Page 6 of Wolf Lost

It wasn’t hard to see the survivor’s guilt written all over her, and Dez felt it as keenly as if he’d known the Kozlowskis himself. He knew how it felt to be the one who survived. He looked at Asher and Gavin. They all knew.

Gavin leaned back against the counter and nodded. “I’m sorry, Ms. Noble.” He turned back to the realtor. “Why don’t we talk about it and get back to you? We’ve got Dez’s friend to consider here. We need to get him somewhere to recover.”

“You don’t want to see the other property on the list?” the man asked, and Dez couldn’t tell if he was hoping for a yes or a no.

Asher slipped his hands under Sawyer’s knees and upper back and stood, careful to make sure the man’s head landed on his chest instead of hanging backward. “I think we’ve had an eventful enough morning,” he said, and motioned to the door. “I’m going to get, um, Sawyer here, to the car. Meet you guys there.”

Gavin nodded to him and turned back to the realtor. “We’ll call you on this one. They’re going to have to reduce the price at least enough to replace the appliances, though. And to get a dumpster out here for that mess.” He waved at the tables and chairs dismissively, and Dez had to work not to roll his eyes. Of course Gavin wanted to toss them.

“Excellent,” Daryl agreed. “We can certainly make an offer based on that. Let me know.”

Dez followed Gavin to the car, stiffly, but on his own two feet. He didn’t make any effort to keep up. His leg had good days and bad days, and he wasn’t going to push it on a bad day. The guys would wait for him. They would always wait for each other.

As Asher was always saying, it was what pack did, and they were pack. An odd pack, surely, but a pack nonetheless.

5

Closer to Fine

Sawyer’s stomach woke him, vibrating with its demand that he give it something. Anything, really. It was about ready to settle for tree bark and leaves.

The rest of him was oddly comfortable. The last time he’d woken, he’d been sitting upright, buckled into a truck seat. It hadn’t been the worst, but it definitely hadn’t been comfortable. Now, though, everything was still and he was lying down—on something soft, no less.

Reluctantly, he let his eyes drift open. He was in a room that was too clean to exist.

The walls were pristine white, and everything from the crown molding to the nightstand was trimmed in deep gray wood with heavy grain and whorls, like it had been carved from driftwood. There were gauzy white curtains covered with thick black velvet drapes, and the bed itself had a huge black sheepskin blanket that was impossibly soft.

He had to be dreaming still, he decided. Or maybe he was dead. This was the kind of room that existed only in his imagination and those “our house is better than yours” magazines.

His stomach rumbled again, telling him that no, this was as real as anything.

“And that’s all very logical, Dez, as always,” a voice said from somewhere outside the room. “But I keep telling you that your brain doesn’t work the way you expect it to anymore.”

The handsome alpha’s gravelly voice followed, and it made Sawyer shiver. “It’s still my brain, Ash. So my bed’ll smell like him for a while. I’ll manage.”

My bed.

The alpha’s bed.

Sawyer turned his head and took a deep inhale of the pillow. Sure enough, there was that smell he hadn’t been able to place before. That rich, warm, deep scent of a hot mocha on a cold morning. No person had ever smelled like anything other than human or wolf to Sawyer before. What did that mean?

At least he knew that whatever had happened in the empty shop, the alpha who protected him had survived it. He hated to imagine three alphas in a fight. He’d heard they turned mindless and bloodthirsty when their territory was threatened, and while he’d never seen the behavior in his father, he didn’t doubt it was possible. The only other alpha he’d ever known was Mark, and he was definitely violent.

Sawyer shivered at the reminder of what he had left behind. A lifetime with Mark would surely have been awful. And probably short.

“You can come out whenever you like, pup,” the man his alpha had called Ash said.

Sawyer turned his head to look at the doorway, worried they’d caught him creepily sniffing the pillow for traces of the alpha’s scent, but the door was empty.

“Don’t call him that,” Desmond muttered, sounding annoyed, but not angry. “He’s a full-grown adult, not a little kid.”

The other man sighed. “You’re right. I’m sorry. It’s the way my family acted toward omegas, and it’s not appropriate.”

That was when a third voice chimed in. “What’s an omega? You’ve never mentioned that before.”

Never mentioned omegas? Seriously, what kind of pack had he landed with?

He slipped out of the bed, pleased to find his clothes, travel worn as they were, completely intact. They’d taken his shoes and socks off, but those were sitting right there on the dark lacquered wood floor next to the bed. No one was trying to trap him, and no one had changed his clothes while he was unconscious.

---