Watching the snow fall had become my favorite part of the day. It was relaxing and I liked the way that everything went quiet as the white flakes fell to the ground. I read somewhere once that the fresh snow actually makes it harder for sound to bounce around, effectively turning down the volume on the world.

I’d settled into my new home, the camp that my pack leader owned and had been fixing up for the last year or so. I was happy here and had everything I needed. Charles and Dwayne, the other alphas under Matias’s command, were both great and I got along well with the other omegas, but the trauma of my past was still haunting me.

A year and a half ago I was living in another pack under the “leadership” of a terrible alpha named Kade. He was a monster. I was a slave to him, part of a breeding pack of omegas that were there to satisfy his needs and give him children. That was it. Romance wasn’t even a word in Kade’s vocabulary.

He had a horrible apartment building as his home base, but we moved around a lot, in the back of tractor-trailer trucks, from one truck stop to the next, never knowing where we were headed or what was in store for us. We were subject to his will and his mood, which turned on a dime.

I’d already had my heat when he’d found me. I’d grown up in Connecticut, near the border of New York, but my mother and father never got along, and my father left when I was young. During my senior year of high school, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. I’d planned on going to school and getting my degree in something, but she’d died that summer.

I went numb for a while, shut myself up in the house and watched the bills pile up. With no job and no idea what I wanted to do, I felt lost. My mother had been everything to me. Without a father, she was my best friend and my only parent, and with her gone, the world no longer made sense. So I sold the house and moved to Maine.

Why Maine? It was like Connecticut, and not that far away. I’d thought about something more drastic like Florida or California, but that just seemed too far away. I got an apartment and started looking for work, and that’s when I met Kade.

He said he had a pack he was the leader of and I was welcome to come stay with him and meet the others. What he neglected to mention was that while I was free to come and visit, I wasn’t free to leave.

He took my car, my clothes, all the money I had on me, and had his men watching over me twenty-four hours a day. I thought about running away. I really did. But after Corey broke out one night, and I saw what they did to him, I put that thought right out of my mind.

Eventually I realized that I was a prisoner. I accepted my life for what it was. My future was nonexistent, a dull gray void on the road of my life that had once shone with at least a glimmer of hope. Now all that was gone. And the night that he came for me, everything changed again.

I gave him a pup. And when I say “gave,” that’s exactly what I did.

He got me pregnant – a night without passion would be the world’s biggest understatement – and my belly grew. I hated every second of it. My child was not created from love, and I knew he would never know the meaning of the word. But I was going to try as hard as I could to raise him. But Kade had other plans.

I spent one night with my baby boy. He was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. He had heterochromia like me, with one eye blue and one eye green, and a head of messy auburn curls. One night he lay in my arms, and then he was taken from me.

I screamed and howled and cried for two days, screeching until my lungs were sore and my throat was bloody, but it didn’t matter. They wouldn’t even tell me what Kade had done with him. My son was gone and I would never see him again.

For some reason, as I stared out the window at the snow, the night I held my little miracle in my arms was all I could see. He was a miracle. How could something so innocent and beautiful come from such a nightmare conception?

I still wondered sometimes if he’d ever come back to me, but I knew it was impossible. Even if I wanted to go looking for him, I had nowhere to start my search. I had no idea what Kade had done with him, and he was gone now, dead and buried, unable to answer any of my questions.

Before the revolt, Matias had been part of Kade’s pack. He was the second in command, head of security, and even he didn’t know anything about what Kade did with the omegas' babies. I had nothing to go on, and I was slowly coming to grips with the fact that my son was gone.

I heard a knock at my cabin door, and without looking, already knew who it was.

“Just a second, Tyler,” I said, just loudly enough that he could hear it.

Tyler was a gorgeous alpha who wasn’t technically a member of our pack, but had been hanging around a lot lately. He was friends with Chase, Matias’s new mate, and we’d met this summer when there was a lot of drama going on between them.

At first, he’d just come by occasionally to visit Chase and see how he was doing. But slowly, his reasons for visiting started to be more and more vague, and I could tell by the way he was looking at me what his true intentions were.

Tyler was gorgeous, there was no denying that. He was like a total magazine model, with perfect blond hair that parted flawlessly to one side, sea-green eyes that were strong and intense, but held a sensitive, vulnerable side behind them that you really had to look for to notice.

