by Tanya Chris
“Wouldn’t you like to know.” Gods, Keesh wished he could show Fortis his skills—audition for the role Fortis had always refused to consider him for. But if Fortis refused to mate with either of them, then why shouldn’t they mate with each other? His feelings for Owen were entirely different than his feelings for Fortis, but they ran deep and strong. Maybe together they could forget they both wanted someone else as much as they wanted each other.
Fortis got to his feet, deceptively casual. Keesh staggered to his own feet in response, his instincts cautioning him that Fortis was about to strike, as ludicrous as that was. They’d been friends forever. They weren’t going to tear into each other’s throats over an omega.
“Go ahead,” Fortis said. “Mate him. I hope you’ll be happy together. In fact, I’m sure you will be.” He stalked off, heading away from the alpaca pen.
“Where’s Fortis going?” Owen’s head appeared from out of the middle of a huddle of his furry friends. “What did you say to him?”
“We were just talking.”
“He’s upset.” Owen jumped the fence in a single bound, a display of athleticism he wouldn’t have been capable of a week ago. He bounded after Fortis, and Keesh trudged along behind him, secretly grateful Owen was going after him because otherwise he would have to do it himself. Fortis couldn’t leave. Not like this.
Fortis allowed Owen to pull him to a stop, which meant the stalking off had been for show, because Owen didn’t have the strength to make Fortis do anything he didn’t want to.
“But you’re in charge of taking me back to Pertha,” Owen was insisting when Keesh’s plodding footsteps caught up to them.
“Oh, come on,” Fortis protested. “You don’t really want to go to Pertha.”
“I might. Neither of you is allowed to leave until I’m safe at home. You promised.” Owen’s lashes weren’t as long as an alpaca’s, but they fluttered more intentionally. Along with becoming a better hunter and a better runner, he’d become a better flirt. He was blooming right in front of them, and Keesh didn’t want to miss any of it.
“Well, I’m not going anywhere,” he said with an apologetic look for Fortis.
“Me either,” Fortis sighed. He tried to shuck Owen off him, but Owen was like a vine, wrapped so tight around him they were practically fused. “Any ideas for where we can bunk tonight?”
“My parents’ house. Assuming they haven’t forgotten I’m their son.”
Fortis
In all the years Fortis had been sending omegas to the Central Pack, he’d never actually been there before. It was fucking gorgeous. Water everywhere and a huge variety of plants and animals, including alpacas. They had fucking alpacas. Keesh said the alpacas were a mainstay of their economy, that their wool was traded for things it was easier to acquire from humans than make themselves.
“Something for you to think about,” he said as the three of them walked down a wooded path that wound in and out of view of another one of those lakes teeming with fish. “If you ever get tired of ferrying packages for North Leland, Hybernia is always in need of people to manage their trade.”
“Why? Are the wolves here nervous about traveling too far from home?”
“Hey, would you want to leave if you lived here?”
“I wouldn’t,” Owen chimed in.
Owen had put his feet on the ground again, but he was still hanging onto Fortis’s arm like Fortis might vanish on him. He wouldn’t. He’d just needed some space for a minute there. The idea of Keesh and Owen mating each other had him raging. He didn’t know if he wanted to fight Keesh for daring to take his omega or throw Keesh over his shoulder and fuck him until he understood he didn’t belong to anyone except him.
“If you like it here, you could stay. Keesh wants you to.”
“I know,” Owen whispered, as if Keesh couldn’t hear him. “But if I stay, you have to stay too.”
Fortis couldn’t agree to that. The Central Pack might be heaven on earth, but if he had to watch Keesh and Owen in a happy mating, it would also be hell on earth. Which made him a dickweed almost as big as Devin, because if Keesh had been willing to sit on the sidelines, Fortis would’ve let him. That was the only solution he felt like he could live with—claim Owen and keep Keesh as his best friend. But Keesh had given that plan a definite thumbs down, which Fortis couldn’t blame him for.
