Page 89 of Broken Bonds

“Jax, what am I going to do?”

I suck in a breath. “Todd,” I snap. “Calm. Down. Let me think.”

He goes quiet. “Sorry.”

“This doesn’t automatically mean you have a mate bond with him,” I say. “He’s an omega, and he’s young, and he just went through an intense session with you. When we first met him the other day, the hormones radiated off him, and it’s not hard to see why. Maybe it’s possible it was something on his end, not yours.”

He didn’t answer at first. “I’ve never heard of that happening.”

“Neither have I, but the point is we don’t know what happened.”

I hear him take a deep breath to calm himself. “Yeah. Okay. And if it was a mate bond we would have, like, immediately tackled each other, right?”

I want to remind him that’s not necessarily true and point out his own mother and Caleb’s history, but that would run counter to trying to calm his tits. “Yes. And it’s not like we got there with him and you felt it immediately, right?” I have a thought. “You even said you didn’t feel one for him when we dropped him off.”

Another deep breath from his end, and I wonder if he’s close to hyperventilating. “Yeah. Right. Okay.”

“And it’s not unusual for different species not to be able to hear each other, but it’s also not unusual for some species to be able to communicate.”

I hate lying to him because the only instances I’ve heard of that happening, where it wasn’t between closely related packmates, or at least very similar species, were because there was a mate bond.

“Okay.” I hear him breathing. “Okay.”

“Obviously, you’re very attracted to him. And he hasn’t had his first mating heat yet, either. So there could be a lot of hormones and other stuff, things he had to tightly suppress while in his old pack, that might be contributing.”

He doesn’t sound fully convinced but he sounds willing to let me bullshit him, so I’ll take that win. “Maybe you’re right.”

“You can’t freak out, okay?”

“Do I tell him all this?”

“No,” I say a little too quickly and harshly before gentling my tone. “We don’t need to burden him with this. Tell him we have to bring vampires and others here to protect them, and his father might be involved, and that’s why he has to stay on your property. Answer his questions, but use your best judgment and try not to freak him out. Okay?”

“Yeah. I will.”

“We might not even need to bring up any of the stuff about the mental communication to him until after all this other BS is settled. I want to hear from my friend after he activates Mal’s phone and see if anything happens. His father might have written him off already.”

Todd snorts. “That’s pure bullshit and you and I both know it. That man will not give up until he kills Mal.”

“Maybe. Or maybe he’ll be too busy putting out fires of his own to even bother.”

“What fires?”

“Let’s just say I’m in the mood to commit some metaphorical arson.”

We talk a few more minutes. Once I’ve assured myself he’s calmed down, and we set a meeting time for tomorrow, I end the call.

That leaves me sitting on the couch, my head thrown back and rubbing my eyes with my cellphone next to me.

This is the last complication we needed.

If it wasn’t for the timing of the vampires and others arriving it’d be an easy problem to solve—sit and talk to Mal and Todd, see how both of them feel, and then move up the timeline for the initiation.

But I have to walk a very thin line now, a razor’s edge, between keeping the refugees safe and keeping my pack safe. I don’t know how the vampires and others would react if they picked up a hint of Mal’s home-pack scent.

And we definitely don’t have time to put him through a full initiation.

I glance at the time and it’s going on 4:00. I know I won’t get more sleep, either. Not with so much to do.