Page 2 of Wolf Found

Or he supposed back then, a boy who loved other boys. They had both been children then, Graham a preteen and Ash a teenager. There was no way to know if the human military had been kind to Ash, but he looked happy in the picture, with his arm around two of the other men and a huge smile on his face. He was certainly just as beautiful as he’d been.

Maybe more beautiful.

So looking him up had been a mistake, because now whenever Graham had a moment for his mind to drift, it was the first thing he thought about. Beautiful, sweet Asher Martingale and his happy friends, who all owned a coffee shop together in Colorado.

Were the friends werewolves? One of them had the delicate features and size of an omega—the partner, Graham thought. But lots of humans had those same features, and there was no such thing as an omega human. They were all just human.

In his youth, Graham had dreamed of having been born human, in a human home, so that his family wouldn’t have seen him as a curse and a burden. His mother had refused to have another child after him, claiming that it was a waste of pack resources.

That was what Graham was to his parents. A waste of pack resources.

He sighed and tried to shake off the melancholy that had been growing inside him. He was not a waste of pack resources. He was a valued and useful member of the enclave. Maybe he wasn’t allowed to do the field work, but cooking was hard work too, and he was good at it.

The alpha had even once told him he had saved the pack money on their groceries, despite their growing numbers. “Not bad,” he’d said. From the alpha, even speaking of him was high praise. It meant Graham had been noticed, and not because he caused trouble.

The back door behind him opened, but he almost tuned it out. It wasn’t done with force and didn’t bang shut, so it was clearly one of the other omegas. They were well versed in keeping quiet.

After a few silent seconds, he realized no one had passed him or spoken. That was odd. He turned around, and there, plastered against the wall just inside the kitchen door was Hannah. His best friend, Hannah, who had been sent away in shame almost a year earlier, when she’d been caught breaking enclave rules and consorting with a human.

Hannah, who was biting her lip to stay silent, trembling in fear, tears tracking down her face.

Hannah, who held a baby in her arms.

Oh.

He met her gaze, and she started sobbing in earnest. “I didn’t know where to go, Graham. He didn’t want her. The alpha said I could come back, but not her. I don’t—I can’t—”

Graham did the only thing he could. He put down the cookies and went to hold his friend while she cried. He wondered if she would like Colorado.

2

I Don’t Want to Wait

“Idon’t like him,” Dez announced, like that was something profound and shocking.

Gavin raised a brow at him. “You don’t like anyone.”

Dez shrugged but didn’t question the statement.

“Aww, sugarbear, you like me,” Dez’s boyfriend, Sawyer, announced, plopping himself onto Dez’s lap. “And you like the guys.”

“Most of the time, I guess,” Dez agreed grudgingly.

It was a testament to how well he knew Dez that Ash’s only reaction was a chuckle. Dez did like him. Dez loved him, in fact. They were like brothers after all they’d been through together. Dez pretended to be grumpy, but anyone who knew him knew it was all an act to protect his squishy marshmallow core.

Kind of.

“Can we agree he’s a better choice than the lady who quit, at least?” Gavin asked them all. “I mean, we can’t let him near the customers, but he actually knows how to do the job and didn’t walk out because you asked if he can learn a recipe.”

It was an ongoing problem. They had hired one baker after another, from the grandmotherly figure who’d known three recipes and insisted that those should be more than enough to please everyone and gluten allergies were all fake anyway, to the current guy, forty-something Waylon, who took every opportunity to remind them that he had “trained at the CIA, dammit. No, I won’t make your generic blueberry muffins.”

The single time they’d asked him to talk to a customer, the result had been a sobbing teenage girl who didn’t even know what “bourgeois twit” meant, and her angry mother demanding an apology. She’d gotten one from literally everyone except the perpetrator of the situation, along with a box stuffed with free pastries. Dez had seen to the last, hurrying Waylon to take the last pan of the day out of the oven so he could give the pastries to “that poor little kid you insulted.”

Waylon had been snippy the next day, like somehow it had been their fault he’d been rude.

Ash hated to think it so bluntly, but Waylon clearly wasn’t going to last. It was a matter of time before either he quit in anger, or they were forced to fire him for another incident with a customer. Dez had been for firing him since “the bougie incident,” as he liked to call it. Sawyer had never liked Waylon to begin with, and frankly, Ash thought they should have taken that as a sign and not hired him. The problem was that they needed someone, and he’d been the only applicant with real experience.

It seemed that with a local college turning out bakers, they’d have had an easy time finding a good one, even if just out of college. It turned out most of them didn’t stay when their degrees were done, and the local resorts snapped up the best of those who did. Apparently baking at a coffee shop wasn’t a terribly desirable job.

---