Omega Hunted by Linsey Moon

12

Once she hada moment to think, she breathed in, searching for the lemon-pepper scent of Corinne, but wherever she'd gone she wasn't close enough for Savannah to spot.

Maybe if she were a more experienced tracker. She didn't know if she even wanted to find the other omega. She understood why Corinne had done it, she couldn't even really hold it against her. But she had hoped... She didn't know what she'd been hoping for. That she'd made a real friend for the first time, maybe?

She walked on, just trying to find a good place to hide and rest for a few hours. She was spent. If she didn't find a good spot soon she was just going to collapse. She definitely wasn't going to be able to run if another alpha came after her.

She was so tired she almost thought she was imagining the yelling when she heard it. It took a few seconds for her to process that she was hearing words, furious muttering in a language she wasn't familiar with interspersed with occasional exclamations of what sounded like pain and frustration.

She followed the sound, curious and slightly worried. What if someone was hurt?

She found the source a few minutes later. A man hung upside down from a large tree, his ankle caught in a snare, which he was struggling and failing to remove. He'd managed to bend himself up to reach it, but couldn't get it loose when his own weight was just pulling it tighter. There was a quiet alarm going off, just a steady beeping, enough to alert any alphas in the area that someone was caught, if the bitter swearing didn't draw them first.

"Do you need help?" Savannah called out without thinking. She realized it was stupid a second later, but by then he'd already twisted to try and see her, which sent him spinning in a slow circle. He was a slim, athletic man in the same black athletic wear as the other alphas. He had skin the color of dark caramel and warm brown eyes and a dazzling smile which covered his face the moment he saw her.

"Ah, thank you, beautiful!" he said with forced cheerfulness. "Please don't trouble yourself! I'll be down in just a moment, so you had better run along. Unless you would like to wait there for me, which, in all honesty, I would not object to."

Savannah frowned, looking at the foot caught in the snare. Judging by the color, he'd been here a while.

"How long have you been up there?" she asked, and his smile turned a bit pained.

"An hour or so," he admitted. "I'll be fine. I have gotten out of worse situations than this one. I will tell you some time of the night I went home with this stunning alpha girl only to discover her father and *many* brothers were both extremely protective and highly armed. I climbed up a fireplace to escape and was wedged in there for quite some time before I managed to dislocate my shoulder and-"

"Shouldn't security or someone have come by to help you by now?" Savannah interrupted, growing increasingly worried.

"I'm sure security will be along eventually," he said reassuringly. "They don't exactly have cameras out here and there's only so much a gps tracker can tell you. A few alphas have passed by but, ah, I assured them of my ability to free myself and they went on their way."

Savannah looked at the man, looked at his slowly purpling foot and increasingly red face, and looked towards the trees where she should be running, glad at least one more alpha was out of the running. She sighed.

"I'm going to get you down," she said, coming closer and beginning to search around the bottom of the tree for the other end of the snare.

"Really, you don't need to bother," the man insisted. "I promise I have this completely under control."

"Obviously," Savannah said, not bothering to hide her sarcasm.

"Sincerely, I can handle this!"

"Maybe you can, but I'm not comfortable leaving anyone in this kind of position," Savannah countered, tracing the snare where it came down from over the tree branch from which the man was hanging, following it back to the snare's mechanism hidden in the leaves below. "So my apologies to your alpha pride, but I have to do this for my own peace of mind, okay?"

"You're an angel," the man said, and Savannah thought he even meant it.

"Brace yourself," she said as she figured out how the trap worked and prepared to release it. "I'm going to try and let you down now."

She released the catch and grabbed the rope, hauling back on it to try and slow his descent. She wasn't terribly successful and he hit the ground with a thump.

"Sorry," she said, breathless, hurrying over to him. "Are you okay?"

He rolled over with a groan as she leaned over him, and smiled up at her beatifically, his curly dark hair in his eyes.

"Never been better."

"Can you walk?"

She helped him to his feet, and as soon as she got close enough to him, she recognized his scent with a flush of embarrassment. She almost dropped him in surprise, but he caught himself, stumbling a bit.

"Realized who I am, did you?" he said with a chuckle. "I knew you immediately of course, but then you weren't wearing a mask when we last met. Or much of anything else."

Savannah turned red. "Your Highness," she muttered.

"Please, Kasim is more than fine," he insisted.

Savannah stepped back, keeping her hands braced on Kasim’s arms but trying to put as much distance between them as possible before his scent could overwhelm her. “Do you think you can walk on your own.”

“Of course,” Kasim flashed his smile again, and that combined with his scent which was too thick with their nearness almost made Savannah forget that he was hurt and it wasn’t the time to let her omega instincts take over.

Kasim straightened his shoulders and Savannah lowered her hands from his arms, leaving him to hold all of his weight up on his own. It only took a matter of seconds for his brow to furrow under the curls that had fallen into his eyes during his struggle, but he still forced a smile at her. Until he put weight on his injured foot.

His knee buckled and Savannah lurched forward to catch him before he fell to the ground, his face screwed up into a grimace. She stumbled trying to catch him, and had to right herself under his arm before they both wound up falling and hurt.

“You know, it’s not a bad thing to ask for help when you’re hurt,” she scolded him, nearly out of breath from the struggle to keep them both upright.

