Page 22 of Wolf Found

Everyone else had gone to bed, or at least to their rooms. Gavin had wisely suggested Joey be the very first inhabitant of their guest house. It had been finished a week or so earlier, and Sawyer and Dez had decorated it, so it was ready.

And more importantly, it was away from Ash.

Dez and Sawyer had taken him out there after dinner, Sawyer chatting away about all the amenities, and how amazing Dez was at carpentry. Joey had nodded a lot and sent a look Ash’s way. He wanted to talk.

Ash most emphatically did not want to talk to him.

Gavin hadn’t dragged him aside and made him explain, but it had been a close thing. He’d given Ash a long, complicated look—confused and worried and a little hurt that Ash hadn’t just confided in him—but he’d let it go and headed off to his room to read.

Ash had gone downstairs, the entire basement being his domain. It had the laundry room, a guest bedroom, and some kind of weird room with a pool table and beer taps and antlers on the wall, but they didn’t make much use of that. So the majority of it was Ash’s room, and a connected room with his enormous television and every video game they could find.

Usually, his mass of game systems was more than enough to keep Ash’s attention for any amount of time. The first-person shooters had lost their shine quickly—too close to real life; except for ones with stories. So he’d spent the last few months working his way through every RPG he could get his hands on.

Living different people’s lives had a shocking amount of appeal, especially when every single one of them seemed to have the option of a happy ending. Maybe not perfect, but so much more satisfying than real life.

On this night, though, the games couldn’t keep him from thinking about Joey and Graham and Hannah and what a mess his childhood pack had been. At random moments, things from the last day would pop up in his mind.

Joey, staring at him with hunger he remembered all too well. Hannah, saying her boyfriend had called Paige a dog, and the implied question about what it meant he thought of her.

Graham.

Graham made one of his mother’s old recipes. How did he even know it? It had been perfect, exactly like he’d remembered, and Ash had simultaneously wanted to snatch the rest of the rolls away from his pack and force them to eat them.This, he wanted them to know, this was something of value from his childhood. It wasn’t all Amos and hate and backward traditionalism.

But how could he defend the Martingales, when they were all living through the misery it created for Hannah and Graham? He’d lived one of the only lives of privilege in the enclave. It hadn’t been easy or perfect; he’d still been expected to work, and the pack had been poor. But Ash hadn’t had his education cut short because he was an omega. He hadn’t been pushed into the kitchen and lied to in order to make sure he lived in fear.

He found himself standing in the kitchen, looking into the cupboard filled with baking supplies. Some were his, from his continuing attempts to learn, but a lot of it was new, from Gavin and Graham’s walk down the baking aisle earlier that day. A few things had been opened and then neatly closed back up, ready to be used again. There were four packages of chocolate chips, neatly stacked to one side of the rest.

Ash had made chocolate chip cookies more than once. The recipe on the bag itself was fine. Everyone liked it. But the ones his mother had made had been chewy and flat and perfect, and he had no idea how to do that.

He wondered if Graham might know how she’d made those.

A throat cleared behind Ash, and he jumped. It wasn’t a surprise to find Graham there. Omegas in the Martingale pack had been taught to be quiet above all else.

“Hey,” Ash said, scrubbing the back of his neck with one hand. “Sorry, am I keeping you guys up?”

Graham smiled wryly and shook his head. “No, Hannah’s been out like a light since just after dinner. Paige too.”

“But not you.”

“Not me.” Graham bit his lip and glanced down at the floor. “I’m sorry if I put you on the spot about the rolls, or if you didn’t want anyone to know your mother was an omega.”

“What?” Ash closed the cupboard and ducked around the counter to plant his hands firmly on Graham’s shoulders. “No. Absolutely not. I don’t care if everyone knows my mother was an omega. My mother was the most amazing person. She was—”

Graham’s answering smile was brilliant, and he nodded like a bobblehead. “She was friends with my mentor. She—that is—” He held up a slim notebook, the kind the pack used to buy ten for a dollar for the kids to use in school. “I wrote down as many of their recipes as I could. My mentor wasn’t very good at writing, but I stayed in school long enough to get the hang of it.”

Ash eyed the notebook enviously. “Could we—”

Without waiting for him to finish, Graham held it out to him. “They’re mostly your mother’s recipes, so—”

Ash took one hand off Graham’s shoulder and pressed the notebook back into his chest. “You did this, Graham. You made this. It’s yours. I was going to ask if I could have a copy, but I’m not going to take your hard work.”

“No one ever wanted it before. Cooking is omega’s work and all that.” Graham’s mouth twisted down in a frown, and for some reason, it made Ash happy.

No, Ash knew what made him happy about it. As a child, whenever he’d pointed out some injustice perpetrated against omegas to his mother, she’d given him a placid smile and told him that was just how things were. But not Graham. He might have lived with it and accepted it, but he knew injustice when he lived it, and it still offended him. Pack life hadn’t broken down his ability to value his own work, and Ash was going to make damn sure it never did.

“Do you have her recipe for chocolate chip cookies?” he asked.

Graham’s eyes lit up. “They’re my favorite.” He glanced past Ash, to the cupboard. “Gavin picked up chocolate chips. I think you have the sugar and molasses. We could—I mean, I could make them.”

---