Page 63 of Scapegoat

I crept up behind her, the gap between us little more than a finger’s breadth apart and made a show of watching her as she worked.

“You need to add some fat to the pan, though you could get away without if I had non-stick pans,” she told me.

“Do you want non-stick pans?” I asked as she sliced off a piece of butter from the block and sent it skidding across the heated surface of the frypan. “We’ll get you some if that’s what you want.”

“We might need to with our cooking skills,” Atlas muttered. The stink of our first attempt at dinner was faint but still perceptible.

“Now you’re going to pour the eggs into the pan.”

Kai stepped back, crossing her arms and watching me closely with an air of challenge in her eyes, one I was determined to meet. I grabbed the bowl of eggs and gave it one last mix through before doing just that, pouring the contents into the large pan. The eggs sizzled when they made contact with the hot surface, but not for long. I could see our mistake from before because the edges of the eggs had turned brown then black not long after we’d poured them into a smoking hot pan. I went to grab the fork to stir them around, but she passed me a spatula.

“Just move the whole lot around gently,” Kai instructed. “People have different ideas about scrambled eggs. Some think you need to constantly agitate it, others think that makes it all hard and lumpy, so moving it less and in broad sweeps… Yeah, just like that.”

I’d picked scrambled eggs, thinking it was a simple dish. Camp cooks had made it over a campfire often enough, so how hard could it be? But when I watched Kai, her eyes on the pan the whole time, I realised that, like a lot of things, it was harder than it looked. But I wouldn’t take this shit for granted ever again, especially not with my mate as my tutor.

“Perfect,” she said when all of the eggs were cooked through. And the smile she gave me? I might have shorn a never-ending number of sheep today, but right now this was my proudest achievement. “Now, we need toast—”

“Got it.” Jay held up a plate piled high with buttered toast. “You two looked like you were having a little moment so I—”

“We,” Atlas said, nudging our brother in the ribs.

“We made the toast.”

“Did you want bacon?” Kai asked, shaking her head as if breaking a spell. “Or sausages? You’ll want more than this.”

“No.” I spoke then definitively, authoritatively, on behalf of me and my brothers, because my stomach was turning upside down and inside out as I looked at her and I knew theirs would be too. “This is enough.” I stared at her, wanting to store every detail of her away in my head, just in case she got it into her head to try and slip away from us again. “Everything we need is right here.”

Chapter 37

We took our meal out onto the deck and sat down on the edge, the moon shining down on us and for a while all you could hear was the sound of forks scraping across plates and the crunch of toast being eaten.

“So, what do you think?”

Xavier looked at me with a curious shine in his eyes, his brothers just as intent. If you’d told teenage me that one day I’d have the bloody Campbell boys waiting intently on my opinion on their cooking, I’d have smacked you upside the head and called you a liar. Yet here we were.

“It’s perfect,” I told him, them, because, really, any time I was with them, it was. Absolutely perfect. That’s why it’d hurt so much that day with Mum and Anna and perhaps why I’d overreacted. I’d had one perfect thing in my life and she took that away too, but now… I smiled slowly as I watched each one of them perk up, even Jayden who hadn’t really helped with the cooking. “You did good.”

But once our plates were scraped clean and set down on the deck, the silence felt like it thickened, growing more and more oppressive. The guys seemed determined to show me what adult life could be like if we were together, but now that the meal was done…

“Maybe we should—” Xavier started to say.

There were so many ways to end that sentence, from doing the dishes, to flopping down in front of the TV and each one felt terribly intimate. They were the actions of people that lived with each other, loved each other, were tied to each with mate bonds. And while all of that was true, I wasn’t ready for that right now.

“Go for a run,” I finished for him, standing up and slipping my clothes off.

I caught the small gasp of breath each one took, as I stood there for a split second, then leapt off the deck, in skin, then in fur. Because the wolf didn’t think, didn’t worry like I did. She ran forward, getting a thrill from the sheep scattering before her. The tame creatures had no natural predators in this country, but some dim ancestral memory remembered what I was. But I was up and over the fence and away from them streaking over grass and rocks and towards the nearby forest, when I heard a howl.

I whipped my head around, staring back over my shoulder to see three grey wolves approach and that put iron in my legs, my haunches. My mouth was open, panting, but there was something of a wolfy smile to it as I ran faster, further away. They were big powerful alpha beasts, but I was a wily, nimble omega and I would not get caught. The fingers of moonlight combed the ground between the trees, but I was as grey as the light was, blending in with the dappled silver splashes on the leaves and the earth. I wound my way through trees, running deeper, deeper into the forest, when I heard another howl.

It was full of challenge, of admonition, of command and it had me pausing for just a second. My lungs worked as fast as my heart, sucking in breath. My muscles quivered with the need to run, towards them or away, I couldn’t decide, some strange instinct kicking in to push me forward.

Because this was what we’d missed out on.

After the boys had been announced as heirs to the alphas, their omega would have stepped forward.

Me.

And I would have found fur for the first time, just like I had that day. I would have run, but for an entirely different purpose. Those boys who thought to claim me as their mates would have had to prove themselves all over again.

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