Page 11 of Wolf Found

He turned to look down at her face. “What makes you think that?”

“You could have left hours ago if you were. You said there are Martingales nearby.”

Without reaching for them in any way, Graham observed the nearby pack bonds. One worry, fear, and a strange sense of longing and sadness. The other a simmering anger that, upon examination, he found all too familiar. Amos Martingale. He shivered.

Graham would never forget the day the enforcer had assigned him permanently to the kitchens, saying that if he had time to “be a pervert,” then he’d gotten all he needed out of the enclave school, and it was time to get to work.

He looked back on it as one of the best and worst days of his life. He’d never seen Ash again, except the one or two times he’d served dinner at the alpha’s table, and even then, he’d felt Amos’s eyes boring holes into his back.

But he did love to cook. The triumph of coming up with a new recipe and having the pack love it was what he’d spent years living for. He made people happy.

Graham wondered who was cooking now, and was struck by the guilt of having left them to fend for themselves when no one knew all the meals he’d planned, or the password to their grocery delivery account.

They would survive without him. They’d done fine before him, after all.

Hannah poked his chin, trying to get him out of his own head.

Finally, he voiced the thing that had been bothering him for five days. “The alpha lied. He said you’d been kicked out.”

She blinked, staring at him for a long time before saying anything. When she finally opened her mouth, she said exactly what he’d been wondering for all that time: “Why?”

“I don’t know, Han. I just... I don’t know anything anymore.”

It was a small thing. Maybe he was being ridiculous, letting it take over his brain and make him question everything in his entire life. But he could only see one reason the alpha would lie about why Hannah left. She had run away of her own volition. Hannah had made a choice for herself, about what her life should be.

And maybe the alpha didn’t want anyone else in the pack getting ideas about making their own choices.

6

How to Save a Life

Ash had never given bisexuality much thought before. He’d known since he was quite young that he was only interested in men, and that had been proven true again and again in his life.

Hannah, for instance, was very pretty. Bouncy blonde curls, big blue eyes, and—hell, Ash supposed from some angles, she could be a female version of himself, which made it more odd to be cataloguing her attractiveness. But either way, she didn’t inspire anything in Ash other than a general feeling that she wasn’t hard to look at.

Did her resemblance to him mean Graham had a type that spanned both genders? Gold hair and a bright smile? That didn’t seem right. Unlike the gaggles of girls—and the rarer other boy—who had always stood around and watched him at work chopping wood those summers, Graham had never made him uncomfortable. He’d looked Ash in the eye, not the bare, sweaty pecs.

He’d been sweet and helpful, and if he’d had a crush, he hadn’t been overt or strange about it.

It was possible that it was all about his looks. Everything had always come back to that in Ash’s life so far, so he didn’t know why he expected anything else. It was always about his generic good looks or his alphahood. If not for those things, no one would ever have noticed thoroughly average Ash.

Not too smart, not too talented, not too anything. Middle of the road, boring Ash: that was him.

He bet Hannah wasn’t boring. Hell, she’d had an illicit baby against the alpha’s interests; Ash respected the hell out of her already. And he was jealous of her.

It was silly. She’d just come from a terrible situation: kicked out, carrying a baby across the country because her pack said she wasn’t allowed to be with the man she loved. Ash wanted to love someone enough to walk away from everything.

Someone like Graham, who’d love him back enough to walk away too.

There was a noise from the kitchen, something dropped on the floor followed by a soft curse. Something inventive about the son of a sheep-loving... huh. He hopped up and headed up the stairs. If he was going to be awake and maudlin, he might as well make himself useful while he did it.

Useful to the very woman he was being jealous of, in fact.

Hannah was standing in the middle of the kitchen holding her baby, looking down at the jug of orange juice like it had been the one doing the insulting, not her.

“Need a hand?”

She turned to him and sighed dejectedly. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I was trying not to wake anyone, but she’s hungry, and I’m still not, um, that is, not enough.”

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