"Hudson! You joined us! Here I thought you'd gotten lost."
Leo was the sort of family you chose, not the type you were born with. I shook my head at him and he mocked me, shaking his shaggy blond hair back at me. He was five years my senior, in his middling 30s, and built like a fortress. But those wild, forest green eyes brought the ladies to him every time we walked into a... ...hell, take your pick. Parties, bars, even promotional venues had him with three, four, even five girls clinging to him at any given time.
It was ridiculous.
"Where's Xav?" I asked, walking to the buffet that catering had been so kind as to provide us with.
Mostly? I concentrated on the beef. The bloodiest steaks, the thickest cuts. They knew that we were passionate about our protein and they delivered every single day. I really needed to give our catering crew a raise. They did such an incredible job. I made a mental note to do so when I got back to the office.
Gabe came up to refill his plate as Leo ignored me. "He's stuck talking to one of our vendors. You know how hands-on he is."
"Little too much. That's what he's got his assistants for. Is it that big of an issue?" I asked
He rolled his shoulders in a not-quite shrug. "He says it is. But he promised he'd show up. No dice on Tommy, by the way. But nobody's complaining about chewed up chickens or anything like that, either."
I nodded, because it was all I could do. Gabe kissed me on the cheek and I followed him back to the table, tearing into my steak as I sat there. It would do me no good to starve myself. Tommy wouldn't appear just because I was hungry, and if anything? It might distract me when I did have a chance to go pound some dirt and look for him that evening.
"If we had a bigger pack, we could have people out there right now," Leo said.
I swallowed the hunk of meat in my mouth and gave him a look. "We had a bigger pack at one point. What happened?"
"They got dead."
I snorted and sliced through another thick cut of meat. Leo spoke up again. "Because of your dad."
"I know what happened. We all do. There's no reason to talk about it here," I said, my tone telling him the conversation was finished.
He didn't take the hint. "Look, I'm not saying it was entirely his fault. But you have to admit-"
"Drop it," I growled, facing him fully.
Leo toyed with his fork and knife, letting them flop back and forth between his fingers. His gaze narrowed and I readied myself for an attack. The fur didn't pop out quite yet, but it was a very near thing. Gabe rolled his eyes and continued with his ridiculously overloaded cheesesteak sandwich. Nothing would stop him from having a satisfactory lunch.
The tension broke when I fell to the ground, convulsing once, twice. Pain, terrible pain, tore its way through my psyche and found an exit through my feet. I moaned, rolling on the ground and tearing at the low pile office carpet. Whatever had passed between Leo and I wasn't important, he was there to grab my head and keep me from knocking into the lunch table until Gabe had it moved out of the way.
Only once before had I felt agony like that. I tried to force air into my lungs. Just breathing had helped last time but this? No, this was the sort of thing nightmares were made of. It was like every nerve in my body had suddenly decided to have a fucking parade, zapping and sparking in ways that I didn't fully understand.
"Easy," Leo said above me. "Come back to us. Talk to me. There's nothing for you to worry about, just me."
I gasped through the agony. "There's plenty for me to worry about. Fucking christ that hurts."
"What's up?" Gabe asked, as though we'd all just met in a goddamned mall food court. There were times when he was a bit too relaxed for my nature.
"Maybe something happened to Mom?" I said, confused. "The only time I've ever felt like that was when Dad bit her, turned her back when I was a kid."
Leo withdrew and sat back on his feet, his brows raised. "The last time you felt like that was because someone forcibly entered your Lineage and you got a link established with an omega. Your mom's an omega, right?"
"Yeah," I said, because that was all I could do. Confirmation.
He traded glances with Gabe and my stomach sank. Unless my father had decided to crawl out of his grave and add a few more ladies to the family, that only left one possibility. My omega mother certainly wasn't going to turn people; it was beyond an omega's powers to do that. Only alphas could give the gift, the bite, that would eventually turn a human from one of those soft, ape-like bodies into the sleek, lithe hunter that worshipped the moonlit sky.
I'd mated with an omega and she had given birth to an alpha. If I dared to say it, that was probably why the kid was such a handful. Alphas had a mind of their own from a very young age, often wandering off when they were only a few months old. We did our best, as parents, to keep them with us but what Tommy had done was absolutely normal in our society. It was why it was so important to teach them young, and to teach them early,
