Page 46

Grey

While I don’t smell my baby growing inside her yet, I’m hopeful it’s happening, and though I know it’ll be healthy I feel like it’s under threat. I don’t fucking like it, don’t know how to fully decode this instinct, but I know what I know.

I planted as much seed in her as I could when she was in heat that night and everything about her smells right. She looks and smells like a healthy female covered by the scent of her mate.

Mase said he smelled his baby inside Amelia not long after her heat. So did Ty, inside Ivy. I don’t smell another being yet, but I sense something is changing and fully expect to scent my child within days. I don’t know if it’s that her brother is at large that has me feeling the threat or if it’s something deeper, but I do know I’ll do whatever it takes to get past this, with her safe, with our child growing strong.

Stacy’s body is the ideal place for this and she’s precisely the mother my children need.

Knowledge sinks in that I had the exact mother I needed.

Carrie, not Soleil.

Even though I can’t smell our baby yet, I want my mate away from this filthy, stinking junkyard as soon as possible. If it weren’t for the fact that there are innocents here right now, ill and recovering folks, I’m sure my rage would’ve brought down more than just the scrapyard office.

I’ve had it with the stench of this place, with the attitudes of most of the weak and beaten down males. I have no direct experience living under a tyrant of an alpha, being broken into submission like they are, and maybe it’s just not in my chemistry because of what I’m made of and where I come from, but it also makes no sense to me regardless of being alpha. We’ve got hundreds of betas in our pack, but they’re still males. They’re still protective. They have opinions and wants and needs. They get passionate about things and will stand up for what they believe in.

This pack still has sixty-some members and had over a hundred a year ago. Surely that number of people could’ve done something about Meadows. They could’ve reached out to the SCC. They could’ve reached out to another pack. If nothing else, the men could’ve practiced shifting in secret, gotten together, shifted all at once and went after that shithead. They may have lost a few men along the way, but he couldn’t have fought off ten or more able-bodied men at once.

I just don’t fucking get it.

Jase is doing everything he can to help as Jase always does, but he’s restless, fretting about his sister being stuck with this fuckhead brother-in-law of mine. And his, I guess. There’s no sign Sherry has been here and the scent trail dead-ended across the lake from our village. Clearly Meadows still had enough herbs to mask their scents.

I give Jase credit for spending the night here last night instead of going off to continue looking for him, but he said he didn’t want to be out there aimless when he could be here lending a hand.

Once he knew Dani was coming this morning, he was on fire to ask if she could do a spell to locate his sister. With no leads, no scent trail, but with what my wife said about how Meadows will be fixated on money he thinks he’s owed from renting those girls out, it’s something at least.

And there’s my cousin Dani now, pulling in behind a courier truck who’s presumably bringing in some supplies the SCC rushed last night.