Omega Mine

“What? Grayson, move,” Josie commanded, beyond shocked that he was telling her to stop the bloodshed. Had he hit his head before she’d found him? He wasn’t making any sense, and protecting a Mongrel was the worst mistake someone could make. There was no redeeming them, no helping them.

Unless you intended to put them down.

“Josie, we can’t kill him,” Grayson insisted, a haunted expression on his face that gave her pause, if only for a moment.

“The hell we can’t!” Josie shook her head in disbelief. “You can’t just go flying off the handle to murder Samuel and then tell me I can’t shoot someone that stabbed you. That’s not fair at all.”

“I’m going to check the restaurant,” Jameson murmured quietly beside her, clearly uninterested in the conversation unfolding before him. He didn’t bother waiting for a reply. A second later, he was gone, running into the building.

“This Mongrel is different from the others, Josie. I won’t kill him, and you can’t either.”

Movement behind Grayson caught her attention and her eyes narrowed on the dark haired Mongrel as he stood to his full height, his lips peeling back into a snarl.

She gave him a snarl of her own. That son of a bitch had hurt her mate, and she was going to do everything in her power to make him feel that agony a thousand times over. Grayson would forgive her, surely, if she put the Mongrel out of his misery.

The gun didn’t waver in her grip as she aimed it just over Grayson’s shoulder, glaring furiously at the Mongrel as he righted himself, his attention solely on the back of her mate’s head.

Hatred and death burned in his eyes as he lunged forward. Right as she began to pull the trigger, Grayson flipped around, balling his hand into a fist and slamming it into the Mongrel’s face. The male flew back again, his back hitting the hard ground.

Grayson jumped onto him, hitting him twice more before the Mongrel went limp, arms falling to his sides.

“Now can I shoot him?” she asked in exasperation, rushing to Grayson’s side to stare at the downed male.

His shoulder length black hair was in his face, obscuring his features. He didn’t look familiar to her, but given that her mate hadn’t ripped his head off, literally, she was beginning to suspect he knew the male.

Was this an opponent he’d faced before in the arena? Or a previous cellmate?

“I’d prefer it if you didn’t,” Grayson said gruffly, an odd note in his voice catching her off guard as she glanced at her mate. Surprise? “We need to take him with us.”

“Take him with…Grayson, are you out of your mind?” Josie snapped, grabbing his arm. “We can’t take a Mongrel with us. He’s not a pet, he’s a blood thirsty, killing machine!” She looked down at her mate’s ripped shirt, letting out a hiss of despair at the blood staining his clothing. “Look at what he did to you,” she whispered forlornly, moving her hand to inspect his wound.

She’d been determined to be furious with him for the antics he’d pulled, but now that they were together again, all she wanted was to hold him close and make sure he was okay.

So much for strangling him for running off on his own.

Grayson caught her wrist before she could take a good look at his injuries, his thumb brushing delicately over her pulse point as she glanced up at him in confusion.

His eyes burned into hers, the fiery red color making her heart skip a beat. “I’m already healing, little mate.”

“I should still make sure you’re alright.” She released a trembling breath, doing her best to ignore the irrational fear in her heart telling her that her mate was on the verge of death. Logically, she knew he wasn’t, but seeing him covered in so much blood made her crazy. Scenting it in the air was just as bad, if not worse. “I need to see, Grayson. Please.”

Sighing, he brought her hand to his stomach, using his free hand to pull up his ruined shirt. Blood was already drying on his abs. Ten deep puncture wounds marred his flesh, most of them already beginning to stitch themselves back together.

“That looks really bad, Grayson.”

“I’ve had worse.”

She huffed, rolling her eyes even as they began to sting with unshed tears. “That isn’t reassuring and honestly? You shouldn’t even say something like that right now. Not when I’m furious with you.”

Her voice lacked any heat behind it, and when he cupped her cheek, whatever anger she’d been holding onto, fled.

Josie felt the tension in her shoulders drain as she watched his body repair the damage that had been dealt right before her eyes. Taking a relieved breath, she let the warmth of his body seep into the pads of her fingers, another reminder that he was alive and out of danger.

“You’re really okay?” she asked hesitantly, leaning into him until her forehead rested on his chest.

Grayson wrapped his arms around her, holding her close. “Thanks to you.”

“I barely did anything,” she admitted, inhaling his scent into her lungs. The coppery smell of blood was still present, but his own musk and evergreen scent more than made up for it.

“You kept me from getting shot to death.”

His words brought everything from the last half hour back with startling clarity. “It wouldn’t have been necessary if you’d stuck with the plan. Going after Samuel like that was a mistake. Any one of us could have died, Grayson. You could have died,” she whispered brokenly.

