Page 11 of Hunter Moon

“What? No! Jesus Christ, no, Lin.” I retracted my hand, but continued to glare at the flowers until Wanda swooped in to grab them.

“I’ll just return these when you two leave, shall I?” And without waiting for an answer, she was gone.

As much as I loved eating with my little brother, and as perfect and crispy as those fries were, it took both of us a long time to go back to our food. So much for hashing things out over dinner.

6

Brook

I’d called out of work. After staying out in the woods all night, I was exhausted. As nice as a nap sounded, I couldn’t get to sleep, so I pulled out my Switch and started playing a game—one of those farming simulation kind of things, where you grew stuff and shipped it out and everything was gentle and nice, and I was nothing more than a block of pixels that everyone in the virtual town thought was pretty neat.

My eyes stung, and I sank low in my seat, holding the game closer and closer to my face as my eyes got more and more tired.

Rapping on the door knocked me out of my game haze. The light in the room had changed, fading as the sun went down, and filtering gray through the window.

“Yeah?”

Mom stuck her head in and gave me that awkward smile like she was interrupting something important. She hadn’t always been like that, but something about having her son in his mid-thirties still living in the same room he’d grown up in, still doing the same shit he’d been doing as a teenager must’ve made her think I was doing important work. Or resting. Or... just that I was too damaged to bear being mildly inconvenienced.

Yup. That sounded about right.

“Alpha Grove’s here to see you,” she said softly.

Thank fuck—seriously, thankfuck—she hadn’t brought him back to my room. Something about Linden being back there, standing in my room and surveying all the evidence of my arrested development, would’ve wrecked me.

Linden and I had been in school together—same grade—and now, he was a doctor and leader of our entire pack. I had the same job I’d gotten when I could only work nights and weekends. Don’t get me wrong—I loved being a mechanic, liked fixing things and working with my hands, but Linden had, like, thoroughly adulted.

I was in the dark playing video games.

“That’s... cool.” I got up, but there wasn’t a damn thing I could do for the sweats I was wearing or the bags under my eyes without making an important guy like Linden stand out in our little living room and wait for me.

I figured Rowan had told Lin I’d come by the house, and he was here to check up on me, since Aspen clearly wasn’t going to. It was a nice gesture, and I felt absolutely pitied in the worst way. Any second, Linden was going to offer to force his brother to marry me in some kind of Victorian arranged pack obligation as a consolation prize for how completely pathetic I was.

Okay, maybe not. But a sick little part of me wished he’d at least make Aspen talk to me. That—that wasn’t too much to expect, right? One conversation, just so I could understand.

Or hear his voice.

What? I was owning my pitifulness.

But when I came out from the back of the house with Mom, it wasn’t just Linden Grove there, but Claudia too. He’d made an omega his second, and it was pretty much the best thing anybody had done for the pack since its founding. Claudia was the perfect choice—stubborn and resourceful and sharp where Linden wasn’t. He was more capable than his father gave him credit for, but everybody knew Claudia was the one with fangs.

He was holding a bouquet of flowers. Carnations. And he had the thin-lipped, placid expression of a man doing something he very much did not want to do.

Claudia smiled at me, but her lips were closed. The two of them looked weirdly formal standing in the middle of our living room—the furniture all lumpy and outdated, the walls Pepto Bismol pink.

Claud jabbed Linden with her elbow, and he huffed through his nose.

“The Reids came to see me today. Wanted to make amends. To you.” His voice was as stiff as his shoulders as he held up the flowers.

I blinked. Those words didn’t go together. “Reids” and “amends” and me? None of that added up.

Except there was one Reid who’d shown me kindness, who’d been there for me at the worst time in my life.

“Dante?” I asked, ignoring the way my voice cracked.

Linden scowled. “He said his name was Cain.”

“Oh.” I stared down, looking at the stitching of Linden’s navy sweater. One of the Hagen sisters from the B and B probably knit it for him. The stitching was beautiful and even, but the edges had a handmade look.

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