Page 60 of Hunter Moon

My lip trembled and I shrank into my knees.

Mom combed her hand through my hair again, tracing her nails around the edge of my ear. “Just think about it. You’ve given up plenty to take care of us, so whatever you need now, that’s okay. Want something to eat?”

I sighed, nodding into my legs.

Even after she left, I kept hugging them tight. She was right—Aspen wouldn’t want me to feel alone. He hadn’t left because of me, and he’d—

I stared into the empty mug of tea on my nightstand. When I breathed in, I could smell that deep, grassy scent.

He remembered what I liked and tried to give it to me.

Forcing down the stark, irrational fear that I was being selfish, I pulled my phone off the nightstand and texted him:I need you. Please come?

37

Aspen

“Iknow, Grove, I know,” my CO’s voice was more calm than usual, trying to soothe my irritation. Nick Challenger and I had been together for a long time, and during the years I’d spent outside my pack, he was the closest thing I’d ever had to family. “Butyouknow how these things go. They pay attention when they decide to pay attention, and not a minute before. Nothing I do will change it.”

He was right, of course. As soon as the powers that be decided to deal with my fate, it’d be set and over and they wouldn’t be interested in discussing it. And until they deigned to deal with me, they also weren’t interested in discussing it.

Back when I’d signed on, I’d been told there was “the right way, the wrong way, and the navy way.” I’d thought it was a joke, and hadn’t really understood it. In retrospect, “the navy way” was just a combination of the two. Things done the wrong way and called right, and the poor sucker who’d signed on the dotted line with no recourse to question the result.

Even a month earlier, I wouldn’t have been so down on it. It hadn’t been right or wrong or good or bad—it had just been the way things worked. It had been life.

Now, I needed it to not be my life.

“I’ve gone through almost half my leave,” I shot back, trying to keep from sounding whiny. “I get that it won’t happen overnight, but my pack needs me.”

He gave a long sigh, but I knew it wasn’t frustration with me. He was the one guy in the situation I could count on to be on my side. He wasn’t thrilled I was leaving, but he was a wolf too. He understood. “I thought the whole point of you leaving home was to avoid becoming pack alpha.”

Okay, he mostly understood.

He’d grown up in one of those tyrannical packs that lived entirely outside of human society, where the alpha ruled everything. And his pack alpha had decreed that every other alpha, when they were eighteen, had to leave his land. So basically, Nick’s own father, on his eighteenth birthday, had tossed him out on his ass, and his happy birthday had been more like “don’t come back.”

So he understood wolf issues, but maybe not the problems that came from a functional, happy pack.

“It was, and I did,” I agreed. “My brother’s been installed as alpha. But the neighboring pack that murdered my father is still threatening, and Lin’s a leader, but he’s no fighter. I can’t leave, Nick. I won’t leave them vulnerable like this.”

I loved Nick like a brother, but I wasn’t going to complicate matters by including Brook and what the Reids had done to him. I was getting worried enough that I might have mentioned it, if the choice had been in Nick’s hands. I had no doubt that hearing about what my omega mate had gone through, was still going through, would decide him. But he was already on my side, and the higher ups? They weren’t wolves. They definitely wouldn’t understand. Or care. I had to convince them by offering rules and technicalities.

“Jesus, Grove. When it rains on your people, it fucking pours.”

“That’s pack life, commander. At least, it’s pack life in the era of the goddamned Condition.” I sighed and let myself fall back on the noisy motel bed, phone still in hand. “Any chance they’re going to get off their asses and give me what I need before my leave is all gone?”

“Murray might wait till the day after you get back, just to inconvenience you and make sure you have to make the drive,” he muttered. Then he blew out another frustrated breath. “The Condition? This other pack feral?”

“If they’re not, they’re acting the part.” My phone buzzed for an incoming text message, so I turned it to check—

It was from Brook.

I need you. Please come?

I sucked in a sharp breath, sitting up and pushing off the bed immediately. “Nick, I gotta go.”

“Grove? You okay?”

And well, I couldn’t explain, but I wasn’t going to just hang up on him. “I am, but it’s a pack emergency. I have to go help with something.”

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