Page 89 of Black Moon

This was the kind of alpha I was used to, and I wasn’t having it for one more second.

A growl low in my throat, I leaned into him. “If the opinion of one omega from out of town was enough to ruin your chances at becoming pack alpha, you never stood a fucking chance. You wanna play big man? Go start your own pack.”

I shifted my weight toward him, swinging my leg up, and—there.

A grin crossed my face as Skip doubled over, going red in the cheeks after I kneed him right in the balls.

“Don’t you ever touch me again,” I hissed in his ear.

Shiloh came over with our drinks, blinking big, blue eyes at us. “Everything okay?”

“We’re good. Thanks!” I snatched the drinks off the bar and went out to find Linden. The lady’d left him alone, and Birch and Claudia had found him. His face lit up in the sweetest way when he caught sight of me coming.

“Trouble?” Linden asked as I slipped my arm around his back and leaned against him. I offered him the mug of cider, a soft instinct in my hindbrain thrilling at having provided for my alpha.

“Nothing I couldn’t handle.”

There wasn’t even the hint of a question in his eyes when he draped his heavy arm around my shoulders and pulled me in. His lips pressed, dry and warm, against my temple.

“Cheers to that!” Claudia lifted her glass. “And to our new alpha!”

People whooped and howled for him, but when he looked at me, all I heard was my racing heart.

45

Linden

The night passed in a blur of pack and cider and the warm presence and comforting spicy scent of Colt at my side. The next time I was reminded of talking to him about staying, it was in bed, in that hazy moment between wakefulness and sleep—the time when so many good ideas happened and were immediately lost to the ether.

It didn’t immediately come back to me, either, when I woke to the knocking on my bedroom door. It was like a persistent hummingbird, the long series of soft knocks against the solid oak door.

Too light to be Juniper, but five, ten, fifteen knocks in a row? That wasn’t just Rowan. That was Rowan, panicked.

As I surfaced into real consciousness, the muttering hit my ear. My poor little brother, and yes, that was definitely panic. “Linden. Linden, please wake up. Please wake up. I need you to come out. Oh my god, Linden.”

I dragged myself over a groggy Colt and out of bed, stumbling over to open the door, barely avoiding tripping over the piles of clothes we’d left strewn across it in our half-asleep tumble into bed.

“’Sup?” Colt mumbled from the bed right as I opened the door.

On the other side stood my recalcitrant, terrified brother. “I’m so sorry. I know it’s early and you guys were out late celebrating, and—”

“Rowan, it’s fine,” I reassured, laying a hand on his shoulder. I had no idea what time it was, but the sun was up, and that alone meant it was plenty late enough to be waking me, emergency or not. And from the look in my brother’s eyes, this was clearly an emergency. “Come on. I need to grab some fresh clothes and clean up a bit, but you can tell me about it while I work.”

I put an arm around his back and went to lead him into the room, but he pulled away, shaking his head. “No. Oh no, I can’t.” For a second, I thought he was being weird about coming into my room, since he didn’t usually, but he glanced back in the direction of the house, then leaned in to whisper conspiratorially, “I left them alone with Juniper.”

I could see where that might be a bad thing. I loved my sister dearly, but she wasn’t exactly a sparkling conversationalist. Well, not with anyone she disliked, and the list of people Juniper disliked was substantial.

“Them who?” Colt asked in a yawn, sitting up and stretching, not seeming in the least put off by Rowan’s presence. Hell, he was reacting to my brother how I did. Like he was harmless—a complete non-threat. Like he was family.

“I’m so sorry, Colt,” Rowan whispered in his direction. “It’s your family.”

Colt went from sleepy and satisfied to wide-eyed and stiff as a board in a fraction of a second, staring at Rowan in horror. “My family? You mean...my brother?”

“Brother, sister, father, mother...” Rowan shuddered. “They all showed up on the doorstep demanding to know where you were, because your car is parked at the clinic, and someone told them this house was where the pack alpha lived.”

“They don’t know Colt is here?” I asked him. Not that I’d expected Colt to tell his family all about me or anything, but it stung a little, that apparently they didn’t even know who I was.

Rowan shook his head. “His—the alpha—the senatorsaid that his wayward omega son had been lured here by some nefarious alpha. He keeps looking around like he’s expecting the house to turn into the set ofDeliverance.Like the banjo music is going to start up any second. And he talks to me like he’s an American tourist in a foreign country, all slow and loud.”

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