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Chapter 41
Declan came around slowly and groggily, sensing strangers close enough that they were touching him. His first reflex was to fight back, and he was thrashing almost before he’d fully recalled what had led to him being unconscious. The last thing he remembered was that psychopathic bastard Roen drugging him and threatening Marcus, and then telling him to ‘Go to sleep, Alpha.’ His left hand was also a strange mix of cold and numb that he couldn’t understand – although his nerve endings awoke in pain when he tried to make a fist and swing at someone.
“Declan! Declan!” Marcus’ frantic voice reached him, and Declan tried to get his eyes to focus. He blurrily saw figures around him, but it was the familiar face of Marcus that he got his eyes to focus on first: a vivid bruise was forming all along his left cheek and his right arm was covered in bandages and a sling. Besides that, he also look
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Marcus Rushton walked home quickly, even though the day was still bright. This part of town was quite sketchy, the kind you tried not to be stuck out walking in (or living in, to be honest), so if anyone noticed how he always furtively scurried home, they’d blame it on that. Very few humans would immediately peg him as one of the non-human members of society, but he was able to see passingly well in the dark and smell most kinds of trouble before they got to him. Being a Werewolf occasionally had its perks.The grocery store he worked at had had quite a spill today – the kind of mess that happened only rarely but was no less hated for its absence. This time, it had been thanks to a pair of drunkards getting into a fight right in the aisles. Anywhere else, and the event would have been unbelievable, but here, it wasn’t even unprecedented. That was just the kind of place Marcus lived in. Marcus tried to avoid working around the spill, especially
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The first thing that Marcus realized was that he couldn’t afford to move. That realization hit him like a wrecking ball, crushing his chest in and leaving him silent and breathless.He could always just skip town, of course, but he already had enough trouble tiptoeing around the Werewolf community – he didn’t need more trouble with the judicial one as well, if he just decided to leave unpaid rent and bills. His next check from work wouldn’t come for another whole week, and even that wasn’t much, considering he had to eat between now and then. If he made sure to pick it up promptly, and didn’t use up too much of the remaining money he had from his last one…Marcus forced himself to nod, dragging in deep breaths and telling himself that it would be okay. He could do it, he could wait out the week and put all of his focus and savings into leaving at the end of it. He usually lived pretty much from pay-
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Those Betas had made him late for work, but at least he’d made it. They’d left his door about twenty minutes after he’d turned up the music, although he only had known that by checking through the peephole on his door. The blasting music had left his ears ringing and numb-feeling for hours afterwards, even after he’d more or less sprinted to work in the hopes that he still had a job when he got there.His boss, not surprisingly, was irate, but Marcus took the verbal beating silently, nodding when appropriate and making his posture as submissive as he could get it without physically kneeling on the floor. As an Omega, submissiveness technically came easily to him, but right now he was so out of sorts that he was just grateful that the lecture was one-sided – no hard questions were asked of him, and no responses were required other than, “Sorry, sir” or “No, won’t happen again, sir.&
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Declan was feeling something akin to relief as he sat and talked with Liz and Kobi, and Liz and Kobi (mostly Liz, because Kobi was the taciturn type) talked about Marcus Rushton. They’d been seeing the lone Omega on a regular basis now, usually over his lunch-break, although apparently he’d accepted their company while walking to work in the morning, too. Kobi was a damnably early riser, and while Liz most certainly wasn’t, the two of them seemed happy to get up early just to troop over to Rushton’s rundown little place and then go with him to work from there. Of course, Liz was usually too sleepy to recall most of the morning conversations, but on those occasions, Kobi made up for his girlfriend’s quiescence a bit. Declan himself was an early bird, and had long-since gotten used to the friendly, easy way that Kobi talked over a cup of coffee in the morning – he always used words conservatively, but in the hush of the starting day, he talked a bit
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Rushton’s paws skidded out on the tiled kitchen floor as soon as Declan put him down, partially because two of the four were slicked with blood, partially because the Omega had to be on his last dregs of strength anyway. The battered little white wolf looked with panic around the room, skittering and cowering away when his blue eyes eventually came to rest on Declan himself, a towering giant as a human right now. When Marcus’s retreat brought him up sharply against the kitchen cabinets, he smeared blood on them, but also lost his footing and fell with a pained yelp.Declan could see that Marcus was trying to back down, as if this were a fight and he wanted nothing to do with it. That was probably why the territorial temper was only grumbling softly at the back of Declan’s head instead of trying to overwhelm him like it usually was around the Omega – from the moment he’d seen Marcus standing there, head down and tail tucked rig
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Marcus was floating. He was drifting in quiet and darkness, and felt safer than he could imagine being in awhile – there was a scent wrapped around him, one that made him content and made him smile. It was a smell of protection, one that any Werewolf, but especially an Omega, learned to associate with safety: an Alpha’s scent. There was always a bit of his Alpha’s scent clinging to his clothes and skin, from John doing the laundry at his wife’s behest, or from one-armed hugs to paternal pats on the back. So even when Marcus was off on his own getting groceries or just taking a walk, the scent was there as a reminder of the place he belonged.Of the place he had belonged.This Alpha he was scenting wasn’t John.Peace shattered like glass beneath a falling rock, Marcus woke up to reality all around him. He remembered his past haunting him like over-eager ghosts. He remembered his body starting
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Earlier that day, probably at about the same time that Liz and Kobi had been trying to get Marcus to eat something and Declan had been taking an exhausted, troubled nap, Rob had padded quietly through the house. He’d stopped at Clarissa’s door, pitching his voice so that only she would hear him, “Open up, unless you’ve suddenly changed sides and decided to go all cuddly on that Omega brat like the others.”His careless, blunt remark had footsteps shuffling inside, and soon the door was opened. Clarissa, looking more unkempt than she would have liked, with dark circles under her eyes, glared warily at Rob through the crack in the door. He grinned back. Rolling her eyes and sighing resignedly, the older woman backed off but left the door open for him to slip inside, closing it behind him. “Why are you here, Rob?” she asked wearily.“To see if you’ll help me with something,” he asked w
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