Up ahead, a house came into view. It was a sturdy thing, made of river stones and roofed with slate tiles that threw back the sun in a sparkle of blue and green and mirror-black. It had a full second story, which made sense considering Keesh was one of six. Fortis could imagine a wild tumble of grey wolves wrestling in the sparsely vegetated dirt that formed the front yard. Keesh’s siblings had probably all moved out by now, but the grass hadn’t recovered yet. Maybe there were grandpups to lay fresh waste to it.
The door opened before they reached it, and a beta came out. She had Keesh’s corkscrew hair in the same mottled grey as his fur, and her smile at catching sight of him was familiar too.
“Hi, Mama.” Keesh stretched out his arms as he climbed the stairs to reach her.
“Mama? Who’s Mama? Do I know you?” But she opened her own arms just as wide as his. “Turn up whenever you want, do you? And who have you got with you? One of these your mate?” Her gaze flickered over Fortis, assessing him from head to toe, then moved on to Owen to give him as thorough a once-over.
“Friends of mine,” Keesh said.
“Well, whoever they are, they’re welcome. Come in, come in. Look at this poor little omega. You’ve been running him ragged, I can tell.”
“This is Owen, and he looks tired because he’s been playing Twister with a dozen alpacas for the last hour, not because we’ve been overrunning him. Owen, my mother Kris.”
“Oh, just call me Mama,” she said. “And who’s this strapping alpha taking care of the two of you.”
Fortis stepped up on the porch to offer his hand. “Fortis, ma’am.”
“Mama,” she repeated. “If we aren’t family yet, we will be soon enough.”
That was news to Fortis. Which of them was going to be family with which was the question the three of them couldn’t seem to answer, but Mama Keesh acted like it was predetermined. She ushered them through the door, then bustled around brewing a pot of tea and setting out biscuits, which Owen attacked as ravenously as if they hadn’t fed him a passel of fish last night.
The biscuits were delicious. Now Fortis knew why Keesh would show up on his doorstep with a sad smile and a batch of fresh baked goods every once in a while. Keesh beamed as he ate them, so glad to be home. Fortis had an alpha’s distance from his own family. As soon as he’d come of age, he’d moved out to claim a space away from his alpha mother, but Keesh was a beta child born to beta parents. There was no formality between him and his mother. They were happy to see each other and not afraid to show it.
Owen lapped up the attention Mama Keesh showered on him, telling her about the adventures he’d had on their journey. How he’d caught some fish—which made her beam with pride as if she’d taught him to fish herself—and about his fear of traps, which made her shake her head in disapproval.
“Hunters,” she said.
“We’re hunters too,” Keesh reminded her.
“Do we leave animals to suffer for days before killing them? I certainly hope not. It was a hunter who took Keesh’s eye,” she told Owen.
“It was?” Owen asked with big eyes. When they’d first met, Owen had treated Keesh’s empty eye socket like something he had to avoid looking at, but he’d gotten used to it by now.
“Hunter shot him,” Mama Keesh explained with a ruffle of Keesh’s sprigged hair, which had pine needles tangled in it, as usual. “Right here on Central Pack land.”
“He was lost,” Keesh said. “And I scared him. I should’ve shifted as soon as I smelled him, but I didn’t have any clothes with me.”
“Should’ve thought more about your safety than his modesty.” Mama Keesh stopped
rubbing Keesh’s head to give it a smack. “We almost lost you. He was hardly more than a pup,” she told Owen. “Hunter got him right through the eye with a rifle. Nothing we could do but take it out.”
“What happened to the hunter?” Owen asked.
Fortis knew the story of how Keesh had lost his eye, but he’d never thought to ask about the hunter. He’d always assumed either Keesh had killed him himself or one of his littermates had done it for him, but he wasn’t really surprised when Keesh gave a different answer.
“We showed him how to get back to human territory.”
“Gave him a righteous lecture first,” Mama Keesh said with a stern shake of her head. “When you’re on someone else’s land, you don’t shoot without asking yourself what you’re shooting at.”
“I’d have killed him,” Fortis said, as if it needed saying.
“I was too busy bleeding,” Keesh said, but Fortis knew that wasn’t it. Owen could probably be trained to have more of a killer instinct than Keesh did. A cat jumped onto the table. Fortis growled at it and the cat, which was about the size of his forearm, raised her claws to him, showing neither respect nor fear. That was what came of making friends with critters.
