Page 53 of Omega's Heart

“Where’s Abel?” I asked stupidly.

“Dropped him off at home.”

I noticed the leg lying in the back seat. “Did they figure out how to fix it?”

“Yeah. Get in, I’ll tell you on the way over and back. Or you can just throw the chair in and I’ll get it out when I get over there myself. I know it’s late. I can fill you in tomorrow.”

“Not that late,” I said automatically and pulled the hinge that let me squeeze the sides of the chair together so it would fit in the back seat. “It’s good news?”

He nodded and watched silently as I fitted the chair into the back, then climbed in beside him. “I think it is,” he said as he put the car in gear and made a neat turn on the grass in front of the pack building. “It’s going to mean another surgery and another couple of weeks off my feet.” He glanced my way and it felt like, for the first time ever with me, he was uncertain. “It’ll be harder for me to do things until I’m back on the leg. The chair means everything’s too high, the damn crutches get in the way as soon as I try to do anything other than walk.”

Oh. He was asking if I could keep playing housekeeper. “I don’t think Holland has anything else in mind for me yet. Nothing I can’t do in between looking after your apartment. It’s not like you’re a slob anyway.” No, I guessed the Army had made sure of that. He had a place for everything, and it all went into that place as soon as he was done with it. I liked that; it made my job easier, and I’d been raised to keep a tidy house. “I don’t mind,” I added, just to make sure he understood.

He seemed relieved. “Good. I hate being a drag on someone else’s time, but you make it easy to accept the necessity.”

His words made a tendril of warm happiness sprout in my heart. Which was stupid—this was no different than me mooning over some alpha back home in White River. Maybe Mom and Dad had been right.

Or maybe they hadn’t. I had a chance to make things happen differently here. I couldn’t make an alpha like me, but I could like myself better. And after all, Raleigh wasn’t mated. And neither were Cale, or Seosamh. Though come to think of it, Seosamh did have someone courting him. Or, at least, someone he danced with regularly on full moon nights.

No, wait, Seosamh’s friend was a gamma. Did that even matter here?

Ugh, I didn’t understand anything.

We pulled into the yard beside the garage and Kaden parked the car. I got out and got the wheelchair set up, then stared at his prosthetic, trying to figure out where to put it. He’d definitely need help getting back to the building, if only to get over the roughest patches.

“I’ll just carry it on my lap,” he said quietly over the roof of the car. “Can you put the key inside the box to the left of the office door in there?” I watched him start to hop around the back end of the vehicle.

“No, wait, I’ll bring the chair around.” I did exactly that, then apologized. “Sorry, lost my train of thought for a moment there.”

One corner of his mouth turned up in a half-smile, but it wasn’t an unfriendly expression. “Yeah, well, I’ve been known to do that every once in a while. Lose more than my thoughts sometimes.” He winked and even with that hint, it took me a moment to realize he was joking.

“Alphas,” I mocked him gently and shook my head. “Sit down and I’ll run the keys in. It’s not hard to find, is it? The box?”

He shook his head, then levered himself around and down into the chair. “It’s on the wall next to the big set of shelves with all the parts on them.” He held out his hand with the keys dangling from the tips of his fingers and said blandly, “Trade you for my leg.”

I was such an idiot. I fished the leg out of the back seat and handed it to him, then snatched the keys out of his hand. “Be right back,” I said, my cheeks burning, and dashed off to hang up the keys.

I found him waiting for me when I came back out, playing games with the chair, tilting it up dangerously on the back wheels.

“If you fall over,” I told him, trying to save face from earlier. “I’ll leave you there like a turtle.”

He grinned. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

We started walking back toward the building. “So, your leg?” I asked.

“Doc says it’s a bone spur, or an outgrowth, or something. Said it doesn’t happen that often with humans, but he sees it sometimes with shifters.”

“They can do something about it though, right?”

“Yeah. He’s setting me up for another surgery, then it’s another week or so off my feet, then we check the leg for fit again and then, hopefully, I’m good to go.” He snorted a laugh. “He called us sturdy.”

I let out a laugh of my own and glanced down my body. “I can’t argue with him over that.” We started hitting the rough sections and I moved over behind the chair to put a bit of my sturdy weight behind it.

“Nothing wrong with sturdy,” Kaden said, acknowledging my help with a nod. “Sturdy’s damn useful sometimes.”

“Yep,” I agreed with him, but in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to be a little more fragile.

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