But Hunter knew her well enough not to take offense, and she had a reputation as the Pack harpy to live up to. Hunter was grumpy—or hehadbeen—but the Pack tolerated his crankiness because they loved him and respected him.
Della, they tolerated. Or avoided.
She passed by the largest building in the settlement, quiet and cool after the evening meal had been eaten and cleaned up. The combination mess hall/cookhouse served as a central hub. Beyond it, further toward the perimeter, lived the quieter sections of family cabins, the Alpha bunkhouse, and her own small domicile. Hopefully, Rue would be asleep so they wouldn’t have to interact as Della got ready for bed. She empathized with the quiet Omega, obviously traumatized beyond comprehension, yet Della longed to have her cabin back to herself.
“There you are.”
The deep male voice oozed with a familiarity that stopped Della in her tracks. To her left, coming down the darkened path that led to the Alpha bunkhouse, strode a tall, languid shadow.
“Pardon?” Della asked, purely on instinct. A hundred years in a coarse civilization and she hadn’t yet been able to relinquish all of her hard-wired etiquette.
The man approached, his gait smooth and easy and exceedingly fluid. Arms swinging at his sides, there was a looseness about him, a nonchalance. It lent him an air of sophisticated confidence so unlike the typical Alpha hulking assuredness. If they were fe-fi-fo-fum giants, he moved with a feline grace, complete with the wide, self-satisfied, Cheshire cat grin aimed at her from where he stopped, a mere foot between them.
“Been looking all over for you.” His voice tumbled down from his height, saturating her with its thick, luxuriant twang. Parts of her brain, unused for decades, sprang into action, dissecting the broadness of the vowels and the drag of the consonants. She hadn’t heard anything like it for a very long time. Oklahoman? Texan? Those places no longer existed, yet here this accent was, hugging her eardrums like a long-lost friend. “You aren’t headed home now, are you?”
The inquiry snapped her back to the moment and the stranger in her path. “I am,” she said decisively, deploying the crisp Della tone that even the densest of these Alpha creatures never failed to understand as not-fucking-interested. But instead of marching off on her way, she lingered, her brain snagging on the mystery of what he’d said.“What do you mean you’ve been looking for me?” she demanded, disliking how the presumption grabbed her attention and derailed her path to her bed.
Stray light from the bonfire touched his face, confirming his identity as one of the new Alphas whose names she hadn’t bothered to learn. He canted forward a few inches, close enough that Della recognized the blank air where his scent should’ve whispered across her nose. Unlike the Alphas and Omegas, who evolved to survive in the AfterEnd with their heightened sense of smell, hers had only diminished. The fires that robbed Della of everything she loved had also scorched her airways and stolen her olfaction in a last, final insult.
Nostrils flaring, the man inhaled audibly before grinning even wider. “That’s good stuff right there,” he murmured, more to himself than to her.
“I beg your pardon,” Della sniffed with her nonfunctioning nose. “It’s not polite to comment on someone’s…” She silently balked at the word scent, with its primal, intimate connotations she didn’t care to reference in front of this stranger. Problem was, all the other words that came to mind (fragrance, perfume, bouquet, aroma) were no better, possibly even worse.
“Scent?” he supplied, a big smile tucked into the small syllable as if mocking her hesitation to say the word out loud. “How polite is it to smell the way you do and run anywhere except into my arms?”
A whooshing heat roared up Della’s neck and blasted onto her cheeks, quickly followed by a cooling stream of sharp annoyance. It had been a while since she’d fended one off, but Della was no stranger to Alpha propositions. Yet an Alpha’s clumsy attempts for her attention had never resulted in such an immediate and assertive bodily reaction. “Wh—what did you say?”
“You heard me just fine.” He rocked back on his heels, giving her some much-needed breathing room. “I’ve been catching traces of you since we rolled up this morning. A little here, a little there, but never enough to be satisfying. I’d heard there were a few unmated Omegas here, but—”
“You’re mistaken,” Della interrupted. “I’m not an unmated Omega.”
The Alpha’s grin extinguished like a blown-out candle. “You’re mated then?” He jerked his chin back toward the party. “Which Alpha is yours?”
Della shook her head, her flustered tongue tripping over itself to get the words out. “I don’t have an Alpha, and I’m not an Omega. That’s all I was trying to say.”
Two thick brows popped halfway up his forehead. “Well, darlin’, you ain’t no Beta.”
Della sighed an exasperated huff. Setting aside the fact he’d called herdarlin’, which was ridiculous and over-the-top, even for an Alpha, she despised this discussion and the hundreds of times she’d been mired in it. What was the fucking obsession with labels? It was like the human race forgot about every other distinction that used to divide people and went all in on this business with dynamics. Alphas as the “new” version of men, Omegas as the “new” version of women, and Betas as everyone else who hadn’t changed in some biologically improbable way. Everyone had to be categorized and put in their proper place, and, god forbid, if you didn’t fit into one, you’d never hear the end of it.
What was she? Della wanted to snarl.How about a twenty-first-century feminist living in some caveman-adjacent post-apocalyptic society witnessing the simultaneous evolution and devolution of the entire fucking human race?
“It doesn’t matter what I am,” she snapped, her good manners finally giving up the ghost, “and even if it did, it’s none of your business. Now, if you’ll excuse me...” Pressing the back of her hand to an unyielding bicep, Della moved to swipe the Alpha out of her way. More of a symbolic gesture, really, but she was making a point.
The man relented, feinting to the side to let her pass, but as she slipped past the arm in question, she found herself spinning off her path and pinned against his solid chest. Before she could protest with anything more than an undignified squeak, he’d backed her up against the rough side of the mess hall.
Instinct tallied up the danger in her situation. She was alone, in the dark, trapped against a solid structure by an Alpha she didn’t know while the rest of the settlement partied the night away at least a dozen yards from where she stood. Alpha hearing being what it was, someone would hear her scream and come to her rescue. That is, if they weren’t all too plastered or rendered blind from Lars’s most recent batch.
Della opened her mouth to test her theory but hesitated as more data points notched onto the opposing tally. Her heart thumped at an accelerated clip, but not with the skidding, hurtling scramble of fear. Her breasts tingled, awake and interested in a situation that did not involve them in the least. And her belly whirred with a dirty, restless tickle that signified something else entirely.
She wasn’t actually afraid.
As if he read the thoughts on her face, the Alpha’s broad grin reasserted itself. “My apologies for surprising you,” he said in his soothing drawl, “I ain’t gonna hurt you, you see?” He slid his palm from around her waist and coasted it up the length of her arm and then back down again. Despite her clothes and the warm night air, Della shivered at the touch. Strong, determined fingers hooked around her own, then raised her hand in a loose grip she could easily break, yet didn’t.
The Alpha brought her hand to his lips, sliding her knuckles across them in a slow, seductive movement. Shadowy eyes locked on hers and Della’s breath caught in her throat, as if time were suspended along with all her bodily functions.
Well, not all of them.
“You can explain it all to me later,”—his low, soothing voice cascaded down her spine like a physical touch—“what you are and what you’re not. Where you’re from, where you’ve been, and how you got here, and I’m gonna listen to all of it and anything else you gotta tell me, all right?” He flipped her hand over to press a slow, humid kiss to her palm. “But I can’t have you brushing me off like some unfortunate gnat who crossed your path. That ain’t how this is gonna go.”