Page 33 of Cold Moon

My eyebrows shot up. “Pie?”

Alexis grinned. “Don’t worry. Rowan’s pies are fine. No creepy chemicals in there.”

He led me in to sit in the chair across from their couch, then disappeared. He and Claudia came in with little plates of warm pie in their hands. He handed me one.

Claudia was a short omega, but round as I’d ever seen, working toward her third trimester if she wasn’t already in it. She wore flannel pajama pants and a sweatshirt, her hair pulled back and a broad smile on her face when she considered her plate. She sent that smile at me, for a second, but it was clear I came second to pie.

“Thank you for having me,” I said before I took a bite.

She waved her fork in the air. “It’s nothing. Should’ve had you over sooner. Introduced myself. I’m Claudia. You’re Dante.”

“That’s a normal introduction,” Alexis muttered to his plate.

She stuck her tongue out at him. “That’s Alexis,” she announced. “Now that introductions are out of the way, he and Linden tell me you’re working on figuring out what Sterling’s doing to cause the Condition.”

Even Ridge didn’t say it that bluntly, but I had a feeling that if you were an affected omega, that earned you the right to be pretty pissed at the big-ass corporation poisoning you.

“Yes. He said Alexis’s parents are bringing samples from a Sterling farm nearby.”

Claudia wrinkled her nose, making a face like she could still remember how just being near the farm had taken her down.

“Good. It’s time we got things moving. I know the pack’s been through a lot lately, and Linden has too much on his plate to do this on his own. It works out you showed up when you did, Dante. So, how can I help?”

I had her take me through her pregnancy—when she’d started showing symptoms, what cravings she’d had early on.

She reached over and squeezed Alexis’s hand. “I hate to think what might’ve happened if Alexis hadn’t offered to come out here and help me, or if Ridge hadn’t followed right after.”

Alexis’s face colored and he shrugged. “You’d have been okay.”

She gave me a skeptical look. “Sure. Except loads of omegas aren’t. I want to think Sterling doesn’t realize, but it’s just... so little actually affects werewolves. None of us were ready for this. The Groves are lucky to have a doctor, but werewolves have never had much need of professionally trained doctors, you know? Just somebody to pop a bone back into place so it doesn’t heal wrong.”

I nodded. Claudia and Alexis had come from another pack, not quite like my own, but rural and rustic and not at all prepared to deal with the Condition either.

“And you haven’t had any other symptoms since you cut out all Sterling products?” I asked.

Claudia and Alexis shared a look. “No. None. It’s damn hard to do, but my mate got in a tear right after we found out. But Sterling stuff is in everything. Processed sugar and flour. Pasta. Half the juices in a chain grocery store are from Sterling or one of their subsidiaries. As much as I want to say the solution is all werewolves cutting out Sterling products, it’s not that easy. Our pack is pretty self-sufficient. We have a local grocery store, restaurants run by werewolves who are sensitive to the things that affect us and willing to change for the good of the pack. And it’s hard to keep track of it here. Somewhere, like a city or a less organized pack, it’d be a full-time job for every omega, just keeping an eye out. It’d mean less omega independence, fewer job opportunities with the flexibility and resources we’d need to stay healthy. That’s better than, you know, fuckingdying, but it’s not great.”

It wasn’t. We couldn’t put the burden of all that on omegas alone, but I couldn’t imagine alphas like my father and Cain offering the kind of support they’d need—and definitely not without turning into domineering assholes about it.

“So what I need to do is isolate the compounds affecting omegas, and we have to get Sterling to remove them. That’s not going to be easy.”

I remembered the interview I’d watched in the clinic with the Sterling CEO. He’d been so defensive, I’d have to have hard proof, obtained legally. Thankfully, it sounded like it wasn’t going to be hard to drive out of town and purchase Sterling products, even if I started my work straight from Ridge’s old family farm.

“No,” Claudia agreed, “it’s not, but whether or not they mean to do this, it’s wrong. They need to fix it.”

I nodded. “I’ll do my best to help.”

Her grin returned. “I knew Linden picked the right guy for this. He’s got a good eye for that.”

I looked down at my pie, took a few more bites to finish it off. Meanwhile, she shifted around on the couch and pulled out a backpack.

“I was glad to hear you were coming by this morning too, you know.” She nudged the bag across the floor toward my chair with her foot. “Got some stuff for you. I heard you had some problems with the pack on the run.”

Oh. Linden hadn’t mentioned that.

I opened the bag, and there were folded up clothes inside, the tags still on. “You really didn’t have to—”

She cut me off with a huff through her nose. “In this pack, we take care of our own.”

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