Page 60 of Pack Kasen: Part 1

I hadn’t needed to run with the bunkhouse so close, but what if she stopped breathing on the way?

The door flies open before Finan, who had followed, was reaching for it.

Gregor, our pack healer, an older, husky man in his fifties with a gray beard and a surprisingly angry demeanor for one of the best healers in the country, glares at me. “Give her to me.”

My arms tighten around her and it takes brute force to relinquish my hold on her.

“What happened?” he demands, carrying her into the bunkhouse as Finan holds the door open.

The infirmary is just inside, the first door on the left in a long hallway that leads to the rest of the living quarters.

“She fell from the deck. She was dangling from her neck.”

Gregor shows no sign he heard me as he lays Kat down on the bed and examines her neck. Like most of the pack, he dresses casually in sweatpants and a T-shirt. He listens to her breathing, studies the marks on her neck, and pulls a blanket over her.

And all the while, I hover.

I’ve done what I’m here to do.

“I can watch her. You can get back to your task,” Gregor says as he riffles through a drawer without looking at me.

I take a seat on the hard wooden chair just beside the door. Gregor says he does his best work when people aren’t standing at his elbow, watching him. The uncomfortable seat encourages people to leave who might want to linger. “I’ll stay.”

He arches his eyebrow.

“In case the feral attacks,” I say.

He snorts. “Theferalwon’t be doing any attacking. You can leave.”

From the emphasis he places on a certain word, I can guess what he thinks. “You’ve been speaking to Finan.”

“I’ve been using my eyes and my ears,” he says, taking a small bottle from the drawer and walking over to Kat’s side. “Which is a damn sight more than you’ve been doing.”

I snarl at him.

He doesn’t react. “If you’re going to be snarling and growling, you can do it somewhere that won’t disturb my patient. You know the rules, Aren.”

This is Gregor’s domain.

He is an omega. He functions, as it were, outside of pack hierarchy, which means my snarls and growls have little to no effect on him. There’s no out dominating an omega. They do whatever the hell they want.

I sigh. “How bad is her throat?”

“Bad enough,” he says. “She crushed some bones.”

I get up from what has to be the most uncomfortable seat I’ve ever sat in my life, rubbing my lower back. “But she’ll heal?”

“She will. What happened?”

I give him the condensed version of taking the feral from the cage and leaving her with Marisa near the decking with a promise to return quickly. He raises his eyebrow when I reach the point in the story where Marisa was telling Silas that the chain slipped out of her hand, but he shakes his head when I ask him what he’s thinking.

I’m almost positive he catches me looking at Kat’s neck. Not on the bruised part. The part of her throat I want to bite.

He studies me, and his stare is nothing less than disapproving.

“The chain was to keep the rest of the pack safe,” I tell him before we can get into an argument.

His eyebrows pull together as he frowns at me. “I understand why you think you need it with a feral, but this girl does not need to be chained. Since you’ve decided you don’t want to listen to me, you can go. I’ll watch over her as she rests and heals.”

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