Page 22 of Strawberry Moon

“Yes?” I asked, full of faux innocence.

Andy dropped into the other chair at my break-room table, staring at me, so I pretended not to look at him, staring at a graph on a page as though it held the answer to curing the world. “The only thing in that fridge is a collection of energy drinks.Three different kindsof energy drinks.”

“Yeah, well, I got the Sterling ones, then I was worried maybe I would accidentally poison myself,” I agreed, waving in the direction of the fridge, then for reasons I couldn’t quite understand, adding a little flourish. “So I got that other brand. The big name ‘Energy Drink!’ people, you know? Then the caffeine didn’t really do much for me, so I got the third brand to see if it was just the second one not having enough caffeine, but—”

“Archer?”

“Yeah?”

“Ever think that maybe your body reacts differently to caffeine now?” He leaned over, popping open the fridge and pulling out a can at random. It made that distinctive crack noise and hiss as he opened it, along with a bitter whiff of... I didn’t know, really. Caffeine, probably. I glanced at the side of the can. Yeah, not the Sterling kind, so probably not poison.

He gave it a sniff and scrunched up his nose. “Smells like college.”

My only response to that was a high-pitched giggle, and that was when I stopped to consider that maybe he was right. The caffeine hadn’t given me a shot of energy, so I’d been guzzling the stuff, assuming that I’d just have to drink more and more of it to get enough caffeine to circumvent that wolfy metabolism.

Alternately, drinking that much sugary junk could have just messed up my entire system in other ways.

It was a balance, and I’d never been too good at balance.

I’d always been the guy who gave up on things when he wasn’t instantly good at them. The guy who’d seen Bs as abject failures, symbolic of how I would never be as great as my grandfather.

“Why don’t you come stay the night with Rachel and the kids and me? The guest room’s always made up, and she’s making chicken and dumplings. She’d love to see you, and you know the kids adore you.”

It sounded like heaven, but did I deserve that? Shouldn’t I be working? He’d joked they could wait for me to shower, but werewolves everywhere were suffering. All I had to do was picture Cliff Reynolds’s miserable face to be reminded how important my work was.

Or Ford’s scowl.

Not that I liked Ford. Growly jerk.

Growly jerk whom my grandfather had nearly destroyed.

I slid down in my chair and sighed, covering my face with my hand. “I have to drive down to Grovetown in the morning. I have some samples to test out, and I need to try to talk Ford into letting me have Cliff try them too.”

“Who’s Ford?” Andy asked, reaching over to take my papers. He took one look at them before making a face and handing them back. “Is he the alpha? Or is that not how packs actually work?”

“No, it is, but Linden’s the alpha. Ford is... he’sanalpha. He lost his wife to the Condition, and he doesn’t want me passing out random untested chemicals in his town. I figure humoring him is the least I can do.” Andy lifted a brow, and I held my paperwork up in front of myself like a shield. “What? We took everything from him. Weowehim.”

He leaned across the table, pressing the papers down and meeting my eye steadily. “Wedidn’t take anything from him, Archer. I did more to hurt that man than you did, because I’ve been on the board for five years. Neither of us made the Condition. That was all your granddad.”

I couldn’t even meet his eye. All I could see was Ford’s face, prematurely grizzled and miserable, unable to move past the life we had taken from him.

“Archer. You know I agree with you. We owe the wolves. We owe them so much we probably can’t ever pay it. But you’re trying. You owe them help, not shame. You being ashamed of yourself doesn’t help them. You pushing until you drop doesn’t help them. They need you at your best, not your worst.” Apparently rethinking his previous action, he snatched the papers out of my hands. “Grab what you need. We’re going. You’ll come home and have dinner, then sleep a full night in a real bed, then tomorrow, you can take me to Grovetown. Introduce me to your alpha, and maybe this Ford guy.”

“This isn’t your responsibility,” I denied, and he pursed his lips at me.

The meaning was obvious enough, and not wrong. If I owed the wolves, so did he. Everyone who’d ever made money on Sterling owed them.

Only, of the whole board, Andy and I were the only ones who agreed. The others, guys like that asshole Eric Monroe, thought that it was more than enough to just stop poisoning them.

Us. To stop poisoning us.

And their blasé carelessness was why I still wasn’t willing to eat Sterling products myself, now that I was part of that vulnerable population.

“Rachel isn’t using Sterling products, is she?” I asked weakly, already giving in.

He snorted. “She was already boycotting us before the werewolf murder reveal. She sure wasn’t going to start eating our stuff once she realized it might poison her friends. If she knew about you, well...” He gave a low whistle and shook his head. “When that comes out, I don’t envy the rest of the board her anger. And frankly, they fucking deserve it. I just wish we had a way to be rid of them.”

It was my turn to raise a brow at him.

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