Page 30 of Cold Moon

And dammit, I didn’t want him to either.

“Why are you curious about mating?” Alpha Grove looked up at me.

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I sat there, staring at my hands, chewing on my tongue.

“Do you want to mate Skye?” Alpha Grove asked after a moment.

My breath caught. I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

The man was damnably patient, sitting there and waiting for me to get my racing thoughts together.

“When I was in college, I dreamed about falling for a human. I’d never go back to my pack, and everything would be normal.”

Linden frowned. “But you’re a werewolf.”

I laughed. “Sure. But you must’ve heard about the cases where a wolf bit a human, and the human turned? I know it’s crazy, but I hoped it’d be like that. I’d find someone and they’d change me. I’d never have to hurt anyone. Then I came back to the pack, and it was awful.”

The alpha nodded, his fair brow furrowed with concern, but he just kept letting me lay it all out there.

“The things my father did to Brook—I don’t know how he could stand to do any of it. Brook was so miserable, the whole territory smelled like suffering and sadness, and Dad called him his mate. How could he call someone his mate and then hurt him like that? I know Skye’s not mine, not like that, but just the idea of him feeling a fraction of that pain makes me sick.” It made me want to tear and claw at anyone who’d dare hurt him, but I knew that was an impulse I should tamp down, and fast. The only way I’d find a place here was if I convinced everyone I was utterly harmless.

“That all makes sense, but Brook wasn’t your father’s mate.”

“I know,” I rushed to say. Brook hadn’t chosen to be there, and I knew with complete certainty it’d never been a mating bond at all, no matter what my father’d done to him. “I just don’t know that alphas deserve mates at all, when we’re capable of causing so much suffering.”

For a long time, Alpha Grove sat there and considered me. I could barely hear the sound of frustrated voices out in the parking lot from Skye and his mother, but I tried to tune them out, even though I was sure part of her upset had to do with me.

“Okay,” Alpha Grove said, shifting forward on his stool. “So I’m an alpha, and I have an omega mate, Colt. You know him?”

I nodded. “He was out in the woods the night Brook escaped.”

“The night you helped Brook escape,” Linden corrected. “I love Colt, and he loves me. Should either of us have to sacrifice our relationship because alphas can, potentially, be dangerous?”

“Of course not! But... you’re not like my father.”

Lightly, Alpha Grove put his hand on my knee. “Neither are you.”

I froze, staring at him hard. For so long, I’d been desperate for someone to say that, to say that what I was, was fine. Perhaps I wasn’t a violent alpha, capable of fighting for my pack—what my father’d always wanted. But I also wasn’t a selfish, destructive monster either. There was another way to be an alpha, embodied right there in the clinic by Doctor Grove in his hand-knit sweater.

“But I’m his son.” I pushed to see if he would break.

He nodded. “And even if half of his DNA is yours, you get to make your own choices. You wouldn’t make the ones he did.”

He said it so plainly, like he actually believed there wasn’t something vicious and evil and doomed there inside my head, clawing to get out.

“How can you be sure?”

“Because you saw how he hurt people, and you agonized over it, even when he didn’t.”

Okay, so even when I was a kid, I’d looked up at my father and known he was fucked up. Sure, I didn’t have that exact phrase for it at five years old, but I’d known what he did was wrong and bad, and in time, accepted that was who he was.

“In his life, Skye has had a lot of people try to make decisions about what’s best for him without considering what he wants. I’d suggest, if you want to remain friends, that you don’t make that mistake.”

I fiddled with the seam of my jeans, right at the knee. “And do you think, if I asked Skye out, he’d want to go?”

Alpha Grove outright laughed at that, slapping his knee and pushing to stand up. “I think Skye has a lot of regard for you, and you’ll have to talk to him about the rest of that.”

I huffed, throwing my hands up. “Okay. If you want to be all adult about it. I was thinking I could just pass him one of those notes: Do you like me? Circle yes or no.”

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