Page 39 of Scapegoat

I hadn’t seen that though and neither had my brothers. That scent had seemed to declare something we knew wasn’t true.

That Anna was our mate.

I’d felt like I was a passenger in my own body as we drew Anna closer, that scent overriding every damn thought in my head and then…

It was wrong, I’d felt it then, and more and more each day since. Anna wasn’t Kai. She wasn’t our mate. We’d shoved her away from us, because, as soon as we got a taste of her, her blood was sour, bitter in our mouths. But we’d bitten her, claimed her before the whole fucking town and Abigail had stood back, a look of pure satisfaction on her face. Then Mum had pushed forward.

“Anna isn’t their mate and she’s not a bloody omega!” she shouted, demanding the alphas’ attention. “Kaia is.”

Kaia… Her name had sung inside my head, driving out the foul taste in my mouth, clearing the haze that hung over me.

Right as I caught sight of a beautiful grey wolf streaking out of town.

“Kaia…!”

Back then I still had hope. I was sure we could stop her, find her, but… I shook my head, feeling the full weight of the two years we’d been apart. Each day added to that burden, until I wasn’t sure if I could shoulder it anymore.

But we had to.

We’d found her, scared her, fucked everything up, but we could do better, find her again and make sure she was OK. Then when she finished throwing shit at our heads, we’d explain.

“Get in the truck,” I ordered. “And put the fucking cigarette out.” Atlas winked at me, taking one last drag before throwing the butt on the ground and then grinding it under his heel. “We think she’s gone to ground in a cottage around here?” I looked up at the sky. “We’ve got plenty of hours of sun left. We’ll keep looking until we find which one.”

“Damn right,” Jay said, striding over to the truck.

“Roses,” Atlas said, moving much slower. “We need roses.”

“There’s no fucking flower shops out here, mate,” Jay said, glancing around the tiny settlement.

“Then we need to find some somewhere else,” Atlas insisted. “White roses, because that’s what she smells like.”

I met Jay’s eyes, the two of us communicating silently that we were certain that the biggest bunch of roses in the world wasn’t going to buy us forgiveness, but… We had to try, right? That’s all we’d done since that fucking day. We couldn’t stop, couldn’t until she said… I swallowed hard. Couldn’t until she rejected us as thoroughly as we had unwittingly done her.

“All right, we’ll look for flowers, after we find Kai.”

And with that my brothers piled into the truck. I turned the engine over, then stared in the rear vision mirror as I pulled out onto the road, setting off to find her. This was a fool’s mission. Finding Kai would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, but we had no other options. Jay wound down the windows, letting the cool spring air in and with it all of the scents. Of damp earth and gum trees, of hay and bracken ferns and sheep shit. And her, hopefully her. We breathed deep as we drove on.

Chapter 23

I woke up crying the next morning, but that was OK. I did it so often I’d learned not to pay it any attention. I shut my eyes tight, feeling the heavy weight of my sadness, more stifling than the blankets I’d hidden myself under. I emerged, pushing the covers down from over my head, realising I’d been woken by my alarm, after forgetting last night to turn it off.

Because I wasn’t going to work today.

Come this time tomorrow, I’d be staying somewhere else instead of this cottage. And that was a pity. The Hamilton family owned the farm and the land that the cottage was built on, their house a massive old sprawling one, up the main drive from here, but… I liked this cottage. With the old carved wood cornices and lead light windows, it was a pretty place, somewhere I’d hoped to stay for some time.

It was just as well that I was awake. I’d need to go down to the main house, pay the Hamiltons a month’s rent for leaving early and then pack what belongings I had so I was ready by the time Jamie arrived. Taking detours was not something her company approved of, but she was a reliable, hard-working driver with a spotless safety record, so they cut her some slack. I sighed, setting my feet on the wooden floorboards and wincing at the cold.

Maybe we’d move somewhere up New South Wales way, on the coast, where it stayed a little warmer. I entertained myself with ideas of sunning on the beaches of Byron Bay, working at some cute bougie cafe, serving people coconut milk lattes. Yeah, that might be just the thing. But after I poured myself a coffee and went to the front porch to drink it, I found that someone else had been by in the night.

And it hadn’t been Jamie.

A bouquet of sorts sat on my doorstep. The roses were the tiny pale pink ones that you found on barbed wire fences, or near the dilapidated ruins of old deserted houses in the bush, having escaped the gardens of well-meaning ladies many years earlier and gone wild. They were the climbing ones that wound themselves around fences, trees, making a pest of themselves and…

Smelled so bittersweet.

I shook my head, not having consciously picked the flowers up, yet here I was, holding them like a bride about to go down the aisle, my nose quivering as I caught scent of musk, wood and nicotine, the familiar and the unfamiliar hitting me right in the gut.

Before I pitched the flowers aside.

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