Page 10 of Broken Arranged Mate (Badlands Wolves #4)

Because of our stop, we’re a little late meeting Dorian at the border, and I can tell the few minutes are weighing on him as he paces back and forth. I see the moment he registers us coming down the road, nearly half a mile away from him, and he finally stops pacing, stopping near his truck.

When we get closer, I realize there’s someone else with him.

“Oren, man!” Aidan booms, stepping forward to throw his arm around Oren, who doesn’t duck in time to avoid the hug. “How long has it been?”

“Not long enough?” Oren grumbles.

Aidan looks to me, his blonde-gray hair glinting in the deep orange of the setting sun. Even now, after everything with Jerrod Blacklock and becoming a father, there’s something boyish about him, a certain lightness to his step that I’ve never seen in Dorian’s or Oren’s.

It’s almost like Aidan refuses to let the world weigh him down. Sometimes, I’ve wished I could reach out and take a little bit of that for myself.

“How are you , Ash?” Aidan asks, cutting his eyes back to Oren with a joking lightness. “Is he treating you okay?”

“What kind of question is that?” Oren scowls, crossing his arms and looking the very image of the word grumpy .

I laugh, shrug one shoulder, and say, “About as good as a Grayhide can, I suppose.”

That makes Aidan laugh—he loves a good multi-layered joke. “Touche,” he relents, scrubbing a hand through his hair.

Dorian, who’s been quiet up to now, looks at Oren with a serious weight to his gaze. “I trust you kept my sister safe?”

I feel, rather than see, Oren stiffen beside me, obviously remembering the alpha that challenged him when we were downtown, how close we were to someone actually trying to kill me. I wonder, for a second, if he’d want us to keep that to ourselves, but—

“There was one incident,” Oren says, curtly, almost professionally, like Dorian is his co-worker. “But I took care of it.”

“You guys are making things weird,” I say, wanting to cut through this awkward tension. An arranged marriage is one thing, but if I have to stand here and listen to them talk like they’re robots learning how to love, it’s going to make me lose my mind.

Aidan laughs. “Yeah, plus, Kira is making dinner tonight, so we need to get back.”

Oren and my brother shake hands, and I feel the weight of Oren’s stare on me as I climb back into my brother’s truck, those dark eyes heavy with something I can’t name.

“Ash, did he do something to you?” Dorian asks, and I instantly think of that moment outside the watchtower, Oren compelling me.

Due to the natural hierarchy, any alpha has a certain level of command over omegas.

When they speak, issue commands, our bodies urge us to comply with them.

It can be unbearable sometimes to maintain eye contact with an alpha you don’t know.

For some omegas, raised in hyper-strict packs, it can be even worse; their entire bodies crumple to the floor when an alpha looks at them.

Luckily, I was raised alongside Dorian and brought up in a pack that doesn’t adhere quite so strictly to the biological classes. But still. Oren isn’t just an alpha—he’s an alpha leader now. That carries with it extra power, over other alphas, even, and especially so for omegas.

And he used that power on me.

It was the first time I’d ever experienced it; the look on his face right after it happened told me that it was an accident, and he apologized quickly. I’m inclined to believe that’s true—that Oren wouldn’t use his power like that in such a trivial little moment.

But Gramps raised Dorian and me to be careful of people, to consider every possible motivation they might have, that it’s never enough to think the best of someone else.

“Ash?” Dorian presses, and I know he can sense something is off; his question was too specific for him not to have a sense of it, but I don’t want to tell him. Partly because I’m embarrassed, and partly because I don’t want him to think poorly of Oren.

“No,” I say, finally. “When that alpha came after us downtown, it was…an event. But Oren has been nothing but flat and boring, as usual.”

That makes Aidan laugh, and thankfully moves the conversation away from me and Oren, and more generally toward the Grayhides and Ambersky.

“Talked to Veva this morning,” Dorian says, catching my eye in the rearview mirror. “She said they’re still working on testing the synthetic Amanzite. It’s not responding well, still reacting to the substance Mhairi used.”

“I’m sure Veva is beating herself up about it,” I mutter, thinking about her perfectionism and how much it hurt her when she learned it was her synthetic Amanzite that made it possible for Mhairi to take control.

“Did…Oren say anything to you about their Amanzite stores?” Dorian says it casually, but I get the impression he’s hoping Oren opened right up to me, shared information with me that he might not be willing to with Dorian.

In response, I let out a quick, cold laugh. “Yeah, right. You should know better than that. Oren treated me like a foreign dignitary, an international colleague. It’s not like we’re pillow-talking about pack affairs.”

I see Dorian’s cheeks tinge pink in the mirror, and think it’s what he gets. For years, I’ve had to watch him and Kira fawn over one another—now he’ll get the tiniest taste of his own medicine.

Or maybe not. Oren doesn’t seem that excited to even look at me, let alone do public displays of affection.

My mind flashes back to that moment in the car when he grabbed the fabric of my shirt. That protective, strong undercurrent that runs through him. The sense that he would never let anything happen to me.

It is, unfortunately, very fucking sexy.

“More skirmishes on the border,” Dorian says, like he wants to clear the air of the pillow talking comment. I hold in a laugh as he and Aidan talk about the conflict and how hard it’s been to communicate to our forces that they should disengage.

Some of the shifters on the border don’t understand why Dorian is working so hard to establish an allyship with the Grayhides, especially with all the history between us. It’s really difficult to convince a man who lost his brother at the hands of a rival pack not to fight back when they attack.

I can only hope that Oren has been working hard on pulling his men back. Thinking about the city, how empty it was, I think that the real issue might not be the shifters themselves with their violence.

It might just be that the Grayhide territory no longer feels like a safe, calm place.

Hand on my wrist, I twist my Amanzite bracelet around and around, wondering what it would take to change the identity of that place, make it into a place where food vendors don’t need bars on their carts.

Where people can mingle in the street happily.

An hour later, we’re pulling back into town, and Dorian takes Aidan first to the pack hall, then drops me off at my house. I hop out, a sense of security rushing over me at the sight of my old, familiar door.

Then I realize, for the first time, that I’m going to have to leave this place behind.

This place, with the brand-new kitchen, the million little improvements that I’ve made over the years.

It’s not that I haven’t thought it through, that marrying Oren might not be the right choice—it’s just that every minor detail feels like a new addition, a weight added to the other side of the scale.

As though he can read my thoughts, Dorian hangs out the driver’s side of the truck, his eyes wandering over me, like he’s still looking for a way Oren might have secretly hurt me.

As the alpha leader, he has a special way of seeing his pack members, looking right into the center of them, and I try my best to keep him from seeing what I’m thinking, what I’m feeling.

“Any time,” Dorian says, his eyes serious when they land on me. “Seriously, Ash. You change your mind at any point during this—”

“I know.” I push the words out because I don’t know how to explain this to Dorian—that right now, I want equally to do this and also not. I want to make a sacrifice for my pack, and I even, selfishly, want to be around Oren. But I don’t want to leave my home behind.

My flower garden, the renovations, all of it. I can’t have both.

Clearing my throat, I add, “I know. Thank you.”

“You don’t have to thank me.” Dorian pauses, drums his fingers on the wheel, then turns back to me. “In fact, I think you’ll be the one getting most of the gratitude around here.”

Biting the inside of my cheek, I force myself to smile, wave at him as he pulls off. It’s only once he’s gone that I let my expression fall, my feet walking me up the path and inside my home, potentially for one of the very last times.