Page 12 of Black Moon

“I’m good,” she practically whispered. When she looked my way again, she tilted her head. “You really want a cider?”

After spending the whole day drinking vodka tonics? I wasn’t sure it was an incredible plan to mix alcohols.

“Maybe next time. But I will have another drink, if you don’t mind.”

“Absolutely.”

The alpha at her side took a second to frown at me, but she seemed satisfied enough with my manners that she turned and started unloading the dish sanitizer behind the bar.

Shiloh prepared me another vodka tonic with lime while I looked around.

All day, people had filtered in from elsewhere. Skip and I had gotten there for a late lunch, but now, it seemed like the whole pack had descended on the place. Everyone wore a thin-lipped, sad expression. Most were wearing some shade of black, gray, or dark navy.

Skip had said the pack alpha had died recently, but until that moment, I hadn’t realized he meantthisrecently.

“Thanks,” I said when she slid the glass across the bar to me. I took it back to the booth I’d shared with Skip all afternoon. Another wolf—a beta, I thought—had slipped into his bench and was picking at a basket of deep-fried tater tots Skip had ordered earlier.

“Colt,” Skip said, looking up at me from the corner of his eyes as I reached the edge of the table. “This is Jack McKesson. Jack, Colt Doherty. He’s come in from DC to learn about our pack.”

“Pleasure.” Jack gave me a good-old-country-boy nod, that short kind that was half polite and half dismissal.

“Likewise.” I sank into the booth and set my glass on the worn wooden tabletop between us. “The funeral was today?” I asked Skip before he could turn back to his discussion with Jack.

“Oh, yeah. I didn’t mention that?” He took a slow sip of what looked like an IPA, and he didn’t meet my eyes.

As I dragged my lime wedge all the way around the rim of my glass, I smiled at him. “You know what? I don’t think you did.”

I picked up the slice and squeezed it into my drink, dropping the rind into the cup. When I took a sip, the vodka hit my tongue, cold as ice, but by the time it was in my stomach, it was burning in that familiar, comforting way.

Jack’s grin turned brittle as he took a sip of his drink. He shared a look with Skip. “Thing’s’ve just been moving so fast around here lately. Hard to keep up with all the changes,” he said.

“Oh, I’m sure.”

Jack clearly wasn’t all that worried about my opinion, because he leaned into Skip with his arm across the back of the bench. “You think Grove’s gonna cause problems?”

Skip raised an eyebrow over at the group gathered at the center table. The older guy who’d called Linden over burst into laughter, smiling and red-cheeked. A couple people looked to have red-rimmed eyes still, but they were smiling at the story.

I was starting to think Skip’s reasons for wanting to stake out a table here tonight weren’t as innocent as they’d seemed at first.

“Nah. Linden’s no real alpha. Unless they get Aspen back—”

Aspen, that was the alpha’s name. But it wasn’t all that uncommon for big strong alphas to pass on their big strong alpha names to their sons. Maybe that was the one Shiloh said had run off.

I finished my vodka tonic in a couple quick gulps. “I think I need the restroom,” I said passingly to my companions.

Absolutely no part of me wanted to get embroiled in pack politics. I was no politician, and I’d never wanted that life. That path belonged to my father, to Chase, and to Cait.

My job was to tell the truth and, satisfyingly, to keep them in line. It’d been a point of pride that my father watched what he said around me in case I published anything that might make him look bad.

I didactuallygo to the bathroom, mostly to wash the lime juice off my fingertips and catch my breath. What I’d thought was going to be a relatively simple piece about the values of a country life for the health of an average omega seemed more complicated than I’d been prepared for.

But whatever. I could handle this. If there was a power vacuum, if Linden Grove and Skip Chadwick were going to shift and bare their fangs at each other in the middle of Main Street like some kind of wild west cliché, fine.

None of that meant I had to get involved.

When I came out, I figured it was time for me to head to the motel. I hadn’t checked in yet, and Grovetown being as far out in the middle of nowhere as it was, I was a little worried about getting there after the office closed up for the night. I hadn’t sent an email or anything to let them know I was coming.

I wandered from the back hall over to the crowd gathered around that old alpha and Linden, he of the hand sanitizer.

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