The Omega Queen

Twenty-Two

“Honestly? It’s torture,” Alexander sighed. “I just want to lay in bed with her all day and never leave until I’m covered in her scent.”

“Like rolling in a field of wildflowers,” Kaison nodded.

“Apple orchard,” Alexander corrected. “She smells like apple blossoms.”

Kaison grinned, moving to the liquor cabinet, “In that case, how about some apple brandy? I think you could use a glass to calm down. You shouldn’t bring this energy back to your mate.”

“Yeah,” Alexander agreed, sinking back into his chair. “So, you saw Erin.”

Kaison nodded, handing him a glass, “Your mother was doing her usual rounds. We had a new pup in the ward.”

Alexander grinned. His mother loved pups and always visited the newborns and their mothers in the hospital. When he was little, he often accompanied her. She said it was important for an alpha to remember what they were fighting for. Pups were the true future of the pack. Every decision he made should be for their benefit.

“Your mother also wanted me to look at her to try and diagnose her muteness,” Kaison said.

Alexander was immediately on alert and asked, “And your results?”

“Well, I don’t see any signs of damage, no scar tissue, no abscesses. Everything looks normal,” Kaison sighed. “As far as I can tell, there is no physical reason for it. My guess is that it’s psychosomatic.”

“Which means?”

“In layman’s terms, in her mind she believes she can’t speak, so she can’t,” Kaison said. “I’m guessing trauma-induced. When I brought it up she had a full panic attack.”

“She what!? Is she okay?”

“Yes. Your mother and I were able to calm her,” Kaison held up his hand. “But if a mere mention of it could cause that sort of reaction, whatever happened to her had to be quite severe.”

“I don’t know all the details, but her entire pack was wiped out in some sort of attack,” Alexander admitted.

“Are you serious?”

Alexander nodded.

“Well, that would certainly be traumatic. What do you mean you don’t know the details?”

“Just what I said. Ten years ago, Erin’s pack was completely wiped out, and I have no records of any reports concerning it. Nathan has no memory of it either. How about you?”

“Ten years ago?” Kaison frowned and shook his head. “No. I don’t.”

“Don’t you think it’s strange? How could an entire pack disappear, and no one knows?”

“That does sound implausible,” Kaison agreed. “Something on that scale is not easy to hide, even if her pack was small. Did you ask her about it?”

Alexander gave him a waning look.

“No. I suppose not.”

“And I’m definitely not going to ask her name after her reaction to you.”

“Well, that might not be for the best.”

“What do you mean?”

“Meredith would say avoidance is a patch. If you truly want to heal, you have to face it.”

Alexander sighed.

“We should probably have this conversation with her. She’s the expert and maybe Erin will be all right with discussing it. Your mate has been living with his trauma for ten years. She’s probably ready to talk about it. She just needs someone who can listen and help her understand how it has affected her. Meredith is safe. She won’t judge, and she won’t violate patient privacy.”

“That’s true,” Alexander nodded.

He didn’t want any rumors circulating around his luna. The Council would be looking for any weakness they could find to pressure him into rejecting her. That was something he absolutely wouldn’t do. Erin was his mate and he would wage war against the entire werewolf world if he had too.

But that was not a conflict he wanted Erin to endure. She had survived enough. Perhaps he should start contacting other pack leaders to build a base of support. With enough backing, the Council would withdraw before they started.

“What are you thinking about?” Kaison asked.

“Just wondering how much of a fuss the Council is going to throw.”

Kaison grimaced, “Those old farts need to keep their nose out of business that doesn’t concern them. The Goddess chooses our mates, and she chooses them for a reason. If they think they are smarter than her, they have another thing coming.”

“Agreed.”

“You think they’ll make a fuss about her being wendigo?”

“Wendigo, mute, a mysterious past—you name it. There is a lot for them to make a stink about.”

“Is that why you haven’t marked her yet?”

“Peregrin is trying to find leads about what happened to her pack,” Alexander said. “That’s at least something we can eliminate from their arsenal.”

Kaison nodded. It certainly wasn’t the worst idea. The next logical step would be to consult Meredith on Erin’s muteness. There had to be a reason for it and if they could figure it out, the Council would have to stay in their lane.

Seeing Alexander’s pensiveness, he asked, “Is there something else?”

“A whole pack couldn’t have disappeared without someone noticing, which means only one thing.”

“A conspiracy. So, everything hinges on what Peregrin can find out.”

“Yes. It does.”

* * *

“I got nothing,” Peregrin announced.

Alexander, Nathan and Kaison sat in the alpha’s study. It had been a week since Erin’s arrival and she was settling into the pack well. Several pack members had begun to learn sign language to engage with her, following Cahira’s lead. According to what Alexander heard, they loved her gentle and caring nature. In particular, she had endeared herself to the medical staff with her impressive herbal knowledge.

Downstairs, Cahira, Erin and Meredith were pleasantly chatting after supper while the males had gone to the study to meet the delta. Alexander had been nervous about Erin meeting the gamma she-wolf, but Meredith promised she wouldn’t talk shop. It was a casual meeting. If Erin wanted to broach the subject of her past, that was up to her. So far, they stayed on safe topics like herbs.

For Alexander, the past week had been a strange mix of torture and heaven: torture during the day of having his mate so close while trying to repress the urge to mark her and pure heaven at merely being in her presence and being sounded by her scent. Every night he went to bed alone, but every morning he woke up in bed with her around a wolf who was not apologetic in the slightest.

“Do you want to repeat that?” Alexander asked.

“I got nothing.”

“Seriously?” Nathan asked. “The ultimate scrounger found nothing.”

“I canvased the entire area around Las Vegas,” Peregrin shrugged. “There were no rumors about a pack, or one that used to be there.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Nathan argued. “She didn’t fall out of the sky.”

“You’ll have to widen your search,” Alexander said.

“How far out should I go? I mean, it’s all desert? A young teen couldn’t get far on two feet.”

“She might have been on four,” Kaison suggested.

“What do you mean? She was much too young to shift,” Nathan frowned.

“Under normal circumstances,” Kaison said, “but under extreme trauma, there have been instances of wolves shifting early. It’s like a defense mechanism.”

“So, you think she shifted early?”

Kaison nodded, “If we’re talking about an event that erased on entire pack then, yes, that is definitely something that could trigger an early shift.”

Peregrin sucked in a breath. If that was true, he would have to expand his circle much wider, maybe even four or five times as much. And the clock was ticking.