“This is Aighleigh,” Mama Keesh said. She gave the cat a kiss on the forehead before dropping it back down on the floor. “And she knows she’s not supposed to be on the table.” Mama Keesh and the cat had a stare-down, which Mama Keesh apparently won because Aighleigh slunk away. Owen chased after her.
“It’s a cat,” Fortis heard him say from the next room, as if a cat were a unicorn.
“You’re so domesticated in the Central Pack,” Fortis told Keesh with a shake of his head.
“We like to get along with the land and the creatures we share it with. Is that so bad?”
“It’s adorable,” he said patronizingly, but truthfully it wasn’t bad at all. Everyone was so peaceful here with their crops and herds and pets, but domesticated wasn’t the right word for them. Central Pack wolves lived deeper in nature than Fortis ever had, and there were wolves in North Leland who probably couldn’t hunt any better than Owen. Prince Devin, for instance. Fortis would like to see him go after a squirrel.
The Central Pack was friendly. That was the right way to describe it. The town square had been full of wolves of all different descriptions—such a mix of packs that Central Pack wolves didn’t even predominate. And a mix of castes too. While the laws in North Leland were now firm on the fact that assaulting an unaccompanied omega was a crime, the truth was that most omegas didn’t travel on their own. None of the remedies for rape undid the damage of rape.
“How long are you-all staying for?” Mama Keesh asked as she cleared their tea things.
“I don’t think we know that yet,” Keesh answered. “It depends on Owen.”
“Well, good. That’s how it should be. Always give the littlest one the biggest voice. That way you know you aren’t talking over anyone.”
Owen
“And then I guess we’ll put Owen in here.” Mama Keesh pushed open the door to a smaller bedroom. Owen frowned. He didn’t want to sleep there by himself. The low bed was big enough for all three of them, and the one in the other room had been even bigger. That had been Keesh’s room. He might not have slept there in five years, but Owen could still smell him in it.
“Unless that’s not how you want to arrange things,” Mama Keesh said, her eyebrows adding to the question. She’d been poking at them all through dinner, trying to figure out who was going to couple up or acting like they already had coupled up. She could smell the sex on them, no doubt. Owen was too shy to tell a grown-up beta wolf who was somebody’s mother that he’d been sleeping with two wolves without being tied to either of them. Maybe that was allowed in the Central Pack, but Mama Keesh sure acted like she was expecting mating vows to be exchanged.
“This seems fine.” Owen scooched closer to Keesh, nudging him in the hope that he’d tell his mother they all wanted to sleep together, but Keesh only nodded in agreement.
“Of course, I don’t monitor the hallways,” Mama Keesh said. “Don’t got any of them fancy motion detector lights like you see in the movies either.” She laughed as she moved farther down the hall to open a closet. “I’m thinking you all might enjoy a shower after too many cold baths in the lake.”
Owen snatched up the towel she extended to him. Electricity and television were cool, but a hot shower with real soap sounded like heaven. He’d thought camping by the lake was the ideal life, but Keesh’s home was even more ideal because it had a fireplace in the living room and a lake out back and showers.
When it was his turn, he lingered under the water longer than was polite, getting himself nice and sudsy all over. His cock perked up from the stimulation of being washed, and he considered stroking himself off, since apparently he’d be sleeping alone tonight, but he’d already taken up more than his fair share of shower time, so he left it bouncy and interested and finished rinsing off. Before leaving the bathroom, he put on the pajama bottoms he’d worn to bed in his father’s palace. Funny how much he’d gotten used to sleeping naked. The fabric that used to seem so soft itched him now.
Fortis was in the bedroom he would be sharing with Keesh, stretched out on the bed without any hint of pajamas, his body glistening with the water he hadn’t bothered to dry from it. The sound of water running floated in from down the hall. Keesh had insisted on going last, of course.
