Page 33 of Omega Hunted

I hadn’t checked out the stars in three years.

I’m empty.

I looked up now. Held still in the clearing while my wolf breathed slow and the cold worked through the fur and the strip of sky remained, narrow and clear.

Soren’s daughter was going to need things I didn’t know how to give. Not the birthing stuff—that was logistics and solvable—and I had a library of information I could read. The other things, and not just the fact that so much had to happen in Soren’s body for a baby to be born, and there’d be pain, and there could be danger during the birth. There was a reason so few pregnancies even went to term, let alone result in a live birth.

I didn’t know how to build anything like safety for an omega and his baby.

But I knew how to hold a perimeter, and I knew how to stand between a threat and what needed protecting.

That much I could give Soren.

We stood for a moment in the clearing, and then he turned us back toward the house, steady and unhurried.

Home.

Back to Soren and his kit.

But the worries wouldn’t leave. Ronan had known this address, and he’d pointed a frightened omega toward a mountain I’d chosen with Raff specifically because nobody was supposed to find it. My name was still on the old network, tied to an address in the northeastern territories I’d been careful never to update—but careful wasn’t invisible, and I’d spent three years assuming that was enough.

Trust no one, don’t tell ORT.

Was somebody in the ORT command structure working both sides? Is that what Ronan knew?

Enemy, my wolf whispered.

The snow kept falling as I stood there for one long moment— Raff, Soren, three years of this sanctuary, a traitor in the ORT.

A baby

I ran the fence line faster on the way back, pulling on sweats in my kitchen The burner phone vibrated across the kitchen counter just as I finished rinsing my coffee mug. I frowned at the anonymous caller. Unless this was some freak accident where a person called randomly, it had to be someone Brec gave the number to. Ronan. I hoped it was him and I picked it up, leaning one shoulder against the counter as I answered. “Ronan? “

For a heartbeat, there was nothing but breathing. Then a voice I hadn’t heard in three years said my name so quietly I almost thought I’d imagined it. “Alpha, I wasn’t sure you’d answer.”

“I’m not your alpha.”

The silence that followed wasn’t awkward. We’d spent enough nights sitting side by side after bad operations to know silence didn’t always need filling, but three years had settled into this one, carrying everything we’d never managed to say after Raff died.

“You have the omega?” Ronan asked eventually, his voice rough with exhaustion.

“His name is Soren,” I said, and my gaze drifted toward the hallway. Somewhere upstairs, my guest was probably asleep, wrapped in blankets.

“How is he?”

“Alive.” I rubbed a hand across the back of my neck. “Doesn’t trust me worth a damn, but he’s alive.”

A breath left Ronan that sounded suspiciously like relief. “Good.”

I waited a moment before asking the question that had been circling my head since Soren had whispered Ronan’s name against my throat out in the snow.

“Why me?”

“What?”

“You heard me.” My voice stayed level, but only because I’d spent years learning how to keep anger under control. “You had one chance to get him out, and you sent him here. Not to a safe house. Not to another ORT team. To me. Why?”

Ronan didn’t answer immediately, and I wondered whether the call had dropped. When he finally spoke, there was a weariness in his voice I’d never heard before. “Because I knew he’d be safe with you, Alpha.”