Page 26 of Wolf Reborn

It was obvious enough Gavin was feeling guilty, but why?

It couldn’t be the food situation. Gavin hadn’t chosen the place they had gotten snowed in. Cabin number fifteen, Miles suspected—a lot that had been for sale for almost a year. It was a miracle the place had food in it at all, let alone anything suitable for regular sustenance.

Maybe Gavin felt bad because he hadn’t gotten them back to town? That was silly. Snow-ins happened, and they were lucky the accident had been so close to a place like this.

Screw that, Miles was lucky Gavin had been there at all.

So fucking lucky.

If Gavin hadn’t come—even if it had been anyone other than Gavin—Miles suspected he would be dead. Even if it had been an ambulance that happened upon him...you almost died, Gavin had said, sad and nervous and avoiding Miles’s eye.

The accident part of the afternoon couldn’t possibly have been Gavin’s fault, unless he was a very, very small wolf. Miles hadn’t gotten a good look, but whatever had run out in front of his car, it had been small-fox sized, not full-grown wolf sized.

So if Gavin hadn’t been the one to put Miles’s life in danger, had actually been the one to find him and carry him to safety, that only left one glaringly obvious thing for him to feel guilty about.

He had bitten Miles, turned him into a werewolf, without permission.

Miles tried to process that. He didn’t know what all being a werewolf involved yet. So far there had been the horrific pain, all that excess energy, a need to have Gavin fuck his brains out, and that odd feeling of needing to please alpha. To please Gavin.

The pain, he suspected, had been what it felt like to turn into a werewolf. Hopefully it was a singular experience, never to be repeated.

The energy had been fine, if odd, and the clumsiness that had come with it seemed to be wearing off.

Wanting Gavin to fuck him was hardly anything new. Feeling like he needed it was a tiny thing, hardly different from before.

The urge to please someone had been with Miles his whole life. It was one of the driving features of his personality, whether he liked to say so or not. His father had been an absentee, working more often than not and disinterested when he was there. So Miles had tried to please teachers, then professors, then his superior officers. Wanting to please “alpha” was new and different, but only in terminology, not practice.

Miles had not used the term alpha before; it wasn’t really part of his lexicon. Alpha was what a certain kind of guys called themselves, in turn calling people like Miles “beta males” as a silly insult, as though having emotions was embarrassing.

Gavin was most definitely not that kind of man. Hewasthe kind of man those guys wished they were, though, so maybe there was some validity to it.

If all those things were what it meant to be a werewolf, Miles had a hard time objecting to it. Also, probably most importantly, being a werewolf meant he was still alive. He didn’t care if being a werewolf came with that horrible pain regularly, permanent clumsiness, or just about any other consequence.

Miles was alive, and that was his preferred state of being.

He knew Gavin too well to think that permission after the fact would make a dent in his guilt, so he didn’t bother with it. Few things would distract Gavin from his growing hole of self-loathing.

One was a purpose—something that would make him busy, so he had to stop thinking about the thing that bothered him. The other was to be proven unequivocally wrong—something almost impossible, since Gavin was a stubborn bastard who was usually convinced he was right.

The problem was that he was, in fact, usually right. He wasn’t the kind of man who formed opinions without reason.

So distraction it was.

“What were you doing out there?” Miles asked, reaching for the first thing he could think of as a distraction. Whatever the reason was, he was grateful for it, but it was an odd place for Gavin to be wandering.

Gavin winced and gave his hand a squeeze. “The kid.” He bit his lip and finally looked up at Miles, which was an improvement. “I know I shouldn’t have used that information to... I don’t know, to do anything, but we were worried. There’s a remote chance we know who it is, and we had to look for him.”

That was entirely new information. He rolled onto his side, facing Gavin. “You didn’t mention that before.”

“It seems too unlikely,” Gavin explained. “He ran away from home in California. A runaway nine-year-old doesn’t travel three states just to see people he liked, right?”

Miles didn’t answer, just lifted his eyebrows.

Gavin sighed and hung his head. “Yeah, okay, we think it might be Lyndon. He’s been bullied for being, um, a certain kind of werewolf”—Gavin broke off and bit his lip, then sighed and shook his head—“an omega. It’s complicated, and I’m not going to pretend I understand it, but Lyndon’s an omega, and some people think bullying them is okay. It’s sort of like how we as a society treated women fifty years ago. Or how some of us still do, I guess.”

“Alphas and omegas,” Miles said, still clutching Gavin’s hand to his chest but running the other through the fluffy rug. “You’re an alpha. My alpha?”

Gavin’s pupils dilated at that, and Miles was left with the distinct impression that he wanted to fuck him again. Just for saying Gavin was his alpha? Now that was something that required further experimentation.

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