Runaway Omega (The Wolves of Rocky Ridge Book 1) Read online

  The Wolves of Rocky Ridge

  RUNAWAY OMEGA

  SHANNON WEST

  Runaway Omega

  Copyright © 2020, Shannon West

  Published by Painted Hearts Publishing

  About the Book You Have Purchased

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  Runaway Omega

  Copyright © 2020 Shannon West

  Authors: Shannon West

  Publication Date: January 2020

  All cover art and logo copyright © 2020 by Painted Hearts Publishing

  Cover design by E Keith

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  Chapter One

  Sitting in the reception room of the big, impersonal Omega Family and Children Services office, I jiggled my leg nervously as I waited for a social worker to decide my fate.

  I desperately needed to qualify for services, which shouldn’t be a problem, but I wasn’t sure what I would do if anything went wrong, and I was, God forbid, denied public assistance. If it had just been me, I could have gone without a few meals--hell, I'd done it before. Intermittent fasting was a quick way to lose weight, and I'd used that method for years whenever I wanted to lose a few extra pounds.

  Not anymore.

  Now I had to not only try to eat three meals a day, but eat healthy too, which meant not living on pizza, beer, and tacos. In fact, I'd had to substitute milk for beer, and fruit and green vegetables for pizza and tacos. Everything about my life was different now and I hated it. Hated every fucking thing about it and wished I could just wake up and find the last few months had all been some crazy dream.

  Rent on the tiny room I was living in was due again in three days, and without at least a promise of a check arriving soon, there was no fucking way my landlord would let me stay. It was getting colder than a witch's tit outside with every passing day too, because it was almost winter now. I realized with a start that it was almost seven months since I'd seen Logan. Soon, it would be Winter Solstice, the most important holiday of the year for a wolf shifter like me. It was the shortest day of the year, the day when night reigned supreme, coming early and lasting long. This year the goddess Moon would light up the sky like a lantern, nearly full from dusk until dawn on solstice night. It would be a time of celebration for my pack.

  I had a sudden image of my last winter holiday at the pack's big lodge near Cherokee, North Carolina, with the huge fire roaring in the fireplace, and the giant evergreen tree lighting up the broad front window and filling the room with that luscious smell. Winter Solstice had no special traditions, outside of the long night of celebration under the stars. So, we borrowed heavily from Christmas and New Year’s, which came around the same time.

  Sipping a cup of steaming hot coffee last year as I watched the pack children laughing with excitement as they ripped into their presents—Logan Grady, the pack alpha, smiling warmly down at them, then glancing over at me with his green eyes twinkling—the memories hit me so hard, I almost groaned out loud.

  Seven months. It had been seven long, agonizing months since my whole life had blown up in my face, and I’d run like the coward I was to this big anonymous city over five hundred miles away from the warmer climate and my old pack home. Almost five hundred miles from Logan, my alpha and the only man I’d ever loved or was ever likely to love, even though the feeling wasn’t mutual. Logan only wanted friendship from me and nothing more, and he'd made that abundantly clear. I wondered if he and the rest of the pack was even still looking for me. Or had they made a token effort to find me and then given up?

  At one time I was the pack's beta, Logan's right-hand man. It was a job I'd inherited from my father, because that's how it was in our pack—the alpha and head beta positions in the pack were passed down from father to oldest son. Logan's father had been the strongest alpha in our pack's history, and it looked like Logan was following that tradition. Logan’s father and mine had brought our pack prosperity and made us into the most respected and feared wolf pack in this territory, which ranged all over the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee. When Logan’s dad finally passed away, an old man well-loved and revered by his pack, Logan ascended to pack alpha.

  Logan needed someone almost as powerful as he was by his side, so my father, who was getting on in years, stepped down, saying he knew it was time. He was, after all, over two hundred years old, as Logan's dad had been. He put forth my name to Logan as his second, and Logan accepted, as I knew he would. He and I had been best friends almost since we were born.

  My father's name and that of his alpha had been legendary, once upon a time. They had come to the Smoky Mountains as young men, little more than boys, really, around 1838, during the forced removal of the Cherokee Indians by the United States government. They had been living in the North Georgia hills, but when some fifteen thousand Cherokees were forced from their homes in Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee and taken west to Indian Territory, they became afraid of being swept up in the chaos of the removals along with the Cherokee. Though wolves were only distantly related, we shared common ancestors.

  They arrived in a time when the mountains were still wild and untamed, and they'd had to fight hard for the right to stay. The other packs in the area had been there since ancient times and were fierce and territorial, but my father and his alpha had faced them all down, one pack at a time. They had fought and won the right to claim their land. Soon, wolves from other packs began to migrate to them, sensing a stronger alpha and beta than their own. For the past hundred and fifty years, they had been the largest, strongest pack in the Smoky Mountains. They were called the Pack at Rocky Ridge, on account of their location near the old ridge road, the only road then that crossed over the Smokies.

