Page 2 of Hunter Moon

Fine, so Brook wasn’t my mate, technically. Hell, by now he might be someone else’s mate. Birch had never mentioned Brook in his letters to me, probably all too aware how awful it would be for me to hear about him moving on in my absence. After all, I’d left him behind in Grovetown when I had gone to join the navy.

But I’d had to leave. Had to get away from Dad and the ridiculous expectation that I, one of the biggest hot-heads in the pack, should be its leader.

I hadn’t been able to make myself into the leader my pack had needed, so I’d done the one thing I could do, and made myself scarce.

As reasonable as it had been, my running away, dragging Brook off with me hadn’t been the right thing to do. He’d been trying to help raise his younger sisters, doing an apprenticeship at the garage, and... well, he hadn’t needed to go.

So I hadn’t been able to ask him to abandon everything and everyone he loved, to give up his pack, just for me. Me, the guy who was running away from the looming shadow of responsibility he couldn’t handle. Why should Brook have to give up anything for that?

But now Brook had been hurt, and my father was dead. I’d left my pack to try to protect them from bad leadership, and instead, left them vulnerable to actual attack.

I sat down hard, the cheap springs of my mattress squeaking their protest as I stared at Birch’s words.

Your father is gone.

Trust Birch to say it so gently, but also, without any artifice. No poetry, no platitudes, just facts.

Dad was dead, and just like it did every day, my heart howled for pack.

2

Brook

Iwas running out of video games to distract me from the awkward silence in my mother’s house. Everyone moved around carefully, waiting for me to fall apart or bare my soul or even mention what’d happened to me. They were being gentle, and I couldn’t stand it.

Truth was, I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want them to know. Wasn’t there proof enough in how I moved through the world now, jumpier and hesitant to touch anyone, even my sisters?

The scar on my shoulder, where Maxim Reid had viciously sunk his fangs into my flesh while from behind he’d—

Just—there wasn’t enough physical evidence? Now they expected me to talk about how that’d broken me. It was supposed to be cathartic. Colt and Linden kept bringing up the idea of therapy, a therapist who specialized in working with omegas who’d been—

I didn’t have it in me, okay? So instead of hiding out in my room, I’d gone back to work. I should have known that’d be every bit as uncomfortable.

The guys at the garage had been generous giving me time off after what’d happened. They’d kept my job for me, hadn’t pushed me to come back even when I knew they were busy and could’ve used the extra set of hands. I figured it was because I worked with a bunch of alphas, and alphas were dramatic.

Sure, people liked to say omegas were more volatile, more emotional, but everyone knew that was bullshit. We didn’t lose our entire minds when things got a little hard. We didn’t hurt people just because we felt a lack of something we falsely believed we were owed. And we didn’t take it personally every time someone around us got hurt.

Almost every alpha I’d interacted with since Colt had led me out of the woods and Linden had driven me back to Grovetown had taken some degree of responsibility for what’d happened. They meant well, but all of that hurt? It belonged to me, and I was getting sick of hearing all the ways the Grove pack alphas were going to do better next time—they’d keep a better eye on me, wouldn’t leave me alone to walk home after work by myself. If they were stronger, more attentive, more present, they could keep me safe.

But it was too late for safe, and orbiting around me wasn’t fixing anything. No matter how good their intentions were, they weren’t trying to make me feel better. They were trying to alleviate their own guilt, convince themselves they had some control over what happened in our pack, that they could stop bad things from happening if they were perfect all the time.

It wasn’t even guilt I wanted them to carry. There wasn’t a single member of the Grove pack I blamed for what’d happened, except maybe me.

Because I hadn’t been attentive enough either. I’d been taken by a rival pack, and Alpha Grove had died trying to get me back.

Easier to shoulder the blame for that myself than to try and put it off on anyone else, and with everyone around me buzzing about how sorry they were, the weight needed to go somewhere.

So while Joseph Rees leaned back against a workbench, his arms crossed over his chest, I couldn’t help wishing him gone.

“You about done?” he asked me.

His white T-shirt was stained, his jeans lighter on the knees and ass from sliding across the floor. The alphas at Grovetown Tire and Repair had taken to lingering about after work, even when they were done for the day, just to make sure I wasn’t left alone again.

I slipped the strut out and guided the hood of the car I was working on slowly into place. “Just about.”

While I went for a rag to wipe grime off my hands, Joseph’s attention wandered out the open garage bay.

“Ho-lee shit.” He whistled low, and when I looked out into the chilly evening air, I saw people had gathered near The Cider House, taking up the middle of the street that ran through the center of town with no thought to traffic. Whatever was going on, it wasn’t the kind of thing a person could just drive past.

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