Page 26 of Hunter Moon

Harmony had been a kid. Mom had been suffering bouts of depression since before Dad died, and they’d only gotten worse. I couldn’t move to a naval base, conveniently waiting for whatever Aspen could give me when he wasn’t on active duty.

Hands shoved in the pockets of my jacket, I shrugged. “I wouldn’t have come.”

“I know,” he said, not missing a beat. “But I should have asked anyway.”

I hummed, not sure what to say. He could have asked, but that would’ve made things harder for me. Still, at least I would’ve known that I’d been weighed somewhere in his decision-making process, more than an unfortunate afterthought.

“You should be sorry for those things,” I muttered, not looking into his stark, wide eyes, though I felt his gaze on the side of my face.

There, below the collar of my shirt, there was the scar from a mating mark, barely covered. It was the closest I’d gotten to having a mating mark of my own, and it’d been horrific.

But it wasn’t the closest I’d come to being somebody’s mate. That’d been the decade I spent with Aspen, building up something in my head that I wasn’t sure had ever been there at all.

“I know, Brook. I amsosorry. You have to understand, I—”

“Do you think I don’t get it?” I snapped, glaring up at him. “I know exactly why you left, Aspen. You didn’t want to be alpha of the pack. Didn’t think you were up to the job—and... and maybe you weren’t. But even if you were, you didn’t want it. I knew your dad my whole life, up to the day he got killed trying to save my sorry ass, so I get it. He was stubborn, saw in you what he wanted to see in an alpha. And Linden was never going to take the job from you while you were here. Iknowall that.”

I took a deep breath, but my heart was spasming in my chest, aching behind my ribcage as sorrow swept through my veins, chilling my fingers to ice. “But what I don’t know is how I could have loved you so much, for so long, and for you—you could just leave without so much as a postcard. I thought maybe you’d been hurt, at first. Then, when we finally heard you’d gone and joined the navy, I figured, well, maybe he’s busy with training. Once he gets settled, he’ll call. But you never did.”

I teetered to a stop at the corner of our yard, sure that if I walked past the hedges, Mom’s keen eyes or Harmony’s sharp nose would pick us up, and I didn’t want an audience—not when my eyes were stinging with tears and the words were scraping up my sandpaper throat.

“If you were done with me, you should’ve said goodbye, given me some kind of closure.” Maybe then I could have moved on. Or hell, maybe I still would’ve decided to send all my thoughts and hopes and dreams after a man who’d let me go, but at least the expectation would’ve been cut off on his end.

Aspen was nodding, his whole head bobbing up and down like he was taking it all in, assessing my every word for a point he could wiggle through and get to work making amends.

If I knew what that even looked like, I’d have told him. The part of me that’d fallen in love with him when we were still kids and had clung to the idea of us beyond all sense and reason wanted him to fall to his knees, tears glistening in his eyes, and tell me he was sorry, that he’d always loved me, and beg for me back.

But there was that tricky adult part that’d spent the last ten years alone, coming to the slow realization that Aspen had left me behind with no way to contact him, distracting myself with work and video games and making sure Harmony got ready for college.

I didn’t have kids of my own, sure, but it sucks how empty nesting made it that much easier to think about all the losses in my own life.

Heaving a sigh, I dragged my palm partway down my face, but I pressed my fingers against my closed eyelids for a second before I figured out what to say.

“Or if goodbye had been too hard”—I dropped my hand to my side and listlessly looked up at the guy I’d thought had been my mate, someone I’d romanticized for years so that now, in the flesh, his tired eyes and stubbly jaw stood out like something impossible—“I wish you’d taken that as some kind of proof and stayed. We could’ve figured everything out together. I know you didn’t want to be Alpha Grove, but—”

Didn’t you want me?

The question hung in the air between us, unsaid. Aspen’s eyes were wide, his pupils narrowed to focus only on me, but I didn’t know what else to say or how to fix this. Hell, the mess my life was right then, I didn’t know how to fix a single damn thing.

As tempting as it was to say everything that’d gone wrong in my life had hinged on Aspen’s decision to leave, it wasn’t that easy. I’d decided every day that I didn’t want another mate—that it’d be wrong to give someone else the scraps of my heart that didn’t already belong to this infuriating man, and ask them to settle for a fraction of a bond when they could’ve found the whole thing with somebody else.

And neither one of us were responsible for the decisions Maxim Reid made that’d left me hurt inside and out. Sometimes, it was tempting to forget that and blame myself, but as mad as I was at Aspen, I never wanted him to carry around the guilt for that. Bad things happened, even when people did all the right things.

“Listen, Aspen, I gotta go. My family gets worried if it takes me too long to get home from work.” It was an excuse, sure, but I wasn’t lying. Everyone worried now. Always.

Just as I turned away, Aspen lurched after me. His hand wrapped around my arm. “Brook—”

I felt the prick of the tips of his claws. They weren’t pressing hard or scratching the skin, but they were there. And when I spun toward him, his eyes were wild and desperate.

I knew that look, those claws, that unhinged edge of an alpha spiraling out of control. I’d stared into those eyes, cringed back when nothing I could give Maxim Reid had pulled him back from the edge.

I must’ve flinched, because as soon as I looked at him, Aspen jerked his hand back, his fingers curling into a fist to hide his claws.

“I’m sorry.”

With a hard swallow, I rocked back from him, my stomach rolling. Was Aspen losing his mind too?

People said an alpha without an omega was doomed to struggle. I hadn’t thought about what omegas have might been in the navy—though it seemed unlikely, with the Condition, that there’d been many. I’d also tried not to think about what Aspen might’ve gotten up to without me. But there he was, living out in the woods like an animal, his wolf as close to the surface as any human thoughts or feelings.

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