Page 54 of Cold Moon

Grovetown, the makeshift lab in the Hills’ barn, the pack alpha’s faith in me—all of it was so much more than I’d ever had in my father’s pack. But now, I was seeing it through the eyes of Jedidiah Sterling and his legal team.

I was untried and uncertified. I was doing the best work I could in a barn, with sketchily obtained Sterling produce, but then I saw the water bottles stacked in flats at the end of the rough wooden table I’d been working on. There was an open bottle on the end. I grabbed it and lifted it in the air toward the Sterlings in their silk suits.

“There’s a solution in this—even in the water.”

Archer Sterling scoffed. “In the water? What the hell would we put in water?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted, “but it’s present in the water, in lettuce we picked from one of your farms, in the dry products you can find in any grocery store. It’s some kind of chemical that affects omegas.”

“Why omegas?” Archer asked. His grandfather seemed all too happy to lean back and let others argue it out rather than raise his own voice.

“We’re not sure yet,” Linden offered, “but we know it does. Twice now, omegas have had episodes of weakness, nausea, loss of consciousness, and lethargy in the wake of being exposed toyourproducts.”

“Atbest, that’s anecdotal,” Archer said.

The second I felt doubt, my pack had my back. I had to have theirs.

“Sure,” I agreed. “For now. Today, it’s anecdotal, but what happens when packs start talking to each other? We compare notes, we work together. We’ll find the truth. You’re certain we won’t find you’re responsible for two decades of the Condition?”

“Well, I’m quite certain that stolen produce is not admissible evidence in a court of law,” Archer drawled. He had the cold, practiced look of a man used to getting his way, like he didn’t have to consider for even one moment that he might have to bend or compromise.

He had less on the line than we did, though. The Grove pack was protecting their lives.

“Perhaps not,” Linden said. I kept my mouth shut, all too aware of the sharp press of fangs sharpening behind the soft flesh of my inner cheeks. “But you have an opportunity here to work with us, to right wrongs and cooperate. Or we can continue our work, and when this all comes to a head, we’ll control the narrative. We’ll solve this, with or without your help.”

Mr. Sterling spared a fleeting glance for his lawyers, and a moment later, he scoffed. “I’ve heard enough. This is all children playing at rebellion when there’s nothing to rebel against. Run your tests in a barn practically open to the elements. You have nothing against us. It was foolish for us to come here, to waste our time on this hearsay. Archer, enough.”

His grandson rocked back on his heels, frowning, and one by one, the Sterling group filtered out of the barn and left us in my pathetic set up.

My breath came hard and fast, anger flooding my veins, searing through my limbs like acid until Linden touched my shoulder.

“It’s times like this I would encourage any alpha who can, to seek the company of an omega who soothes them,” Linden muttered quietly. “Should I take you back to the clinic?”

The clinic, and Skye.

That was as good as the alpha’s endorsement. There were plenty in the Grove pack who may not like me yet, but at the very least, I had Linden’s support.

“Yes, Alpha. Thank you.”

I must have sounded as desperate and grateful as I felt, because his smile softened. His thumb brushed my neck. “Of course, Dante.”

32

Skye

“Six or seven months,” I said, shrugging, trying to play it off. Yeah, so I was probably about to have a heat. It didn’t mean I wanted to talk about it.

I knew Brook and his family were open and chatted about things like that, but it wasn’t how things had worked in the Johnson household. Maybe my mother had always been old-fashioned and stodgy. Or maybe my father had influenced it—I’d never know, since he’d left so long ago I barely remembered him.

The truth was probably a little closer to my current issues.

The Condition.

Heats were the main thing shared by all omegas, hand in hand with the soothing pheromones that helped struggling alphas. Heck, the heats were probably caused by the pheromones, not that I was an anatomy expert, to be sure of that. I wasn’t sure there were many werewolf anatomy experts, since apparently there were humans who believed that male omegas could have babies, as though alpha-soothing pheromones made us all anatomically female.

My mother had always connected heats to the Condition, because both only happened to omegas. And frankly, my mother was ashamed of being an omega. Or maybe... maybe angry about it? That made as much sense. Being an omega had caused me more stress than any other accident of my birth, and it was almost certainly the same for my mother. My mother’s reaction to that stress was to hate everything about being an omega, and treat it like it was something bad and shameful.

All that to say that my family did not have chats about upcoming heats, and I wasn’t comfortable talking about it, much less in front of my pack alpha’s brother. Brook alone would have been bad enough, but Aspen was... well, he was an alpha.

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