Page 9 of Strawberry Moon

No, this was a wolf.

Dante’s arm was trembling, and I was reminded of the time he’d confided in me about his father. It was something we’d had in common—a monster had raised us both—and in part, Dante had seemed happy to have someone to talk to about it.

Until the day he’d shot me, my grandfather had never been violent with me, but that didn’t make it any less something we had in common. Besides, Grandfather had always managed to be shitty in other ways. Constant needling about how yes, I had a three-point-eight GPA, but shouldn’t it be a four? How by my age, he’d accomplished something, and there I was, riding his coattails. About what a constant disappointment I was, and how he so wished my parents had lived long enough to give him another, better grandchild.

Well, if he was looking up at me from hell now, and knew I was a werewolf, no doubt he felt doubly that way.

Dante backed me all the way into his lab, going through the pressurization and closing the doors behind us. Only then, when we were safely out of sight of the other wolf, did he turn to face me. Immediately, he started patting me down, as though there were some chance I had been injured.

“Are you okay?”

I lifted my hands to hold his on my shoulders. “Dante. It’s okay. I’m okay. He didn’t come anywhere near me.”

His jaw clenched, lips pursing, and he looked like he either wanted to start a fight with the other alpha or cry. Maybe both. “I don’t know what the hell is wrong with him, but I’ve half a mind—”

The door opened behind me, and he spun to face it, braced once again for a fight, but it was only Skye, eyes wide and worried. “Are you two okay?”

Dante scowled and pointed in the general direction of the main clinic. “I don’t know where he gets off acting like some cave-alpha throwback, growling at Archer like—”

“His mate died of the Condition,” Skye answered matter-of-factly. He threw an apologetic look over Dante’s shoulder to me. “I’m sorry, Archer. I know it wasn’t you, and you wouldn’t have, but... but Ford’s been nothing but an open wound since he lost Lily, and we’ve all thought every day he didn’t go feral and run off into the woods was a surprisingly good day.”

I thought back through the events. The men bringing him in and hovering while he got stitched up. Linden taking them out to the parking lot to talk to them, a worried frown on his face as he shot glances back at his patient.

They were on pins and needles around him, and there I’d been throwing myself at him like a cat in heat. Then, he must have realized who I was.

The living symbol of everything he’d lost. Of everything he hated and wanted to destroy.

Well hell, who could blame him for hating me? I kind of hated me too, given that explanation.

Dante wasn’t having it. “Then he needs to get himself together and realize Archer doesn’t have anything to do with Sterling’s bullshit.”

“How?” I asked.

That stopped Dante in his tracks. He turned to look at me, confused and maybe a little hurt that I wasn’t backing him in his full-throated defense of me. So I reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. “I appreciate that you trust and believe in me, Dante. You can’t know how much it means to me every day that you, Skye, and Linden accept me here. Treat me like I’m a decent person and not a monster.”

Skye frowned at that and interrupted me, pushing up next to his husband. “You’re not a monster. You’re not responsible for your grandfather’s actions. And you’re... you’re pack. Aren’t you?”

I blinked at him in shock, trying to parse the worry and—and hurt? “Am I?” I asked, and my voice sounded like I’d scraped it across sandpaper.

Because... was I? Did I belong there in Grovetown, like I sometimes felt I might? I glanced in the direction of where the alpha lay in his bed, with his broken leg, so disgusted by my very existence that he’d wanted to kill me when he couldn’t even stand up.

Skye reached out and grabbed my hand. “Don’t base your opinion of us as a pack on Ford.Please. Ford’s... Ford’s the guy we’re trying to help, really. An alpha who’s been driven to the edge by the Condition. Who needs the absolute most support we can give him. Not you, you don’t have to, just—”

“My grandfather destroyed his life.” I’d said words like that before, but never quite so small, so focused, sopersonal. Saying my grandfather was a monster who had murdered a million or more werewolves was too big—too hard to really connect to in my mind, so they became like the chess pieces he’d seen them as, or the infographics on the news.

This was more real, somehow. Not that it had been less awful the other way, but this was it. This was what those omegas had left behind when my grandfather had stolen their lives. Miserable, broken people, riding the edge of sanity.

Maybe Ford was an asshole for growling at me, but it was a little hard to hold it against him. Hard to think of him as the villain of the piece, when that was my grandfather, overdelivering by continuing to hurt people after he was dead.

I supposed he’d been right to be disappointed in me. I wasn’t going to leave a legacy of suffering like that. Just a pile of money and maybe three whole people who missed Archer the person, and not Archer the paycheck.

Better to be nobody than a monster.

But no. That wasn’t going to be my legacy. Maybe I couldn’t bring back the dead, but we’d stopped the production of poison, and together, we were going to find a way to cauterize this wound and stop it from killing any more werewolves.

7

Ford

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