Page 76 of Cold Moon

Anyway, it wasn’t like Skye’s mother was a dream parent, and Skye was pretty much perfect, so having a nasty parent wasn’t a life sentence.

I’d have been happy with a courthouse wedding, but Skye deserved the whole damn world, and the second I’d brought it up when we were having dinner at the Hills’ farm, Alexis had given me a sly smile. “Oh, you’ve got to let us help plan it. We’ve got, like, a million wedding magazines.”

Ridge had given a grunt, nodded, hooked his hands in his jean pockets. “Sure do.”

And that settled it. Before I knew what was happening, it felt like every omega in the Grove pack had a hand in planning the party. Colt was calling event coordinators and planners in from Washington DC, Alexis was master planning what flowers to have his mate grow for our arrangements, Brook and Aspen had built us an incredible wooden canopy with their bare hands. It’d be over at the Grove, and between Rowan’s baking, Juniper’s hard cider, and Wanda Chadwick, we had catering taken care of.

All of it, the pack just... provided. The wedding was still a couple months away, in May, but I’d need at least that long to settle into the idea that these people, who I’d once expected to hate me, to leave me to die in the middle of the woods, could give me so much.

Skye? He gave me everything. He’d saved me and given me a place.

In the months after the terrifying day I’d almost lost him, we’d gone back to the hospital for testing together. Linden had watched the flurry of activity in his brain as he’d asked Skye to think about stressful scenarios, and Skye’s remus gland reacted right there, proof on the screen that something happened to omegas that didn’t happen to alphas or betas.

For the first time ever, I saw my own brain too. That was a trip, the sensation of seeing inside yourself to a part of you that didn’t make sense. But alphas’ remus glands were smaller, tighter, more efficient.

We speculated it was why our wolves were bigger, why the Sterling chemicals couldn’t penetrate the same way they did for omegas. Omegas’ glands were large and porous and so reactive, because when they were stressed, they produced the pheromones that pushed the pack to protect. When they sensed our need, they secreted those pheromones that calmed us down, made us see clearly again.

Basically, omegas were magic.

Colt had taken to calling Skye the uberomega, and even if it was silly, if it always made Skye blush, it was nicer than being told he was broken or sickly. Instead, the more we learned, the more we had to admit that Skye’s vulnerabilities came from being, well, the best damn omega he could be.

It all fell into place, why omegas were so prone to developing the Condition during times of high stress, like puberty or pregnancy or when everything stacked up against them exactly wrong. It was a self-sustaining cycle—fear of the Condition caused it.

And sure, there were plenty of health benefits to eating apples regularly, but I had to think that the reason the Grove pack hadn’t been decimated like other packs, like the Reids, was because every single pack member knew they had their pack’s support, even when things went bad. It didn’t make things perfect, but they were a hell of a lot better than they could’ve been.

“How are you feeling, Dante?” Linden asked. He was holding a bottle of water—a Sterling-brand bottle of water—in Skye’s general direction.

Being the badass my mate so clearly was, there wasn’t a lot that put him over the edge, but the sight of that logo, all the stress that came with it, ticked up his fear response.

We were in the clinic, doing a simple stress test. Over the last couple months, we’d established what Skye’s body went through when he was afraid, how that might make him more vulnerable to the Condition. It was slow work, but Linden had brought in other doctors, reached out to other packs, and there was a definite pattern forming.

It helped that Archer Sterling had convinced the board of his grandfather’s company of the legal danger of continuing producing, well, everything.

Lately, Skye, Linden, and I had been researching the other side of all this—what part the remus gland played in pack dynamics and mating bonds.

“Well,” I said, “I feel a little like if you keep wagging that bottle of poison in my mate’s face, I’ll have to bite your hand off.”

Linden, strangely enough, trusted me enough not to take it literally. He set the bottle aside—away from Skye—and made a note.

Skye, on the clinic bed, fiddled with his glasses and smiled at me, like he wasn’t entirely put off by my protective instincts.

“Good,” Linden said, putting his clipboard aside. “I think that’s plenty for today. If we don’t head over, we’re going to be late.”

Despite being alarmingly pregnant, Claudia Wilson, the Groves’ second, was insisting on throwing our engagement party at her house. Really, I thought Alexis had done most of the hard labor for it, but she’d insisted. Grove omegas deserved to celebrate every step, and none more than Skye.

Linden drove us over. The party was a blissful kind of haze, where people clapped me on the shoulder and congratulated me and said I’d made a wonderful choice of mate—as if it’d even been a choice, and Skye hadn’t drawn me in with every sweet smile and wide-eyed blink and fidget of his glasses.

After dinner, Claudia raised her glass of cider and pushed to stand. Birch’s hand settled on her back, even as she clinked her fork on the side of her glass.

“I am so excited to be here tonight, welcoming our young Dante into this most esteemed pack of misfits.” Chuckles sounded all around the table. “When the pack came together to try and figure out what the hell to give you boys to celebrate the, you know, entanglement of your lives in perpetuity forever and ever—” Birch gave her a little nudge. “Or happily ever after and all that jazz. Whatever.”

She smiled indulgently down at her husband, but when she looked up across the table, her gaze met and settled on Linden. Subtly, he nodded.

“We decided, together,” she continued, “that the best thing we can give you is a fond farewell.”

My breath caught.

I turned in my chair to stare at Skye, horrified. Was I—

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