Page 34 of Omega's Heart

“Kade, it’s okay, it’s all right. I’ve got you,” Quin murmured in his ear. Kaden opened his eyes— the floor stared back at him. Quin’s heavy weight crushed him against the fake wood.

“Up,” Kaden demanded, his voice hoarse. “Let me up. Now!” He elbowed his brother in the gut and twisted, missing his leg now more than ever.

Quin rolled away with a grunt, but he was still faster than Kaden to sit up and get between Kaden and the door. “I need you to listen to me, then you can go.”

“You’re going to take advantage of a cripple?” There, he’d said it.

“I should pound you for that. That’s shitty and unfair, and you damn well know it. I’ve never cut you any slack and don’t plan on starting now. You need some help, yeah, but you’re not damn well helpless!”

Kaden glanced cautiously around the room. “Where’s your mate?”

“He took the baby back to our bedroom.” Slowly, like he was expecting Kaden to leap up and attack him, Quin approached him. “Let me give you a hand up, there’s glass everywhere.”

“Sorry.” Kaden held out his good hand and let Quin help him to his single foot and over to the wheelchair, on its side with one wheel spinning forlornly like it had been hunted by its user.

Quin righted it with one hand and lowered Kaden into the seat. “You good there?” he asked. Kaden nodded, and Quin took a step back. “Hold on while I get the broom. Can’t have glass around with pups in the place.”

He was glad for the time to collect himself. In all his time in the Army, during all the insanely disturbing things they’d ever asked him to do, he’d never felt so… there wasn’t even a word for it. His heart raced and he could feel the dampness of sweat in his underarms. All the nerves in his stump flared to life as if his ghost-leg was trying to run away on its own and he rubbed it harshly as he tried to order his thoughts.

“You need a few more minutes?” Quin asked gently, startling him.

“A few minutes for what?” The words came out on a snarl, completely unintended. “Sorry, I’m just…”

“Yeah, I know.” Quin crouched in front of him. “The first time he did it to me, it was a complete fluke. I was having a nightmare and well…” Quin looked down and Kaden could almost see him gathering his resources to make whatever confession he was planning.

When it came, though, it hit Kaden like a two-by-four. Or another grenade.

“I would have killed him,” Quin said softly, speaking with a lightness that shivered unpleasantly against Kaden’s skin. “Even with all the therapy, with the drugs we kept trying, it wasn’t enough. Then one night I woke up on the floor and Holland was on the bed breathing like he was eighty.” Quin held his hands up between them and gave a funny little smile. “The bruises on his neck were a perfect match to my right hand. And I had a chunk of his hair tangled in my left. I don’t even know what memories he ripped out of my head that night, just that there used to be something there, but when I try to remember now, I get nothing. It’s like a word on the tip of your tongue, but you just can’t find it. If I try too hard, though, I get a migraine like you wouldn’t believe. So I just let that old wolf lie in the sun wherever it wants, as long as it isn’t bothering me.”

“And he stayed with you.” Unsettling and intriguing.

“Tougher than Marines are the omegas of Mercy Hills,” Quin intoned, his tone still carrying that odd lightness that made the hair on Kaden’s ruff stand on end. His brother almost sounded like a wolf gone moon-mad, but it was only the voice. Nothing else about Quin smelled like that death sentence. “We’ve all become strange here. At least, those of us who know.”

“You haven’t told the pack then.” Not that Kaden had expected it, but he needed to hear it from Quin’s own lips.

“No, though everyone assumes things about Jason because of how he got here. And they’ve started coming to Bax for wishes, which we’re trying to put a stop to. It just upsets him.” He smiled and huffed a laugh. “For once, Bram isn’t battering at the door to spread the news to the world. I think the pack’s response has scared some sense into him. A little, anyway.” Suddenly, Quin looked at least ten years older than Kaden knew he was. “Pray the Lord and Lady that it lasts until we figure out how to deal with this all.”

“And Holland?”

“What about Holland?”

“You feel safe, knowing what he can do?”

Quin sat down and put his back against the front of the couch, one arm stretched out and supported by a bent knee. “I know better than anyone in this pack what he can do. I also know I have reason to be grateful for it. He still has days where he’s afraid of himself and he needs our support while he comes to terms with it. He won’t do anything without your permission anyway—I’m sorry, tonight was my idea. I thought a demonstration might make it easier to explain. I was wrong.”

The truth rang in those simple words, but Kaden’s skin still crawled with the feel of those ghostly fingers paging through his memories. “I don’t want him to do that again. They aren’t good memories, but they’re mine and I won’t have someone taking them from me.”

Quin nodded. “Then he won’t, that’s all you need to say. You know, he’s not some ravening monster. He’s actually a man half my age who, for some reason I can’t fathom, doesn’t mind that I’m old and creaky and try to kill him in my sleep every once in a while.”

The words cut, but Kaden thought maybe Quin wasn’t wrong to use them. “You’re not old,” Kaden said by way of apology. “Creaky, I’ll give you, but I don’t think I’m any better.”

That brought a smile to his brother’s face. “We’ll have to have a competition some day. The pups can be the judges.”

They stared at each other for a few more moments. Kaden badly wanted to tuck his tail between his legs and leave. He thought he had the right to do so—after all, it was Quin and Holland who’d ambushed him. But this was his brother. This was Quin, who’d gone through fire and storm for their family, practically raised them before he fled Salma in the face of their mother’s ambition.

And look where he’d landed—right where she’d wanted him. Maybe there was something to the old gal’s ideas.

He owed him something, anyway. And there was some small part of him that wanted to judge Holland’s intentions for himself. “I want to know he’s not going to try that again.”