  Later, when the national park was established and settlers were moved out, the pack didn't go far. Just about twenty-five miles away—less than that as the crow flies, to a beautiful hollow not too far from the little town of Cherokee, North Carolina. Our alpha bought enough acreage that we had all the privacy we required. We never lost the name, though, and among our people, we were known as the Rocky Ridge Wolf Pack.

  My mother had been one of the wolves who eventually migrated to the pack seeking asylum from her own cruel alpha, but that was years after the pack moved off the mountain. Despite the many wives and concubines my father had taken over the years, he had no surviving children, other than me, and I was a child of his old age. My mother had been much younger than my father when they met and she was, by far, the sweetest, most beautiful female in our pack. She had died having me, and my father still grieved for her to this day. He said she was his true mate, and he'd waited for her a very long time. Now that she'd gone to be with the ancestors, she'd wait for him, and
one day they'd be together again.

  My father had raised me on his own, refusing to take another wife, even though he had plenty of females who wanted him, despite his age. He was the pack beta, after all, and the best friend and second in command to our alpha. It was a respected and envied position of power.

  I was proud to be Logan's beta, and it lasted for a full year, the happiest, in some ways, of my entire life. But then I'd been forced to leave. To disappear and try to make sure my alpha never found me, because I knew what would happen if he did.

  People disappeared every day, every week. Mostly they wound up coming back home in a few days. Unfortunately, the police found some of them in dumpsters, or shallow graves in the woods, or floating face down in the river. Even some of our own pack members disappeared from time to time, “their bodies found later, often the victim of some kind of foul play.” Wolves were volatile creatures, and rogues still roamed the woods. These victims of violence were the saddest cases and the ones that used to keep me up at night. But many people who disappeared were just simply never seen again, and we never knew what happened to them. They went out for a pack of cigarettes or a quick trip to the mall, told their mates and kids they’d be back in a few, and then just vanished off the face of the earth. Like they’d been taken up to an alien mother ship.

  I always suspected the truth was much less exciting and interesting than alien abductions, however. I think those were the people who had one day decided, for whatever reason, to ditch their old lives and their old pack and make a brand-new start with a clean slate. It almost sounded romantic, in a way, like a real adventure or a chance to leave all your old mistakes and baggage behind and get a fresh start.

  The reality, though, was that it was fucking lonely. Once the newness of being on your own wore off, you suddenly realize you have the freedom to do whatever the hell you wanted to do with your life— stay up all night eating Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and binge on Supernatural reruns, or stay out late at the club and dance your ass off with anonymous strangers, or even order pizza at midnight. You suddenly realized you could do all of that, because nobody gave a shit about what you did or about what happened to you anymore. Literally, no one cared if you lived or died, and believe me, it’s a sobering thought at three in the morning to realize you could shuffle off this mortal coil in the middle of the night, and no one would even notice. Not until the smell coming from your apartment started to annoy the neighbors.

  And yeah, the fact was that dying was a real possibility for me. Omega pregnancies were almost always risky, and twenty-five was pretty old for an omega to be having a baby for the first time. Especially one like me, who was a fucking anomaly and a freak of nature. That fact had led me to where I was now, waiting in line for some social worker to decide if living indoors and eating regularly was going to remain in my near future.

  The Omega Family and Children’s Services in this state had a clinic in the same building as the Human Social Services. Separate but equal, or so they said. That meant a longer wait for services and a packed waiting room all the time. I’d already been there for three hours. One hour was taken up in seeing the clinic doctor to have him take my blood pressure, ask a few questions in a bored voice, poke around a little, and then bitch at me for gaining too much weight. Now another two hours spent waiting to see a social worker—again—about starting benefits. I had been on their waiting list for months now, and my luck had finally changed. Or so I thought. I just hoped they wouldn’t make me wait too long to get a check started.

  If they didn’t give me some food stamps and some emergency aid, I’d soon be out scrounging for food in the nearest dumpster and having this baby on the streets. Believe me, that wouldn’t be a pretty sight for anybody involved.

  A young couple came in and sat across from me and immediately started up a loud fight in Spanish. I should qualify that by saying that he was fighting. She was cowering next to him and flinching away from him every time he made a wild gesture toward her. He was loud and belligerent, not to mention having a pimply face as ugly as homemade sin, with a big scar across his upper lip, pulling it up in a permanent sneer. The female was silent and tearful. She was also heavily pregnant and was obviously scared of him from the way she was scrunched up in her chair, avoiding eye contact with him and everybody else. The guy, who was definitely an alpha wolf and an asshole at that, didn’t let up on her for the next five minutes. He saw me noticing them and gave me a belligerent, eat-shit-and-die look. I picked up a dog-eared Reader’s Digest, circa 2010, and began to flip through it to find the jokes at the end of the articles. But this guy just wouldn’t let up. Just when I was about to ask him to shut it, or I’d shut it for him, they finally called my name over the loudspeaker.

