Page 15 of Crave

“I should be surprised that you managed to sneak up on a trained Legion soldier again, but I’m really not.” I turned, and there she was. My childhood crush, the dream who’d turned into a nightmare. “You shouldn’t be out here; it’s late.”

She raised a single eyebrow. “I could say the same to you.”

I inclined my head. “Then we’d both be right.”

Instead of moving back toward the house, she sat down beside me. “It's weird being home. I kind of expected you to climb through my window again.”

“I didn’t think it would be quite as welcomed as it once was,” I murmured, giving her a crooked smile.

She sighed and tilted her head back to look at the stars. “No, probably not. Things got so complicated.”

I grunted my agreement and just sat beside her, soaking in her presence, like I was a plant who’d been deprived of water for so fucking long that I was basically just a husk. I pretended to concentrate on the stars like she was so she wouldn’t think I was looming.

Shrugging off my jacket, I laid it on the grass behind us, then lay down. I didn’t tell her to join me, didn’t put any pressure on her at all. This moment felt fragile, and I was determined to hang onto it as long as possible.

I held my breath as she lay down beside me, her body pressed to my side softly. “Are you ever going to tell me what went wrong?”

She stiffened but slowly relaxed, though she was still silent. “I guess I can probably tell you now, but you have to promise you won’t tell a soul.”

With those words, I was transported back to being a twelve-year-old kid again, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on her bedroom ceiling. “I swear it. Except for Murphy.”

She snorted a laugh. “Nothing’s changed, then.”

I turned my face to look at hers. “No. I love him more now than I could’ve even imagined back when we were kids.”

She met my eyes. “You’d do anything for him, right? Anything to keep him safe?”

My brow creased. “Of course.”

“What if you thought he was an Alpha but really, he was something else, and you knew if his parents found out, his life would be miserable?”

“Susannah…”

“What if youtriedto save him, and instead it backfired horribly, and then the only thing you could do to keep him safe was to become the shield between him and a monster? Even if it meant giving up your own happiness. Even if it meant lying to everyone. Would you do it?”

I swallowed hard, feeling the slight tremble of her body beside mine. I wanted to grab her, drag her into my arms and tell her that I’d be the shield between her and the monsters now. The shield for both of them.

Instead, I reached out and twined my fingers through hers. “You know I would. What's this all about, Zanny?” I used her childhood nickname for the first time in a decade. It had felt wrong calling her something so intimate when she’d belonged to another Pack.

She blew a large breath out her nose, and I could feel her tensing. “Quinn is an Omega.”

Of all the things I thought she was going to say, that wasn’t it. “No, he’s not. He doesn’t smell like an Omega.”

She turned to me, and if looks could castrate, my balls would be sashimi on the floor right now. “Are you Alpha-splaining Omegas to me, an actual Omega, right now?”

Ah shit. Backtrack, backtrack.“Of course not. I just… I’ve stood next to him. Had entire conversations with him. I’ve breathed him in. Hesmellslike a Beta.” I squeezed her hand. “Is that why you guys ran away? I knew there had to be a reason—other than teenage rebellion, like the grapevine said.” I cleared my throat. “I always thought that it was perhaps because of what we said. What we asked.”

Yeah, we’d told her that we wanted her to be Pack—Quinn too—because even back then they were a package deal. Murphy had told her he loved her, an emotion we both felt, but I still didn’t have the balls to say it out loud.

Less than two days later she was gone, and when she came back, she walked right into Wilkie’s arms. Or so I thought.

She closed her eyes against the night, and I wanted to drop it. She seemed even more vulnerable out here in the darkness, like the moon had stripped away all her armor and left her bare to the elements.

“That wasn’t it at all. It had nothing to do with you and Murphy.” She let out a mirthless laugh. “Okay, maybe a little to do with you, but not in the way you think.” She rolled onto her side, and I was forced to stare into those pretty eyes that had haunted my dreams. “This is really Quinn’s story to tell, but he doesn’t like talking about it, so I’m pretty sure he won’t care. It happened the night after you and Murphy walked us home from Roch’s party. You’d given me your hoodie to keep me warm, and I was pretty sure you and Murphy were the most perfect Alphas in all of Maxton. Way better than the rest of those drooling bastards, who only cared about me because Raiden was my brother and they wanted to use me to get a little closer to an Omega.”

Raiden was nice, but we’d never had the spark we’d had with his older sister, that was for sure. You only had to see him with the Huxley-Gray Pack to know there were no other men or Manix for him. The addition of Naja had only cemented that. I made a soft sound of assent so she’d continue.

“Anyway, that night, I was still in your hoodie when Quinn came over to tell me that his parents had promised him to Wilkie as a Beta when he turned eighteen. He was stressed, terrified even. Quinn is beautiful, obviously, and I knew enough about Wilkie even back then to know he liked to break pretty things. I was holding him, promising him everything would be okay, that Murphy had said he loved me and I’d insisted on Quinn being part of the Pack when it happened. He buried his face in the hoodie I was wearing—yourhoodie—and he let out an Omega whine. And his scent, it filled the air, thick like melted chocolate. I might never have seen an Omega in the early stages of the yearning, but I knew that sound instinctually. Later, we figured it was because he smelled your scent in the fibers of the hoodie.”

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