treaty was signed, and Galen was twenty years dead, all that was left was a hollow shell and a Wolf who had made more mistakes than he cared to admit.

The day I stood with the Alpha Council with my pledge to join was the day I almost quit. A lot of my past, fighting at the front, had been an absolute blur, and I preferred it that way. After Galen died, I never indulged my rut.

It was the only way I could survive the grief of losing Galen, especially during leave after months at the front fighting to live.

But the night I met him—the small, dark-haired Omega who made me want to hold him and never let go—I had been shaken to my core. I’d smelled him in that bar, followed him outside, needed to sink my knot into him like I needed to breathe.

He was young and pliant, and he smelled untouched. The last thing I wanted to do was risk my heart again, but he was impossible to resist. I had to have him, and when he looked at me with need in his eyes, every ounce of my resolve shattered.

I sank inside him and something changed.

Something connected.

It was stronger than it had been with Galen that first time we spent his heat together. The fledgling bond glowed bright, tempting, my fangs dropping as I stared at the crook in his shoulder. And I could feel him—I could feel every atom in his body begging for it.

I wasn’t sure how the hell I resisted, but I managed it. Even as I locked our bodies together and held him as he drifted into unconsciousness, it took everything I had not to give in. I had never wanted before—not like this. And it was petrifying because I knew what lay at the end of that road. I wasn’t naïve enough to believe that Wolves couldn’t find a mate twice, as rare as it was. But I knew one or both of us would likely die before the war was over, and I couldn’t go back to the field with a bonded.

It wasn’t fair to either of us.

And even if I was guaranteed to live through it, my heart wouldn’t let go of my past. It wouldn’t stop reminding me that in the end, it was just emptiness and pain and suffering.

So, I ran. Like a fucking coward, I ran and hid and waited for the damn thing to fade out.

It took months, terrifying me to my core that something had gone wrong, and I’d managed to make it permanent during the knotting. I could feel him every second of every day—the quiet pain I had caused by disappearing and leaving him on his own. I could feel it in his bond that I had been his first—his only. I could feel his heart ache and his growing belief that he was not worth more than a quick, anonymous fuck.

I’m not sure how I managed to close myself off. Every instinct told me to find him, comfort him, assure him he was the perfect mate. Instead, I drank myself into a stupor, then killed as often as I could manage it. I threw myself into every reckless battle set before me in hopes it would end.

And one day, it did, just not in the way I expected.

One day, I woke up with the dawn, and there was nothing left but a ringing echo of what was. The war was over: Wolves and humans were signing a treaty, and we were free.

It was the first time I had cried since laying Galen to rest, and I prayed to the gods it would be my last.

I comforted myself with knowing I would never see that Omega again when I went back to society. The world was huge, and he was so beautiful; there was no chance at all he hadn’t found a mate who treated him like the gift he was. I was just happy to settle into some shitty apartment and ride out the rest of my long, pathetic life on my own.

And even when Zane Bereket showed up on my doorstep with a proposition because we all knew—deep down—that it wasn’t over, I felt good about accepting. After all, the world had moved on and so had that perfect Omega.

If only I had fucking known what was waiting for me the day Zane announced the council to the small band of Wolves ready to take on both sides of the government.

“Mikael, stick around after the ceremony. I need to introduce you to my brother. He’s the geneticist I was telling you about.” When he clapped me on the back and took me across the room to meet his Omega sibling, I didn’t think anything of it.

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