Owen crept into the bedroom, half expecting to be shooed back out, but Fortis raised an arm in invitation. Owen ducked under it, snuggling their clean bodies against each other. He wasn’t sure where they stood. When he’d been playing with the alpacas, he’d overheard some of the conversation between Fortis and Keesh, but they hadn’t really said anything he didn’t already know. Fortis wasn’t going to claim him, because he wanted Keesh. Only for some reason Fortis didn’t have sex with Keesh. It was weird, and Owen didn’t understand it, but tonight Keesh and Fortis would be in bed alone together and maybe it would finally happen.
“Are you going to fuck Keesh tonight?”
“Why would you think that?”
“Because you don’t want me to sleep in here with you.”
“You can stay here if you want.” Fortis yawned like he was sleepy.
“Are you going to fuck me?”
“No one’s fucking anyone,” Fortis said, which seemed like a shame. They had a big bouncy bed and nice, clean bodies.
“I think you want to,” Owen said after thinking about it for a minute.
“Fuck you?” Fortis jiggled him a little. “Yeah, probably.”
“Fuck Keesh,” Owen corrected. Of course Fortis wanted to fuck him. He was an omega and Fortis was an alpha. All Owen would have to do was think a few sexy thoughts to get his slick going, and Fortis would be hard and rutting. That was the magic of omega pheromones. But it didn’t have much to do with Owen. He was just any old omega, like Fortis had said in the park, whereas Fortis and Keesh liked each other an extra special lot that had nothing to do with biology.
“You could fuck Keesh, right? I mean, I know he could give you a blowjob. He gives really good blowjobs, by the way.”
“So you’ve said.”
Owen didn’t even have to get wet. Fortis’s cock was already rising.
“And you could give him a blowjob too, I guess. Do alphas give blowjobs?”
“No reason why they can’t,” Fortis said. “They’ve got mouths.”
“And Keesh has an ass,” Owen pointed out. “So you could fuck him.”
If Fortis tried fucking Keesh, Owen had a feeling he’d like it. And then Fortis wouldn’t need an omega anymore. Keesh would get what he wanted and Fortis would get what he wanted. Owen wouldn’t get what he wanted, but he’d known right from the start that Fortis and Keesh belonged together. Pushing them into a mating could be his way of thanking them for what they’d done for him.
“I really think you ought to,” Owen urged.
“
Ought to what?” Keesh asked.
Oops. Owen had been so caught up in his thoughts he hadn’t heard Keesh come in. He was leaning against the doorjamb with a towel around his hips, all damp and shiny.
“Ought to fuck you,” Owen told him. He’d said as much to Fortis. Why not say it to Keesh? He was beginning to suspect the two of them needed to say things out loud more often. “So I’ll just run off.” He wormed his way out from under Fortis’s arms and got to his feet, but Keesh collared him before he could get out the door, wrapping a hand around his neck the same way Fortis sometimes did. It was just as hot when Keesh did it.
Keesh had stopped him from leaving, but he wasn’t looking at him. He was looking at Fortis. The towel and the way Keesh had Owen caught against his body hid his erection, but Owen could feel it. And Fortis’s was hanging out there for all of them to see. Yeah, these two should fuck.
“Tell him how much you want him to fuck you,” Owen suggested when Keesh just kept standing there with his mouth open. “Go on. Tell him.”
“Keesh wouldn’t want that.”
“Who says I wouldn’t?” Keesh snapped.
“You’re a beta.”
“So? Betas fuck.”
“When I fuck, it’s like…. You saw how I fuck.”
“He thinks you wouldn’t like it that way,” Owen explained, because for all the years these two had known each other, they seemed to have a hard time understanding certain things about each other.
“I’d like it.” Keesh’s gaze dropped, as if those words were hard to say.
“It would be different after,” Fortis said. “I don’t know if I could ever look at you the same.”
“Why? How would you look at me? Are you disrespecting Owen?” Keesh questioned angrily.
“I’m not disrespecting Owen,” Fortis protested. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t respect you. I just said it would be different. It would be too…” He trailed off with a shake of his head. “I’m afraid, Keesh.”
“Try me,” Keesh whispered. His towel fell away as he crawled onto the bed to hover over Fortis’s big body. “If you want me, then try me.”