Runt [ManxMan]

Chapter Twenty-Two

Mason didn't like the uneasy feeling that had settled over the pack complex. He didn't often interact with most of the other wolves, especially since he'd been sick, but everyone he passed was tense, quiet, focused. He knew there had been more rogue sightings than usual, but since the botched hunting trip there had been at least one almost every day. Knowing they came from his old pack unsettled him further. He may not have many memories of the place, but most of what he did know was not pleasant.

And he knew whatever he was feeling, Chase felt it ten times worse. Mason was only three when they left, but Chase was six, old enough to shift between his two forms, and also old enough to remember much more about what they went through there than Mason did.

Mason knew he was different, smaller than the other males and most of the females he'd seen, and weaker too. His instincts screamed whenever he was in a room with a dominant wolf; sometimes even his brother made him uncomfortable and he was the weakest dominant Mason had ever encountered. He wanted to submit even when his mind knew it was a bad idea, knew it could lead to him getting hurt, his instincts urged him to do it anyway.

And he knew this was why his father and his old pack hated him, but he didn't understand why they would hate him so much for something he couldn't help. Chase and their sister—Mason so wished he remembered more about her, but those memories were faded with time, and Chase refused to speak of her—had protected him when they could, but they were only kids, there was only so much they could do. Their mother had shielded him as well, but their father... their father had hated Mason, his own flesh and blood, though he'd been nothing more than a pup.

Sometimes he wondered if Chase regretted leaving. Mason knew their lives had been hard, knew the four years they'd survived alone together in the woods had left their mark on Chase as much as they had Mason, particularly in his diminutive stature for a beta-born. Mason may have been hated by their former pack, but Chase had been loved, revered. Even as only a beta-born, he was a dominant child of the alpha. If they'd stayed, he would have been well cared for, would have grown into the strong dominant he was meant to be, may even have become a leader of the pack.

Instead, he had lost everything, and for what? His runt of a little brother who could barely protect himself from a single rogue even after thirteen years of fighting for his life alone, who was more wolf than man, who had to be babied even now as an adult and couldn't even go out into the human village for a few hours without getting deathly ill.

But with the knowledge that their old pack was knocking at their gates, Chase was the more affected of the brothers. He was withdrawn, hardly spoke to anyone—even Mason—and slept curled around his little brother. This, of course, meant he woke Mason most nights, tossing and turning and screaming from nightmares. Mason didn't mind, but it worried him. He wished the rogues would go away. His memories of that pack were vague enough not to bother him most of the time, and had gotten no worse from their proximity than they had been before. But they bothered his brother, the only family he had ever really known, and that alone was enough to make him hate them.

He woke late in the morning almost a week after the hunting trip to find his brother, for once, sleeping peacefully next to him. Mason couldn't bear to wake him, but his bladder insisted he get up, so he slipped from the hunter's grasp. His legs were unsteady, as they always were first thing in the morning, as if every day he had to remember how to balance on just the two of them after so long with four, but he used the bed frame to steady himself and limped his way toward the bathroom. His bum leg ached terribly, the last recent cold wave not helping things.

Though part of him wanted to curl back up in bed with his brother, he could already feel the muscles in his bum leg loosening from moving around, and knew allowing himself to be still for too long would tense them up again, so he chose instead to move toward the door. He hesitated there, his hand raised and inches from the doorknob.