Page 42 of Black Moon

“Are you—would it be all right if we ran a few tests?” Linden asked gently. “Just to make sure you’re physically well, nothing—nothing healing wrong.”

Shit, being alpha and having to treat your packmates had to be rough. I wanted to soothe the turmoil in Linden’s expression, but I knew better than to think anything I could say would fix all this.

Thankfully, there weren’t many things werewolves had to worry about—not lots of illnesses or infections got to us the way they did humans. It was a metabolism thing, but it was still worth checking—one hard night to make sure Brook had a chance to get better later on.

“Yeah,” Brook whispered. “That’s fine. I can—um, yeah that’s fine.”

Linden nodded stiffly. “I’ll give you a second to change.”

He and Skye retreated, pulling the curtains shut around the bed, but leaving a space for me to follow. Linden gave me a look, but I spun back toward Brook and grinned.

“Need a hand?” I asked, wiggling my fingers in the air between us.

Silly, and still, enough to make Brook smile past the wetness in his eyes. “Sure.”

I pulled the curtains the rest of the way closed, boxing out the teenager and alpha in the room.

It turned out Brook didn’t need anybody to help him so much as company. The most I did was hold out a hand to keep him steady as he stepped out of his dirt-smeared pants.

Now, in the light of the clinic, with his skin bare, I could see the dark purple bruises. He had them on his ribs, around the bite mark on his neck. And when he turned around, I saw the fierce marks of handprints on his thighs.

If there was one thing in the whole world that I was good at, it was talking through my ass. Who knew that’d come in handy in a doctor’s clinic while battling off my own urge to hunt down the Reid alpha who’d done this?

“First time I ever saw one of these hospital gowns, my dad fell off a horse and wound up in the hospital, and I thought it was fucking hilarious—big alpha like him in a dress. We were going on a family ride at the beach, you know? The kind of thing you pay in advance for, and they give kids horseshoes at the end?”

Brook turned to look at me, balling his old clothes up. I took them out of his hands because he didn’t seem sure what to do with them.

Once he’d sat back on the bed, shifting the hem of the nightgown around his fingers, I opened the curtains for Linden to come back in. Skye hung back near the desk, but I figured he was young, and there were some things a teenage omega didn’t need to see firsthand.

Linden spoke in a soft voice as he told Brook what he was going to do, but Brook’s eyes stayed trained on me, so I took that as a cue to keep rambling.

“I was so excited to go. I’d had chicken pox the year before, so Chase and Cait, my brother and sister, had gotten those horseshoes and I hadn’t. This time, when we went, Dad got this big, black stallion named Side-Eye. Turns out, Side-Eye wasn’t a fan of Dad’s alpha nonsense. They didn’t get along at all.”

Brook laid back on the bed when Linden prompted him, and his breath shook a little, so I set the bundle of Brook’s clothes in the chair behind me and reached over to take his hand. My fingers traced lightly over the back of his hand, and I kept talking because it was the only thing I knew how to do.

“So we rounded this corner of the path, and all the sudden, Side-Eye could see the barn. He took off like lightning, Dad’s ass bouncing three feet off his back with every sprint.”

Brook gasped, but I didn’t look down to see what Linden was doing. Wasn’t my business. Though I was relieved as shit when he stepped away and reached again for the hand sanitizer. That meant it was over, right?

“The tour guide,” I went on, “was so impressed. She thought Dad was a professional rider. Right up until the second Dad went tumbling off into the sand dunes, and Side-Eye took off without him.”

“Oh god,” Brook said, grimacing. “That’s terrible.”

I rolled my eyes. “It served him right. He was kicking too much, and he’s one of those big, heavy guys. Anyway, he was fine. And I still have that horseshoe.”

“I’m glad he was okay,” Brook whispered. And he was way, way too fucking sweet.

Before I could think too hard about it, I leaned in and kissed his temple. “I’m gladyou’reokay,” I whispered against his skin.

He nodded, and his hand tightened hard around mine.

“Could you take that with you?” I asked Linden, nodding at the bundle of clothes in the chair before he could get too far. There was no way in hell I was letting Brook back into anything that smelled so miserable.

As he walked away, I could sense Linden’s rage like a palpable heat at my back. He was keeping it locked down tight, his voice as gentle and his hands as steady as Brook needed them to be. But I could still feel it, tingling up the back of my neck, my instincts pushing on me to go sniff his neck, rub my cheek against his until all that anger soothed.

No clue where that was coming from, until—fuck.

For the last couple days, I’d known my heat was right around the corner, my thoughts fixated on—well, on precisely the thing I didn’t need to be thinking about with Brook there in bed, hurt and sad.

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