I knew he liked me, but…I just wasn’t ready for anything. Between the horrors of living with Kade and my little boy being stolen from me, my emotional wounds were too deep and the scars had yet to heal over. Getting into a relationship with someone seemed impossible.

But Tyler was making it pretty hard to resist.

He was charming, funny and confident, and he smelled like a dream. His scent, a mixture of pine and eggnog, was hard to resist and always got me going whenever it hit my nose. For that reason, I had been doing my best to avoid seeing him. He was chipping away at my walls, slowly but surely, and I was doing my best to repair them, but if he kept this up, I wasn’t sure how much longer I could hold out.

“Hey, open up, Nate!” he called out, a boyish laugh behind his voice. “I've got something for you!”

Wrapping my wool cardigan around my warms to shelter myself from the cold air, I stepped across the hardwood floor of my cabin, turned the deadbolt and opened the door.

“Tyler, what is wrong with you?” I asked him with a smile. “Don’t you know it’s snowing outside?”

“Eh, what’s a little snow gonna do to me?” he grinned, shrugging it off. “I’m so hot I’d melt through a blizzard. Am I right?”

There was no hope in suppressing the smile that came over my lips. Tyler knew, as many wise men knew, that laughter was a direct line to someone’s heart, and he was making a beeline for mine.

“No comment,” I said softly, lowering my gaze from his piercing green eyes. They scared the shit out of me. He was beautiful and his stare was hypnotic, almost challenging as he smiled at me. And I couldn’t handle it.

“Yeah, you know it,” he snickered, pulling a long, white, cardboard box from behind his back. “Check this out. I brought you something.”

“You’re too sweet,” I said, with a slightly mocking tone to my voice, but he was – he really was. He handed it to me and I saw it was tied with a double row of red ribbon. I tugged one end and it fell aside. Pulling the tab, I opened the box to reveal a half a dozen fresh—

“Roses!” he bellowed, almost causing me to jump. Surprised, I looked up at him with a smile on my face. “Red and white. Do you like ‘em?”

“It’s – it’s very nice, Tyler,” I said sweetly, closing the box. Another crack had formed in my wall, but I didn’t want him to see it. “You really shouldn’t have.”

“I was down in Portsmouth at this fancy whole foods store, and I saw them, and I just thought of you,” he grinned as the snow fell down and melted on his shoulders. He wasn’t even wearing a jacket, just a baby blue polo shirt and a pair of tan khakis.

“I only get half a dozen?” I teased him.

“You get the other half when you let me take you on a date,” he countered. He’d clearly had that one ready. I twisted my lips as I looked at him, feeling the undeniable butterflies swarming in my stomach.

He is gorgeous, I thought. And he smells…perfect…

But I couldn’t do it.

“I’ll think about it, Tyler,” I said, putting my hand on the doorknob.

“Hey, that’s all I ask,” he said, putting his hands up. “Just think about it. I’ll be back.”

I hadn’t meant to, but I’d hurt his feelings, and I felt bad. As he turned around to leave, my guilt took over and I knew I owed him better than what I’d just given him.

“Tyler, wait,” I said quickly. He turned, and I saw the excitement in his eyes.

“I – I like you,” I told him softly. “But – I’m…I’m just not…there are some things that happened in my life that I haven’t dealt with just yet.”

“Your son?” Tyler asked. Boy, word sure traveled fast in the camp. I nodded slowly as he came back over.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “That must be incredibly hard and I understand why you’d be hurting. I just…I really like you. You’re sweet, you’re caring and you’re hot as Hell!”

Choking back tears, I snorted a laugh and wiped my nose with my sleeve. Tyler took my hands in his and lifted my chin to his eyes.

“I’m willing to wait for you,” he said. “Whenever you’re ready. I’m not going anywhere.”

Before I could answer, Tyler kissed me on the cheek. His lips were warm and his touch hit me like a bolt of lightning thrown at full-force by Thor if he was standing two feet away.

Tyler turned and quickly walked away from me, clearly not giving me a chance to screw up the moment. I watched him go, admiring just how good he looked from the back.

I won’t be like this forever, I thought as he began to vanish into the snow. I promise.