Page 2 of Strawberry Moon

Throwing myself off the couch, I tore my hand out of Barbara’s and stalked outside. I didn’t stop at the porch but leapt down onto the gravel drive and kept going.

The night air was cool. Bracing. It didn’t clear my head, but it kept me in my human skin and on two legs.

I knew Sterling was full of shit. And this—the arraignment—this was the best shot of him facing justice for all the harm he’d caused. It was the only hope we had of seeing change.

Damn if I didn’t feel guilty though. It wasn’t enough. I didn’t want him to face justice. I wanted him to suffer. I wanted him to feel the weight of all he’d taken from me and buckle under it.

Fists clenched, I stalked to the edge of the goat yard. My teeth pressed sharp against the insides of my lips, distended in my fury, my wolf snarling too close to the surface.

With both hands, I gripped the rough wood of the fence, and I closed my eyes. One deep breath. Two.

On and on, I kept going, counting each inhale until my fangs retracted and I started to feel better.

Fuck. Better? That was the wrong word for all this.

Until I started to feel sane, anyway.

I stayed out there, my shoulders slumped, until someone came to get me.

It was Ridge, quiet as ever, swinging his feet as he walked up slow, like he didn’t want to be too much of a bother. It was the same way he’d come out to the farm. He kept his head down, but he was ready to do what needed doing.

When he got close enough to the fence, he sighed. “Reports are coming in. They’re saying Sterling’s dead.”

My mouth pressed together, my teeth aching, because I wanted him dead—god, I did—but he hadn’t hurt like I did. He hadn’t suffered.

“You okay?” Ridge asked after a minute of me not saying anything.

I swallowed hard, shook my head, hunched my shoulders. “It’s not enough, Ridge. That’s not enough.”

He walked up behind me, and his hand settled heavy on my shoulder. “I know, but it’s what we’ve got.”

2

Archer

Billionaires shouldn’t whine about how hard their lives were. That was what I kept telling myself as the crushing weight of my bank account and stock portfolios and properties settled onto my shoulders for good.

Billions of dollars in liquid assets, and billions more in property and other assets. My grandfather’s ill-gotten gains, gathered from a lifetime of poisoning werewolves in his quest to eradicate an entire species from the surface of the earth.

As of ten that morning, it was all mine, whether I wanted it or not. I mean, sure, I could have just donated it all, but to whom? Plus, by the time we even started to put right what my grandfather had destroyed, I suspected there wouldn’t be anything left. Because there was no way to replace the estimated half million dead omega werewolves.

Omega werewolves like me.

Because in his quest to destroy an entire species, my grandfather hadn’t even thought twice about shooting me. The only reason I was alive was a nineteen-year-old boy named Skye Johnson, whose quick thinking had led him to the one thing that could have saved my life, with a bullet in my chest: he bit me.

So I’d become the very thing my grandfather hated most.

I suspected that if he’d found out before he died, he’d have disinherited me, even though he was the one who’d shot me and made it necessary.

But this werewolf was firmly in the closet.

The one member of the board of Sterling whom I considered a friend, Anderson James, had strongly suggested I keep it that way. It wasn’t that the rest of the board wanted to continue my grandfather’s crusade to murder werewolves, but if they knew I was one, they would assume my loyalties lay with werewolves over them.

Which, well... they did. Not that I’d needed the bite for that to be true.

Werewolves had done nothing to deserve the horrors that my grandfather had brought on them. And now the Sterling board wanted to sweep it under the rug as much as possible. The work of one man in a position of power, but all over now. We weren’t producing poison and injecting it into everything we sold anymore, so no harm, no foul, right?

The number of humans willing to accept that answer was staggering, to me. The polling done by our marketing department said there was a decent chance we could get away with doing nothing else—just stop murdering people, and no one would blame us for what had come before. At least, not enough to change the bottom line.

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