He was silent for a moment, his emotions pouring into her as he held her tightly to him. Remorse. Anger. Guilt.

She honestly expected him to lose his temper, or to snap that he’d had everything well in hand.

“You’re right,” he agreed, the truth in his words nearly knocking her on her ass. “I didn’t think; I reacted. I should have done better.”

It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him that, yes, he really should have done better. But she held back, sighing softly into him.

“Maybe I shouldn’t be expecting so much from you so soon,” she added after a brief pause, pressing her lips to his chest. “You’ve had a lifetime of acting on instinct, of being the only one you need to look out for. It’ll be a hard habit to break.”

And she shouldn’t expect him to handle every crisis flawlessly, especially so soon after their prison break. It wasn’t fair to either of them.

“When I realized Samuel was here, all I could think about was how he’d hurt you. What he’d made you go through because of me,” Grayson growled. “I lost all sense of control. All I wanted was to make him bleed, to hurt him worse than he’d hurt you.” He dropped his chin onto the crown of her head, breathing her in. “I’ll do better,” he finished, his voice firm.

Sniffling, Josie pulled away from his hold, eyeing the Mongrel on the ground with disdain before she glanced around them. “Where is Samuel, anyway? Did you kill him before we got to you?”

All of the women were still chained together, watching on with shell-shocked expressions on their faces.

Samuel was nowhere in sight.

Grayson must have realized it at the exact same moment, his own expression becoming thunderous.

“He’s gone,” he growled.

Josie ran a hand down her face. “At least the women are all safe. And we have this Mongrel,” she added, brow furrowing. “Why are we keeping him alive?”

Just then, Jameson returned to their side, David in tow. “No one else is in the restaurant,” The Omega stated. “Either they cleared out when the fighting began, or we’ve killed them all.”

“Your dad wasn’t in there, either?” Josie asked hesitantly.

“No. We’ll need to check his house once we free the prisoners.” He nodded to David. “Let’s free the women.”

The two of them searched the dead guards, finding a key to the chains before setting out to free the women.

When she looked beside her, Grayson’s jaw was clenched so hard she could almost hear his back molars grinding together from the force of it. “That’s my brother,” he informed her softly, nodding toward the Mongrel.

She blinked once, sure she’d misheard him. “What?”

His gaze moved from her to the unconscious male a few feet from them. “That’s Wyatt. I don’t understand it. I thought he was dead, just like my parents. But that’s him. I’d recognize him anywhere, at any age.”

Josie’s mouth popped open in shock, and it took her several tries to close it as she digested this new information. It definitely explained why Grayson hadn’t been fighting back when she’d found him, or why he’d been adamant she not plug his assailant full of bullet holes.

She didn’t remind him that his mother was in fact alive, feeling pretty confident that he didn’t care right at this moment.

But how was his brother alive?

If you could call being a Mongrel living, she thought bitterly.

She took in the unconscious male again. He had a similar build as Grayson, and his hair was the same dark shade, even if it was far more unruly. It was still blocking his face, so she couldn’t see more of him, and there was no way in hell she was going to take a closer look.

He could wake up at any moment, and the last place she wanted to be was within reach of an enraged beast.

“Grayson, are you sure?”

Part of her hoped he was mistaken, and that his little brother had died decades ago. Did that make her an awful person? She honestly wasn’t sure, but death was preferable to being a Mongrel.

Hadn’t the report Bethany had given forty years ago stated that the little brother and father had perished? Had she been mistaken, just like Grayson?

If that was the case, how the hell had Wyatt become a Mongrel? He must have been captured by the humans when he was a child, just like Grayson. But instead of surviving as her mate had, pieces of Wyatt had fractured until there was nothing left behind but a savage animal.

Had he endured the arenas like Grayson? Or had he suffered a worse fate than that? The thought was bleak, and terrible enough that it would haunt her for weeks if she let it.

“That’s him,” Grayson confirmed, his sadness hitting her like a freight train. “I can’t kill him, Josie. Even if he threatened to kill me.”

Josie stilled. “What do you mean?” she asked quickly. “He spoke to you?”

“Yes.”

“Mongrels don’t talk. They’re at their most primitive form like this, nothing more than instinct and animal.” It couldn’t be possible.

Grayson turned his attention to her, eyes narrowing. “He definitely spoke to me. It was only three words, but he did speak. Maybe there’s hope for him.”

Josie squeezed her eyes shut, sighing heavily. “Grayson–”

“I can’t kill him, and I can’t let you do it either, Josie.” She looked up at her mate again, the resolve on his face impossible to miss. His features softened marginally. “This is my family, little mate. Our family. If we can save him, we need to.”