Alpha Omega 03 - Fair Game

didn’t say anything.
    Anna knew that when she played on her cello, her face was peaceful and distant—a product of much coaching from an early teacher whotold her that biting her lip and grimacing was a dead giveaway to any judge that she was having trouble. Her features weren’t regular enough for true beauty, but she wasn’t ugly, either, and today she’d used some makeup tricks that softened her freckles and emphasized her eyes.
    She glanced at him briefly. His Salish heritage gave him lovely dark skin and exotic (to her) features, his father’s Welsh blood apparent only in subtle ways: the shape of his mouth, the angle of his chin. It was his job, not his lineage, that froze his features into an unemotional mask and left his eyes cold and hard. His duties had eaten away at him until he was nothing but muscle, bone, and tension.
    Anna’s fingers touched the strings and rocked, softening the cello’s song with a vibrato on the longer notes. She’d begun with a bit of
Pachelbel’s Canon in D
, which she generally used as a warm-up or when she wasn’t sure what she wanted to play. She considered moving to something more challenging, but she was too distracted by Charles. Besides, she wasn’t trying to impress him, but to seduce him into letting her help. So, Anna needed a song that she could play while thinking of Charles.
    If she couldn’t get Bran to quit sending her mate out to kill, maybe she could get Charles to let her help with the aftermath. It might buy him a little time until she could find the right baseball bat—or rolling pin—to beat some clarity into his father’s head.
    She deserted Pachelbel for an improvised bridge that shifted the key from D to G and then let her music flow into the prelude of Bach’s
Cello Suite No. 1
. Not that that music was easy, but it had been her high school concert piece so she could practically play it in her sleep.
    Her fingers moving, she didn’t allow herself to look at him again, no matter how hungry she was for the sight of him. She stared at an oil painting of a sleeping bobcat while Charles stood at the door and watched her. If she could get him to approach her, to quit trying to protect her from his job…
    And then she screwed up.
    She was an Omega wolf. That meant that not only was she the only person on the continent whose wolf would allow her to face down the Marrok when he was in a rage, but also that she had a magical talent for soothing wolfish tempers regardless of whether or not they wanted to be soothed. It felt wrong to impose her will on others, and she tried not to do it unless the need was dire. Over the past couple of years, Anna had learned when and how to best use her ability. But her need to see Charles happy slipped over the barrier of her hard-won control as if it wasn’t there at all.
    One moment she was playing to him with her whole self, focused solely on him—and the next her wolf reached out and calmed Charles’s wolf, sent him to sleep, leaving only his human half behind…Charles turned and walked purposefully away from her without a word. He, who ran from nothing and no one, exited their house by the back door.
    Anna set down her bow and returned her cello to its stand. He wouldn’t come back for hours now, maybe not even for a couple of days. Music hadn’t worked if the only thing holding Charles in its spell was his wolf.
    She left the house, too. The need to do something was so strong it had her moving without a real destination. It was that or cry, and she refused to cry. Maybe she could go to Bran one more time. But when the turnoff for his house appeared, she drove past it.
    Like as not Charles was headed to Bran’s to tell his father what he’d done for the wolves of the world—and it would be…awkward to follow him, as if she were chasing him. Besides, she’d already talked to Bran. He knew what was happening to his son; she knew he did. But, like Charles, he weighed the lives of all of their kind against the possibility that Charles would break under the strain of what was necessary, and thought the risk acceptable.
    So Anna drove through town, arriving at a large greenhouse in thewoods on the other side. She pulled over and parked next to a battered Willys Jeep and went in search of help.
    A lot of wolves called him the Moor—which he disliked, saying that it was a vampire kind of thing to do, take a part of who a person was and reduce him to it with a capital letter or two. His features and skin