  I got up, holding a hand to my aching back, and the alpha-hole across from me gave me an ugly, mocking sneer when he saw my large baby bump. I pulled the ratty jacket I’d bought for four dollars at the thrift store closed and gave him the finger, then before he could wipe the look of shock off his ugly face, I went back to the window I’d been called to. A faded blonde human gave me a bored glance and asked for my paperwork, which I passed across the table to her. She glanced down at it and then back up at me.

  “It says here you’re an omega wolf?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You don’t look like an omega.”

  Whatever the hell that meant. “Uh. No, ma’am,” I said.

  She gave me a suspicious look and kept glancing over at me as she inspected my paperwork. “It says here that you’re almost nine months pregnant and in dire need of financial aid.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Where’s your alpha?”

  “I don’t have one. I don’t know who the father of my baby is.”

  She looked me up and down like I must be some kind of streetwalking whore. “You don’t know?”

  “No ma’am.”

  “You don’t know who the father of your baby is?”

  “No, ma’am. Like I said.”

  With wolf shifters, only an alpha could get an omega pregnant, and the idea that I wouldn't know who my alpha was...well, it was pretty lame, I had to admit. But I wasn't about to tell her. Wolf shifters had a long history with humans in this country, and it wasn't a good one. The humans barely tolerated us and vice versa. The only thing that kept them from declaring war on us was the fact that if we ever banded together, we could easily annihilate them, and our numbers had been steadily growing for years. The humans had been devising schemes for some time now to put limits on our population growth. So far none of their plans had been successful.

  The human female peered at me suspiciously, and this time she spoke a little louder for the cheap seats in the back. “You seriously expect me to believe that you don't know who your alpha is?”

  I just looked at her, not sure what she wanted me to say. I'd made myself more than clear. We had ourselves a little stare down for a minute and she huffed out a breath. Tightening her lips, she sneered at me. “Omega, my ass.”

  She stamped the inkpad and then the paperwork in front of her like she was killing roaches. “You’ll get your first check in thirty days, and your food stamps about a week from now in the mail. You do have a physical address, don’t you?”

  “I do for about another week. I’m gonna need that check sooner.”

  “There are people in hell wanting ice water, but they’re not getting it either.”

  No matter how many times I witnessed this kind of rude behavior to wolves, and to me personally, I was still as shocked as the first time. I sat still for a moment, contemplating several different courses of action, including going all Chuck Norris on her and leaping over that counter, grabbing her in a headlock, and kneeing her in that fat gut of hers before drop-kicking her ass. But in the end, I counted to ten, took a deep breath, picked up the paperwork and said, “Thank you so much for all your help.”

  I hoped she understood sarcasm when she heard it. Okay, it was lame, but it
was all I had.

  I had gone about three steps away from her desk when I heard the shots being fired in the lobby. I had wondered about the extremely bad security in this place since I’d been coming here. As a pack beta, security had been my main focus, and the first thing I did when I entered a place was to check it from a security standpoint. This building wasn’t exactly located in the best of neighborhoods; there were no metal detectors at the doors, and yet only one ancient and very fat security guard was usually on duty. Believe me, the old guy didn’t present much of a threat to anybody or anything unless it was the buffet at the Western Sizzlin’. He could probably destroy that pretty easily. A constant stream of volatile alpha and beta wolves were in and out of the door all day. And everybody knew alphas didn’t play well with others. In my opinion, it was an ugly incident just waiting to happen. It looked like today was that day. Lucky me.

  I'd always served as a bodyguard for Logan, and in that capacity, I carried a gun. Not that I really needed a gun to take care of most situations, but guns intimidated humans and wolves, too, for that matter, and sometimes that intimidation factor gave me the extra edge I needed. My old instincts kicked in when I heard the shots, and I crouched down, reaching for the Glock 17 I still wore in an ankle holster. I could feel myself starting to shift into my wolf, but I forced it back down. I had no idea what shifting would do to the baby I was carrying.

  I concentrated hard on suppressing my natural instincts and came up out of my crouch with the gun. I had decided to bring it with me when I ran, because I figured an omega, or whatever the hell I was now, had to be careful. Especially a pregnant one like me, in my new situation, and without my pack around me—and without my alpha.

  I jumped up to sprint around the corner—okay, maybe “sprint” is not the word I was looking for, but I definitely broke into a bit of a jog—and saw the asshole alpha from earlier shooting up the waiting room. He had a gun and was on his feet, waving it around and holding it sideways like some punk, as he pointed it at the people trembling on the floor and at the elderly security guard who had come huffing and hobbling over to see what the hell was going on.