Page 29 of Cold Moon

Dante

The door swung open with a bang, and I jumped, Alpha Grove freezing over me with a pair of tiny, sharp scissors. I looked over, and there was a slight woman with dark hair and narrowed eyes, asking to speak with Skye alone.

I wanted to hop up, ask what her business was, but she smelled like a member of the Grove pack, and then Skye said it—“Mom.” I had absolutely no business blundering into that, even if I could’ve gotten off the bed right then.

Skye was quick to usher her outside, and Alpha Grove didn’t comment, simply clicked his tongue against his palate and frowned.

“I should’ve taken these out before the run yesterday,” he muttered.

A shift wasn’t the worst for stitches, but I’d noticed when I’d gotten dressed that morning that they were a little messier than they had been, my skin and muscles moving with the shift the night before.

“You couldn’t have known I’d join,” I said. Anyway, I was a werewolf, and any uncomfortable tugging had been short-lived before it healed.

Alpha Grove gave me a look that said he should have known precisely what everyone was going to do at any given time, but he returned to his work, and I decided to change the subject as I laid back and tried not to squirm under the strange feeling.

“What’s it like, having a mate?”

The question came out of a morning spent with Skye’s scent in my bed, his warm, twinkling gaze first thing in the morning. It was domestic and lovely, tempting me to consider things I’d never thought were for me.

Alpha Grove tilted his head to the side, frowning. “Well, for a long time, I thought I didn’t need one. Wouldn’t find one, either. It was just—I didn’t really let myself think about it.” That was something I could relate to, after all the Reid omegas died and I saw what vile impulses really made alphas tick. “Every once in a while, I’d feel out of control or like I couldn’t protect the people I loved, but it was never bad for me. Then I met Colt, and it was like, hm... it was like everything in me needed everything in him.”

I swallowed hard. That sounded like a lot—the all-encompassing sort of feeling that alphas used to justify all kinds of assholery.

“How do you keep from hurting him?” I asked.

The alpha looked at me then, gray eyes swimming with sadness. The corners of his lips turned down. “Well, I don’t want to hurt him, first of all. But even when I slip up, Colt lets me know it. He’s sensitive, when he feels like alphas are trying to use him for something—the family he comes from is full of alphas who use people as leverage. Politicians, mostly.”

With a flinch, I hunched down on the bed. That was exactly what I was worried about—that all alphas everywhere were natural users.

“But as we’ve gotten to know each other better, started building a life together, we’ve gotten better at communicating—me at asking for what I need or want outright, and him at letting me know when he’s feeling insecure about where his place and value in the pack comes from.”

Hell, looking at Colt Doherty at the center of the pack meeting the night before, I never would’ve imagined him being insecure about anything. But that was what it meant to be with someone, right? You were supposed to be able to share your insecurities with your partner, even if you hid them from everyone else.

Alpha Grove’s lips twitched, and he got a wistful, far off look in his eyes. “I don’t suspect Colt would let me get away with it for long, if I were doing something that genuinely upset him.”

“Would Skye?”

He came back to himself, frowning at me. “Would Skye what, let you get away with upsetting him?”

“Or hurting him.”

Alpha Grove took a long, slow breath. I realized, then, what it sounded like, and rushed to add, “Not that I want to. I don’t want to hurt him. Never.”

“But you’re worried you will?”

I couldn’t answer that. Of course I was! That was what alphas did when we took what we wanted—hurt people.

It wasn’t until I’d come to Grovetown that I’d even considered there could be a healthy alpha-omega relationship. Growing up, I’d watched the Condition take over my pack, omegas disappearing one by one as they fell ill and never recovered. I remembered my father locking my mother up, her wasting away in our shabby little house.

Then he’d taken Brook, and that’d been so much worse.

Finally, Alpha Grove stopped waiting for me to respond. He sighed, lowering himself onto a stool between the beds—one of those low, round kinds on wheels. I sat up so I could see him.

“No, I don’t think Skye would let someone get away with hurting him. He’s a patient guy, has had to learn to tolerate a lot, but he knows he deserves to be treated well by people, and has never had to deal with much of the opposite. One thing you need to understand about him is he’s always lived with the Condition, and that’s how the pack has always known him. When his mother was pregnant and she fell ill, my father called the whole pack together to look after her. Nobody thought Skye’d even make it. But he did, and the whole pack felt a swell of pride over having a hand in it. Everybody’s protective of him.”

What he was telling me, between his words, was that if I wanted to get closer to Skye, that could cause me some trouble with the Grove pack. I was a Reid, a foreign alpha, and untrusted.

But Skye was the closest thing I had in this territory to a friend, and there was something else there too—something in the way he let his head rest on my chest the night before, the frustrated look on his face after we’d found my ruined clothes, how he didn’t want to leave me alone.

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