Kasim laughed. “You really have been sheltered from alphas before now, haven’t you.”

“I only met one alpha before tonight and he did a good job of hiding it from me.”

“Well, something must have been wrong with him.” Kasim leaned his face down close to hers. “If I’d met you before tonight, you wouldn’t have wound up here because I would have claimed you before giving anyone else the chance.”

Savannah flushed, heat running through her veins. She needed to distract herself. The last thing she needed to happen in that moment was to start perfuming again. Hurt foot or not, she had no doubt that Kasim would react and any chance of her leaving without being claimed would have been lost.

“We need to get you out of here so you can get off that foot before you hurt it worse,” she said, and she adjusted his arm over her shoulders so she could get a better grip on him.

“It’s a long walk back to the main house,” he said.

He was right, and Savannah wasn’t sure she could get him there. They had to look funny with her trying to use her much smaller body to hold him up.

“Then we better get going,” she said, refusing to admit defeat in front of him.

The sound of tree branches snapping distracted her and she looked on to see the leaves in a set of thick trees to their left rustled. Her heart raced in her head, drawing out all rational thought. What if it was another alpha?

They weren’t supposed to be hunting the omegas right now, but if one of them found her and decided to screw the rules and claim her, it wouldn’t matter that the hunt was supposed to be on hold. She would still be claimed either way.

Biting her lip, Savannah looked from the rustling trees up to Kasim and considered leaving him to fend for himself. She didn’t owe anything to him.

Before she could think it threw, the trees part and Nick Faulkner came running through the brush. He froze, his nostrils flaring and chest heaving, the moment he stepped into the clearing where she stood with Kasim. Nick’s eyes landed right on Savannah’s and she could see the battle he was fighting within himself.

The muscles of his arms were taut like he was using every shred of restraint he possessed to hold himself back. However, the way he was inching towards her made it clear he wasn’t entirely set on keeping away from her.

Running would probably be in her best interest. She could try to shove Kasim in Nick’s path and let them fight it out and hopefully their jealousy, both of them fighting to be the first to chase her, would give her just enough of a head start to get away. How did she keep winding up between these two?

Nick looked like he was standing at the ready, prepared to chase her the moment she decided to take off. Kasim moved beside her and she heard him suck in a pained breath. He must have tried putting more weight on his foot again. Probably some ridiculous alpha attempt to not look weak in front of Nick.

With her attention back on Kasim, she decided to take a chance. She squared her shoulders as much as possible with Kasim’s arm over them, and met Nick’s dark eyes head on. “Are you going to help me with him or not?”

Nick’s eyes widened, then he blinked and looked back and forth between her and Kasim. The rigidness that had been in his body dissipated as he looked down and seemed to notice Kasim’s injury for the first time. He rushed over and grabbed Kasim’s other arm, and pulled it around his shoulder and took most of Kasim’s weight off of Savannah.

She wanted to sigh in relief, but she wasn’t about to show any weakness willingly in front of these two alphas. She’d already shown both of them plenty. Besides, there was still one problem.

“How are we going to get him back to the house?” said.

“I’ll walk if you two will let me go,” Kasim said.

Savannah rolled her eyes and Nick just ignored him.

“There are cabins spread throughout these woods,” Nick said. “I passed one not far from here that nobody had claimed. We can take him there.”

Savannah doesn’t move when Nick and Kasim start to take a step forward and they both looked back at her.

“I heard those were traps,” she said.

Kasim smiled. “Worried about me, love?”

“No. I’m worried about me.”

“None of us can pursue you during the daytime,” Nick said. “The cabin is the closest and best option for getting him off his feet so he can start to heal.”

“Just because there is some silly rule saying you can’t pursue me during the day, doesn’t mean going to a secluded cabin with the two of you is smart on my part. It will eventually be night again, and then I’ll be an easy target right there for either of you to claim.”

“Do you have a better idea?” Nick asked. “It’s either leave him here, take him to a cabin, or see how well that foot of his will hold up going all the way out to the main house. I’m betting it won’t be good, but it’s no sweat off my back either way.”

He was right. If any other alpha had come through those trees and found me trying to hold up an injured Kasim, they wouldn’t have thought twice about knocking him out of the way and claiming me. Daylight be damned. They definitely wouldn’t have offered to help take him somewhere to heal.

“What if we agree to a truce?” she said. Nick and Kasim both looked at her with a cocked brow.

“We’re listening,” Kasim said.

“Even if we get to the cabin, that’s only a temporary fix. We need to get you back to the main house. I propose a temporary truce until we get you to the main house so you can get your foot looked after.” Her eyes met Nick’s. “A truce between all three of us. I will help you get Kasim to the main house, and neither of you will claim me or hunt me until after he is made it safely back.”

“This plan sounds like it favors Kasim more than me,” Nick said.

“The other option is I leave now, and you’re both on your own. You can’t chase me since you’re not allowed to pursue me in the daytime.”

“I’ll take that truce,” Kasim said.

Nick stared at her hard for several long seconds that felt like they drew on forever before he finally said. “Fine, but it’s just temporary. As soon as we get him to the house to be cared for, I’m coming to make you mine.”

“I wouldn’t have expected anything else,” Savannah agreed.