Page 5 of Strawberry Moon

Assholes, cowards, and monsters, the lot of them. They’d killed Lily and kept on going—kept on going until there wasn’t a pack in the world who hadn’t felt the pain of the Condition. Not one wolf out there, the world over, who hadn’t lost somebody they cared about. A child or a partner or a parent. They’d watched their loved ones die, the alphas they relied on for protection lose all sense and turn violent.

To go after omegas... They were the glue of any good pack, the ones who kept us grounded and put us on the right path.

Sterling was lucky, damn lucky, that they hadn’t gotten worse from us than a courtroom hearing. We should’ve fallen on that Sterling son of a bitch like the rabid dogs he thought we were.

Over the gully, I turned the tractor.

I did it sharp, in my anger, and I’d missed where the tall grass started and the lip of the land dove down.

The tractor wheel caught. There was a metallic grating sound, and then the whole thing tipped.

With a shout, I fell into the gully and the damn tipped tractor after me, still running, blades whirring only a couple yards to my right.

The metal hit my shin, a loud snap that sent a stab of pain that turned the bile around in my gut and made my vision spotty. The sound of machinery filled my ears like screeching hell demons.

“Help!” I shouted. Ridge and Mr. Mena were supposed to—to be—

Fuck, I didn’t know if they were tending the beans or clear across the farm fixing a fence for the horses.

“Help me!”

I struggled under the tractor, but it was too much for one werewolf, even an alpha, to budge on his own.

I must’ve pushed for a full minute before I let my head fall back in the wet mud behind me and shut my eyes. A couple deep breaths. If I could calm down, I could figure this out.

Thank fuck, I didn’t have to.

Ridge’s head popped up around the front of the tractor. “Ford! Ford are you hurt?”

“I’m okay,” I ground out.

The boy was swift, agile enough to get up on the tractor and get the thing stopped.

I helped him push, but truth was, he and Mr. Mena did most of the work of lifting the thing off me and getting it back on solid ground.

I might’ve gotten up to help, but when I looked down, the whole bottom half of my jeans’ right leg was dark red, a stained shaft of bone sticking through the material. Through skin.

Hazily, I realized that belonged to me. That was my bone.

It was supposed to be on the inside.

Ridge was at my side, bracing my shoulder as I tried to sit.

“Don’t move. Did you hit your head? Should we call Dr. Grove?” This last question, he shot back at Mr. Mena, who only frowned back at him like he wasn’t sure.

“No, goddammit,” I snapped. “I didn’t hit my fucking head. The tractor just flipped. I must’ve—” I bit my tongue so hard I tasted something sharp. I felt fucking stupid. I knew better than to flip a fucking tractor.

I was supposed to have a better handle on things than this, or what was the damn point in me? When I started causing the Hills more trouble than I fixed, it was time for me to go. Here I was, blood pouring out all over the gully’s long grass while my heart raced and the world spun. Fuck.

More than that, I hurt. My leg hurt so bad I thought I was going to be sick. When I thought about my leg—what it should’ve looked like and what it looked like now—my head got woozy.

“It’s okay.” Ridge gripped my shoulder, giving it a firm squeeze. “We’re gonna get you help. We’ll—” He bent to tie his shirt around my calf. I hissed at the pressure, but Ridge ignored me and looked over his shoulder at Mr. Mena again, then seemed to make a decision for all of us. “We’ll get you to the clinic. Mr. Mena, can you help me get him up?”

With no small amount of cussing, mostly from me, the two of them got me up and balanced on my one good leg. At least I had that.

Ridge helped me hobble to his truck, dripping blood on the grass with every shuffling hop, and I scooted up there, plumb sure as we drove through town that every wolf we passed could smell the blood on me and knew what a fucking asshole I was.

Farmer all my life, and I couldn’t even mow a damn lawn.

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