Page 9 of Wolf Lost

They all sat in silence for a moment. Gavin thoughtful, Asher looking sad and guilty, as he often did when he thought about werewolf society. He’d grown up in what he called a “traditional pack,” so Dez assumed his people had treated omegas—well, like people in the fifties had treated women.

Sawyer, he realized, looked nervous.

Jesus. The guy thought they were going to treat him different because they learned other wolves were stuck in the wrong century.

The best way to handle this was with all the formality such crap deserved. He blew a raspberry. Everyone turned to look at him. “Oh, come on. It’s a load of crap. Where the hell is the maternal bone, anyway?” He turned to Sawyer. “Is there anything different about you, other than smelling like sugar and looking like a twink?”

Sawyer blushed, and it was fucking adorable. “Well, there’s”—he coughed and mumbled something, but when everyone but Asher continued looking at him expectantly, he spoke again—“heat.”

Asher turned bright red and hopped up, gathering the pizza boxes. “I’m going to take these out to the—”

“Sit,” Gavin ordered, and Asher’s ass hit the floor a millisecond later. “What’s heat?” Gavin looked between Ash and Sawyer, and when Sawyer looked nervous, he focused entirely on Ash.

After a long, silent moment, Ash cleared his throat. “Okay. So. You know how I said a lot of our physiology is vaguely based on wild wolves?” Gavin nodded and twirled his finger in the universal gesture of hurry-it-up. “Wild wolves have, like, you know. A mating season.”

“But omegas can’t have kids,” Gavin said. “I mean, omegas can’t have kids, right?”

“Right. Well, male omegas can’t have kids. Maybe they could, way back in the days when we were in danger of extinction, but they can’t now. Most omegas are female, and they have the same drives either way. During times of year when their bodies suggest it would be safe to have kids, they kind of... that is—”

“They go into heat,” Gavin finished for him. He sat back in his seat and looked shell-shocked, like Ash had told him he personally was going to go into heat.

Dez shrugged. “Sounds crappy.” He looked at Sawyer. “Is it rude to ask about?”

Sawyer shrugged halfheartedly. “I guess it’s pretty taboo. No one talks about it. It’s ‘omega business,’ and we’re expected to handle it ourselves unless we’re married. But it’s not that bad. It’s not painful or anything.” He blushed, and it looked a lot better on him than Ash. “It’s just a little embarrassing.”

Ash reached for the boxes again and started putting as much as possible into the same one. Dez made a face at him. “Don’t put that fish crap in with the real pizza. It’ll make it stink.”

Dez reached for his cane, but as he wrapped his fingers around it, his whole right hand spasmed, twisting uncontrollably. He cursed under his breath and clenched the hand into a fist.

Gavin and Ash were silent, but Sawyer practically leapt out of his chair. “Are you okay?”

He could almost feel the guys wince at the question. No one liked to talk about Dez’s injuries. He understood that. He wouldn’t have wanted to talk about it if they’d come home hurt.

Werewolves healed so quickly that sometimes the injury didn’t register before it was gone. Shaving nicks no longer had time to bleed on the occasion he bothered shaving.

But Dez’s leg had been crushed before he was bitten, if only just before. It was healing, but it was healing like he was still human. The doctors said he’d probably need the cane forever, but all things considered, it was no big deal. He’d survived, unlike so many others.

The twitch, though... that wasn’t fine. At first, the doctors had thought it neurological: a symptom of a concussion. The only problem was that Dez didn’t have a concussion. They had followed up by suggesting that after he was mustered out, he contact the VA for a therapist.

Yeah, right.

Even now that he could afford a therapist, that wasn’t going to happen. The last thing he needed to do was tell a perfect stranger, a civilian, about the things he’d done in the name of his country. It was no coincidence that a former green beret sniper got an uncontrollable muscle spasm in his right hand. If it was all in his head, it wasn’t going to get better.

With all his strength, he grabbed the metal handle of his cane. It gave a little under his fingers, but there was no twitch this time. He stood, slowly—for the most part he’d learned his lesson about getting up too fast early on—and nodded to Sawyer.

“I’m fine.”

It wasn’t hard to see the moment when Sawyer connected everything. The spasm, the cane, the fact that he hadn’t yet seen Dez walk. His eyes went wide, and instead of the usual pity, there was a flash of disappointment.

Well that was definitive.

Ash had warned him that werewolves, especially those born that way, were bothered by physical disabilities. That they were unlikely to accept him into any pack. It hadn’t mattered because they had their pack of three, and that was all they needed.

He shouldn’t have hoped for better. Shouldn’t have hoped that maybe Sawyer would be able to ignore his leg and like him for who he was. Sawyer was a stranger, and he was passing through. He wasn’t a new pack member, and he wasn’t interested in a bitten werewolf with a bad leg.

He turned away from Sawyer and nodded to the room at large. “I’m going to go soak my leg.”

The indoor hot tub was literally the best part of having the money for a multimillion-dollar house. And right now, it had a big gap to fill. His leg hurt, but so did his ego, and the empty place in his chest that told him even with his pack, his brothers, something was missing.

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