Our instincts.

And ever since we’d found that woman, bleeding out, dying, shifting, changing…she’d been calling to me like a goddamn siren’s song.

I wasn’t used to that, even though I usually found ways to scratch an itch among humans. She-wolves never let us near them because of who we were—not Eli’s left hand, but twins—so it wasn’t too unusual I’d find a human attractive. But this seemed different than attraction.

My cock wasn’t totally in charge. It wasn’t that usual itch I got every now and then. It was…strange.

Deep.

Resonating through every beat of my heart and sending the weird feeling around my body.

I tugged at my bottom lip as I stared at the packhouse, a place I knew Eli hadn’t returned to. A place I knew the female wasn’t in.

The urge to find her was imperative. She was in safe hands. There were none safer. Eli was a damn good alpha but, more than that, he was a fine man. He’d look after her. Help her.

Trouble was, I wanted to do that too.

And if I did?

I knew Austin was right there with me.

One way in which we weren’t different?

The women we liked to screw.

“Stop it.”

I jerked in surprise at his hard bark and grunted over just how damn out of it I was. Failing to hear him stomp his way through the cabin? My brain was whirring with particulars it had no right to be focusing on when I was on duty.

“Stop what?” I grumbled. “Just sitting here.”

“I can hear you thinking.”

I winced. “Fuck. Sorry.”

His lips twisted into a smirk, because he knew I rarely swore. “Yeah. Fuck. That’s about the long and the short of it.”

Few knew we could talk to one another that way. It was beyond uncommon. The omega was the only one who knew, and she’d been the one to tell us that it was unusual and that we shouldn’t share the ability with anyone else.

Not even Eli or the alpha who, at the time, had been her mate.

We obeyed the omega with as much devotion as we did the alpha, so there was no way we’d argue, but for her to put such restrictions on us meant the ability was unusual in the extreme.

It was also a pain in the butt.

No part of my life was free from his touch, and some damn days, that was more than I could stand.

Austin stomped closer to the armchair I was slouched in, my feet resting against the window ledge as I stared out into the woods and at the packhouse beyond. But he still stayed behind me. His hands going to the back of my chair as he peered out onto the property we guarded like it was our own.

“Eli wants her.”

The statement was simple, but his tone was loaded with more nuances than if he’d raised his goddamn voice and started shrieking.

“Yeah.” I’d seen that. Both as wolf and man, the alpha wanted the she-wolf with the unusual coloring… The problem was, I wanted her too.

“Doesn’t stop me from wanting to help her though,” he admitted, keyed into my thoughts as always.

Because I never lied to him, I confessed, “Me either.” I cleared my throat. “Think she went hunting?”

“I doubt it. She seemed weak.” His brow puckered when I twisted to look up at him. He helped me by shuffling forward and perching on the windowsill beside my feet. Folding his arms over his chest, he tipped back until his spine collided with the glass, then muttered, “Her weakness should be repugnant to us.”

We were alphas by nature, and we usually liked stubborn bitches with more attitude than sense, but the she-wolf emitted none of that.

And it had nothing to do with her being weak from blood loss or the transformation.

That initial shift?

She should have made a marauding, raping, and pillaging Viking look like he was on Valium.

Instead, she’d passed out.

I carried on plucking at my bottom lip as the urge to go to her messed with my mind.

Eli had given us direct orders, which we’d followed. He was the only one we’d ever followed blindly, and that was another reason why the council hated us, but for the first time, I wanted to disobey.

I wanted to see the she-wolf for myself.

So did Austin, because he asked, “Think they’re still in the woods?”

“I haven’t seen him come in through the back way,” I muttered.

Our eyes met and held because we knew that was the only way he slipped into the house when he wasn’t dealing with the council BS.

One of the reasons Eli rocked as a friend and alpha was because the posturing that went with the job slipped over his head. He had nothing to prove—N. O. T. H. I. N. G.—and the council, even if it pissed them off, knew it.

Some people liked to show dominance when they didn’t have it, but Eli’s power oozed around him like a second skin. It made him a powerful leader and a difficult enemy.

I was glad to be on his good side, at any rate.

Eli didn’t need the pomp and ceremony of his position to be damn good at what he did, unlike his prick dad and half the council, who thought because they were a part of that governing body, their crap stank of roses. It didn’t. I’d know too, because we kept tabs on them, and knew their peccadillos better than they did.

All of them were asshats, selected by an asshole who’d been fortunate in his years that no one in the pack had been strong enough to challenge him.

Well, that was a semi-truth. Austin and I could have taken him. Easily. But getting the pack to follow us was another matter entirely. And Eli? He’d have been able to squash Paul like a bug, but he’d never hurt his mother that way.

“Want to secure the grounds?” he queried gruffly, breaking into my thoughts.

My lips twisted at the stupid excuse, but damn if it didn’t sound like a good idea to me.

Rather than answer, I just surged to my feet, and the pair of us ambled out of the room with a leashed energy that told me we were both feeling the strain and neither of us wanted to show it.

When we made it outside, we let the change hit us, and the relief that came with being in our second skin was acute. It felt damn good to be back on four paws mostly, I knew, because I could scent her better in this form.

And she was a she-wolf.

And awake.

A whine escaped me at the realization, and Austin shot me a look that said he’d sensed that too.

The she-wolf who ought to be weak, considering she was a wolf child, was somehow not overcome with the desire for blood, nor was she dozing in the post-transformation coma that was an integral phase of the gift of shifting.

Weirder and weirder.

The pair of us took off at the same time, loping through the forests that we knew as well as our own faces in the mirror. The early morning scent made everything richer, more pungent. Dew slicked the ground, the brisk chill in the air spoke of the sun not yet having had the chance to warm things through, and the woods were starting to awaken to the day with our prey just beginning to emerge from their shelters.

We weren’t on the hunt, and they knew that. Knew, still, to avoid us.

No point in pissing off a predator.

Every now and then, Austin would ram into me. Not to be an ass—which he was—but just to connect. Our wolves were close, probably closer than the human forms, which I knew was odd. Especially since we lived together and, more than that, led most of our lives knocking up against each other. However, that was different.