Page 1 of Hunter Moon

Prologue

Aspen,

It feels surreal to even be writing this, and it’s going to be shitty for you to learn it in a letter, but you’re the asshole who refuses to give me a phone number. So. Get yourself alone, unless you’ve found someone you actually trust out there. Sit down. Maybe find a bottle of something strong.

Your father is gone.

The Reids lost the last of their omegas last year, and they’ve been getting increasingly feral. Last month they kidnapped Brook, and when your father went to get him back, Maxim Reid killed him. I’m sorry to have to tell you about it at all, but you needed to know what happened, and no one in the pack has been able to get ahold of you. It’s been a disaster around here, but we’re doing better now. Brook is home safe, and your little brother has been voted in as pack alpha. (yes, Linden, not Rowan)

We still miss you. Don’t get me wrong, we’re all pissed at you too, including me, but it would be good to see your ugly mug again.

Plus you still owe me ten bucks.

Your not-quite-brother always,

Birch Wilson

1

Aspen

The envelope was part of a huge pile of flyers and advertisements and credit card offers in my mailbox when I got back from deployment, and it was postmarked only a week earlier.

Birch was my childhood best friend, and the only person in the pack I’d given my address to. Probably the only person in the pack who wanted to have it, after the way I’d left.

He wrote me long, detailed letters a few times a year, letting me know how everyone was doing and what was happening back home, but it had been apparent right away that this wasn’t like that. It wasn’t ten or fifteen folded pages of paper, but a slim single sheet, and something about it felt wrong.

So I’d dumped everything else in the recycle bin and headed to my quarters, marching down the sterile halls that smelled of nothing but antiseptic cleaning supplies, waving off the few people I passed along the way. I wasn’t close to anyone except my team, and after a long deployment, we were all too happy to see the backs of each other for a while.

I didn’t open the letter until I was alone in my pitifully empty, impersonal BOQ rooms, door locked firmly behind me. Bad enough that I had to read about Grovetown on base at all, but having all the other single, lonely guys around when I did it was like letting them see into my soul.

I trusted my team with my life, sure, and I even liked the guys most days. But it wasn’t some Band of Brothers bullshit. They weren’t my family. My pack. I’d had that, and I’d left it behind when I’d joined the navy, and nothing else would ever be able to compare.

Leaving Grovetown, and the pack, and Brook, was the hardest thing I ever did in my life. Harder than any school test, or BUD/S training, or hell, even harder than Mom’s death. Because losing her was awful, but I’d had my pack to get me through it.

Packs are good like that. I honestly don’t know how humans live without them.

I left the pack, and my home, almost ten years ago, and being without them never got easier. I never stopped wanting to be back home. If anything, the opposite was true. It was like there was a bubble of pressure in my chest, pushing constantly against my heart, reminding me of the void where my pack should be. Where I should be teasing Lin and trading jabs with Junie and helping Rowan with his homework.

And kissing Brook.

There was a lot of kissing Brook in that empty space in my chest.

With Birch’s letter, it was as though the bubble popped. Not like the need for home was gone. Like it had exploded inside me, and instead of a niggling push, it was every single part of me that needed to be home, in Grovetown, protecting my family. My mate.

Brook had been kidnapped. My father was dead.

Yeah, I was probably a bad son for thinking of Brook first. But there was nothing I could do for Dad anymore. Our relationship had been contentious on the best of days—we were too alike for anyone’s good, most of all the pack’s.

That was why I’d left, after all. Dad was a great alpha for the twentieth century. But as much as he’d been willing and able to ignore it, we weren’t in the twentieth century anymore. Society had changed, and stodgy old men unwilling to or incapable of change weren’t going to lead us into a brighter, more peaceful future.

Sure as shit a guy whose bread and butter for the last decade had been violence wasn’t the right man to lead a pack. I’d never been right for the job, but the last ten years had only made that even more apparent.

On the other hand, a guy like that was perfect to track down and destroy Maxim Reid.

A guy like me.

Anyone who had ever laid a finger on my mate was going to learn why that was a mistake.

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