One Omega

Epilogue

---Marcus' POV---

The air was thick with emotions as I watched Quinton grow more and more desperate as time passed by. Its been months since we lost his pup by the river side, and our trackers had a hard time finding a trace of him.

Usually it would've been easy to pinpoint a shifter's scent and follow it but somehow, Quinton's last pup had a slightly different scent. 

He smelled pure wolf.

And the truth behind that fact was unnerving. We don't know what happened to him, but whatever the pup has been through, caused its wolf to be in the lead instead of the human.

Looking over, I sighed and shook my head as Quinton was pacing yet again, muttering to himself. A sudden thought made me frown and I walked over to speak my mind.

"Say, whenever you mention your missing son, you've never spoken about a name. Why's that?" Quinton looked up at my approach, pausing for a moment as if he was stunned by my question. "We... we've never gone through the bonding. Audrey did deliver them but she never got to approach the pups in human form."

My breath left in a shocked exhale. No bonding... no wonder the pup's scent was off.

The bonding was a ritual based on instinct. In the earliest days of our race, pups wouldn't receive a name until they reached a certain age, for fear that they might not survive their first months on this world.

The custom has changed over the centuries and now the bonding was just as the name implied. A bond, a deep connection between a pup and its parents, its pack and later its mate. During the bonding, the parents gave the pup its name and it would respond to that.

But there was one catch; the name would only stick if the inner wolf trusted its carer, its pack.

"If you guys haven't gone through the bonding... that means..."

"Zayne never received his name from us. I guess at some point there must've been someone he was able to trust in that pack, someone who had connected to his wolf as pack. And whoever they were, they have given Zayne his name."

I nodded to myself, frowning curiously. Someone Zayne could trust...that didn't leave me with a lot of people to begin with. The whole pack was despicable, save for a few people.

My chain of thought was broken when I felt something crash into my leg, followed moments later by a loud yip and the scrambling off claws. When I glanced down, I just managed to spot Koda's soaking wet tail flashing through the air as he was being chased by Sebastian.

"Koda, you get back here before you drench the whole house! Do you hear me, you rascal!" Sebastian's threat didn't work when he proceeded to step into a puddle of water and nearly did a split before he straightened himself up.

His pup on the other hand didn't seem to care, running around in circles and shaking himself off at random intervals, only to drop down in mock surrender. When Sebastian got close enough, Koda dashed away, slipping between our legs and bumping into Quinton with a happy yip.

After a lot of scrambling and Sebastian retorting to calling for his mate, Wyatt managed to throw a handtowl on Koda, making the pup trip before his fathers caught him.

"Damn, trying to bathe you is like dipping a cat in water. Speaking of bathing, you still reek pup. Off we go." Koda whined plaintively as Wyatt stood up with the pup firmly bundled in his arms but it seemed there was no escaping the towel and its father's firm hands this time.

I chuckled at the disgruntled look of the pup before looking around, laughing out loud. Quinton joined me as he noticed the watermarks all over the floor, furniture knocked out of place and skid marks from shoes marking the floor.