Page 7 of Hunter Moon

I caught the fluffy robe and pulled it around my shoulders. What swallowed her was tight on me, but I belted it at the waist anyway. No way I was making my baby sister yell at me while my dick was hanging out.

There, on the stool next to the chair she’d been pacing beside, was a bundle of my jeans, T-shirt, and coveralls I’d abandoned when I’d run off the night before. She bent down and snatched my cell phone off the top of my pile of clothes.

“So, here’s the deal,” she announced, marching up and shoving my phone at my chest until I grabbed it, holding it close like a security blanket. “We’re playing by sorority rules now.”

“O-kay?” Harmony was the only one of us who’d gone away to college, but she’d come back when I’d been taken, then used our family emergency to get the rest of the semester off. Lots of omegas didn’t bother with college—not because the Groves didn’t allow it, but it was easy to prioritize other things when every so often, your brain shorted out and you wanted nothing so much as an alpha to hold you down and fuck your brains out. Or when the whole pack expected you to settle down with someone. Or your whole job was taking care of everyone else.

Harmony had always hated the idea of giving herself up to somebody else, and that was just fine by me. So long as she was happy, I didn’t care if she ever found a mate.

But all that worldly experience she had and I lacked meant “sorority rules” didn’t translate right away.

Thankfully, she was there to explain it to me with her hands on her hips, her glare not softened in the slightest by her pastel pajamas with the ice-cream-cone print.

“I get you’re going through shit right now. We all do. And we know we can’t fix it. So whatever you need to do—run off and howl at the moon, hide out in your room or the garage, whatever—you do it. We can handle it. But what youcan’tdo is leave us scared with no way to contact you. So you’re going to leave Find My Friends on all the time. And if you need to go wolf and spend some time digging up chipmunks or whatever, fine, but you grab your phone—stick the germ brick in your mouth if you’ve gotta—so we know you’re okay. Can you handle that?”

My shoulders shrank down, curving in over my chest. Harmony was more than a decade younger than me, I’d practically raised her, and damn if she didn’t know exactly how to give me what for.

“Yeah. I can handle that.”

She sniffed, turning up her chin. “Good. If we need to, we’ll get you one of those fancy tracker watches with the stretchy bands so you don’t lose it when you shift. But it’d be really great if you didn’t start spending all your time out in the woods, ’cause I’d miss you. Jerk.”

Even when she narrowed her bright blue eyes at me, I couldn’t help smiling. “Understood.”

“Great.” She spun on her heel and marched off, bristling with energy she’d need to work out somehow. “Who wants pancakes?”

* * *

Breakfast was as awkwardas every other one had been since I’d come back, but we got through it. After a shower, I almost felt like everything was back to normal.

I still felt that shroud there in my head, trying to block out all the shit that’d gone wrong recently. Very little of it had anything to do with Aspen Grove, but his return had been like a breeze, lifting the edge and letting the darkness flood back in.

I couldn’t say it out loud, because I didn’t want to make her feel like she had to stay for me, but I was glad Harmony had come home. Mom and Shiloh were walking on eggshells around me all the time, and I got it. Mom was, well, Mom. And Shiloh had her job and Talin and was largely self-sufficient. But Harmony was the baby of the family, and I couldn’t just up and abandon her when things got hard.

Didn’t hurt that she wasn’t afraid to keep me in check. She’d always known how to push me in the right way, keep me on track.

If I was going to be the man my family needed me to be, that meant confronting the things that scared me. Okay, not all of them. There was way too much I wasn’t ready to unpack, but there were definitely things that scared me that shouldn’t have.

Like seeing Aspen.

He’d hurt me when he left, sure. And it wasn’t just one wound, either. It was the morning he’d disappeared. Every day after that when I’d hoped he’d come back and he never did. It was finding out that he’d been in contact with Birch Wilson, but not me. It’d been having to ask Birch for any news, and the awkward grimace he gave like he wasn’t sure if I was allowed to be in the loop. It was every time I realized he felt sorry for me, and it was the heavy realization that while Aspen had been my best friend and the man I’d leaned on after Dad died and I had to step up and help take care of my sisters, to him, I’d been another burden to run away from.

I’d never meant to put the weight of my responsibilities on him. Sure, the pack had provided for us, had helped where they could. But the Groves were rich—like, another level of rich. And sometimes, it must’ve occurred to my teenage brain, working nights and weekends in a garage while I struggled to finish high school, how much easier things would be for us if Aspen and I were mated.

There’d be money and security and—and things would’ve been easier. We could’ve been happy.

Or maybe just me. I could’ve been happy. But if there were any part of that life that Aspen had wanted, he wouldn’t have left so completely. We wouldn’t have gone years dancing around each other, fucking but never mated, boyfriends but never partners. Sometimes, it’d felt like we were, but now... I must’ve seen what I wanted to and ignored his hesitance.

So I didn’t know why I needed to see him, exactly. But I did, so I went. His home was only a couple blocks from mine—the houses closer to his bigger, the yards well-manicured. It was an easy, familiar walk, and also one that made it abundantly clear that I’d never really belonged in the fancy part of town where the founders built houses with wrap-around porches where they could drink sweet tea and cider and plan the pack’s future.

But Aspen and I couldn’t just skirt around each other in town. Already, too many people were avoiding meeting my eye, so I got to feel guilty for taking up space while wounded. The last thing I needed was another person making me feel like an outsider in the pack. And if he was back, really back, I—I needed to figure out how to live with that.

I’d look him in the eye, and I’d tell him he hurt me, but that I was okay. I was bigger than a relationship that’d ended in silence a decade ago. It’d be uncomfortable, but maybe it’d clear the air and give me the closure I’d been missing for so long. I could finally move on.

But as I mounted the porch of Grove House, none of that was enough to keep my hands from shaking or my breath from coming fast and shallow.

I rang the doorbell and stepped back, bracing myself for the cool appraisal of my prodigal ex. Only, on the other side of the door I heard light steps and a little huff as the lock clicked.

The door swung inward on Rowan Grove’s smiling face.

---