Page 39 of Omega's Heart

The entire bottom of the double layer of socks had soaked through with blood, the material wicking it up the outer side where the pain was worst until it had nearly reached the top of the sock. “I’m going to call Felix too, I guess. I’ll need that chair and he’s got a key to my apartment. Tell Adelaide I’ll come up to see her. She doesn’t need to leave the clinic. I’m not dying.” No, just crippled.

Cas hugged him with one arm, the other already holding his phone up to his ear. “Hi, Adelaide, you got time to see Kaden this morning? Yeah, it’s the leg.” Cas made a face. “It’s bleeding. There’s something not right about this.” He listened a moment more, then ended the call. “She said to come up whenever you can, but you might need to wait a while. She’s busy today.”

“You know, this can probably wait until tomorrow—” Kaden started, but Cas gave him a look that Kaden didn’t think his little brother was capable of. There’s more of Mom in him than he realizes. Ha.

“Did you call Felix yet?” Cas asked pointedly and Kaden shook his head. “Then call him. I’ll close up shop here for a bit and give you a hand.”

“I’m fine, Cas. Once I’ve got the chair, I can get around again. Barrens, I could probably hop up to the clinic from here.”

Cas crouched in front of him, looking more like a predator than Kaden had ever seen his little brother appear. It was startling and certainly got his attention, raising all sorts of questions about what he’d missed while he’d been procrastinating in the Army.

“We’re family,” Cas reminded him. “And pack. Either one of those gives me rights to poke my nose in your business when I think you’re not looking after yourself. Even if I could live with it if I let you hurt yourself by being stubborn, I wouldn’t be able to live with the omegas. They take their jobs as caretakers of the pack very seriously.” He gave Kaden a serious look and stood up. “Call Felix. I’m going to put away some stuff I don’t want out in the open.”

Kaden stared doubtfully after Cas, but his little brother sent him the kind of sharp look that Kaden recognized from some of his commanding officers and he realized he’d have to concede defeat on this. Besides, it would upset Felix if he found out later that Kaden hadn’t called him.

He got Felix on the third ring. “Hey, can you do me a favor?” Lysoon, he hated asking this.

“Sure, what’s up?” Felix asked.

“I’m down at Cas’s office. I, uh, need the chair.” He could almost feel that sense of stillness that Felix sometimes gave off, usually when he was thinking hard about what he wanted to say next.

Whatever it was, the omega obviously swallowed any of his own opinions. “Be there in a couple of minutes.” The question, What did you do? hung in the air after Felix hung up.

“He’s coming down,” Kaden said, more to fill the silence than to actually say anything.

“Good,” Cas grunted. He was sorting through papers, frowning in a way that reminded Kaden of their sire when he’d bring home pack work in the evening, trying to pry more hours out of the day than a clock would rightly hold.

“What are you working on?” Kaden asked, peering over the desk. He couldn’t read much of it— not only was it upside-down, but it all seemed to be in lawyer-speak, which might as well have been another language entirely for all that Kaden understood it.

Then again, it wasn’t likely that Cas knew how to strip and rebuild a gun in the middle of the night while under fire either. The thought made him grin.

“Some of this is just crap. We’re getting pressure from all sides now that this trial has started, stuff that we shouldn’t be dealing with. But you know how it is—suddenly we’re the weak deer in the herd.”

Yeah, Kaden could believe that. “How much in the way of pack resources do you have tied up in this trial?”

“Too many,” Cas muttered and moved a sheet of paper from one pile to another. “You looking for work?”

“You want any of it to be more than a waste of time?” Kaden countered. “You know me better than that.”

“Yeah, I know. Not really a desk guy, are you?”

“I don’t know.” He might be now. It took everything he had not to glance down at the leg.

Kaden’s phone went off, only this time it was Quin’s ringtone. “Hey, Big Wolf.”

“You wait for Full Moon,” Quin said lightly. “Got a question for you.”

“Shoot,” Kaden told him, smothering a snicker when Cas twitched at the word.

Quin’s sigh of resignation told him the older shifter had caught on to Kaden’s joke and wasn’t having any of it. “I got an interesting phone call this morning about you.”

“I didn’t do it! It was Cas!” Might as well shift blame onto the littlest of them—not like he didn’t get up to enough mischief on his own.

Cas flipped him a raised middle finger, then closed one of the folders and put it inside his desk and moved onto the next one.

“Funny. In this case, I know you did do it. I got a call from the Office of the President. They’re giving out some medals and they want you to come in to get one.”

“You’re kidding!” Kaden pulled the phone away from his ear and stared at it for a moment, then glared at Cas. “Did you know about this?”