Alpha Omega 02 - Hunting Ground

ratcheted down a full notch.
    Charles turned, his eyes pure blinding gold—and growled. At her.
    Leaving Anna standing alone in a room filled with dominant wolves and violence. The smells of it were so familiar that her body flashed with phantom pains, and it hurt to breathe.
    She fled through the door she’d been holding closed, fled before her blind terror became the tinder that caused an orgy of violence. She’d seen that happen, too, though never in such a public place.
    The Frenchman said something rude as the door swung shut behind her, but she wasn’t paying attention. Panic, raw and ugly, made it hard to breathe as her conditioning tried to overwhelm her common sense.
    She needed to find something else to focus on. So she looked around.
    The patrons in the main restaurant were still unnaturally quiet—and there were a lot fewer of them than there had been when she and Charles first came into the restaurant. Most of them were looking down, an involuntary reaction to so many Alphas, she thought. Even the humans could feel it, though hopefully they didn’t know what it was that made them so uneasy.
    Even though they were all in the next room, there was a weight to their presence, just like there was a weight to the Puget Sound. While Charles had been at her side, she’d been able to push it away—but now it ate at her. The sound of her heart beat loudly in her ears.
    But the wolves were on the other side of the door—and Charles wouldn’t let them touch her.
    She paused in front of the outside door.
    She could go back to their hotel room and wait. The city at night held no terrors for her—all the bad guys were here. But that would be cowardly. And Charles would get the wrong idea.
    Away from the drama and the first impulse to flee attack, she figured out the reason he’d growled at her: he needed to stop her. He couldn’t afford to let her quiet Brother Wolf.
    Charles might be naturally more dominant—but he was the only wolf in the room who was not an Alpha of a pack. She knew that there were less dominant wolves coming to the conference, but none of them were here.
    So many Alphas put Charles in a bad position. They had to fear him, they had to know that he would kill them if they moved against him—or they would smell weakness and attack him together, like a pack of wolves taking down a caribou. She’d been taking away his edge.
    There was a battered piano on a small stage in the corner of the room that beckoned to her like an oasis in the desert. She could wait if she found something to think about other than old memories of pain and humiliation. Anna caught the eye of a passing waitress.
    â€œDo you mind if I play?”
    The waitress, looking a little stressed, paused midstride and shrugged. “It’s fine, but if you don’t play well, the cook may come out and ask you to stop. He makes a big production of it. Or the crowd will boo you off. It’s kinda tradition.”
    â€œThanks.”
    The waitress looked around the room. “Play a happy tune, if you can. Someone needs to liven up this place.”
    The piano was an ancient upright that had been old a long time ago. Someone had painted it black, but the paint had faded to a dull gray, scuffed on the corners and sprinkled with initials carved into it. Most of the edges of the ivory keys were broken, and the highest E key popped up an eighth of an inch higher than the rest.
    Something happy.
    She played the theme from Sesame Street . The piano had a much better tone than it looked as though it should—and it was mostly in tune. She segued into “Maple Leaf Rag,” one of two ragtime pieces that every second-year piano student learned. The piano wasn’t her instrument, but after six years of lessons, she was moderately competent.
    The lively feel and fairly easy music lines of the piece made it tempting to play too fast. “Ragtime is not fast” was a favorite rant of one of her teachers. She disciplined her fingers to keep a steady beat. It helped that she was a little out of practice.
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    CHARLES watched Anna walk out and knew he’d sent their relationship back to the beginning. But if he hadn’t stopped her, it would have been disastrous. He couldn’t afford to let himself be distracted. Not by his Omega, and not by the real possibility that he’d destroyed something between them.
    Most mates would be angry at being