Chapter 36
Luna
I sleep like the dead and wake up in a house that smells like bacon.
It takes me a second to place where I am. For a long time, waking up meant feeling wrong with the wrong person. Every morning started with the same frantic, internal checklist. Where am I? Who’s breathing next to me? How many steps to the door, and what’s standing in my way?
But now, the inventory comes back wrong, which is to say right.
Warm. A square of orchard light laid across the floorboards.
Reed’s shirt, which I stole yesterday after the shower, soft and three sizes too big.
And underneath the house: a pan, three low voices, and the very specific percussion of somebody losing a fight with the toaster.
Safe, my omega mumbles, and burrows back down.
Indeed.
I get us both upright, drag a brush through the disaster on my head, and follow the bacon downstairs on bare feet.
I’m three steps from the bottom when I see a folder squared up dead center on the kitchen island. A folder like this is rarely good news.
“Morning.”
I look toward the voice and see the three alphas in the kitchen, all looking at me with a smile. Ash at the stove. Reed against the counter with a mug. Bram halfway across the room, the toaster’s entire situation abandoned behind him.
“Hi,” I smile.
Bram follows my eyes to the folder. Something moves through his jaw for a second before it’s gone.
“That’s quite an ominous folder for eight in the morning,” I say.
“Coffee,” Reed announces, and steers me by the shoulders into a chair. A mug lands in front of me, doctored exactly the way I take it. “Drink, Inspector. Eggs in thirty seconds. Ash did the bacon.”
I sit, my eyebrow shooting up. “Thanks but—is everything alright?”
Bram sighs, then pulls the chair out across from me, turns it around, and sits with his forearms on his knees. The temperature of the kitchen changes.
“Might as well tell you now,” he says, then pauses for a beat. “While you and Ash were gone, some things came together. I want to walk you through all of it, start to finish. Feel free to stop me any time you need to.”
Okay.
Okay.
“The bag,” Bram starts, and then he lays it out.
A man named Wade Fenton mailed it. Somebody hired him to find me.
I do the arithmetic before Bram gets there. “Derek.”
The name lands flat on the table. Reed’s jaw sets. Ash goes very still and very pleasant, which I know points the opposite direction from pleasant.
“We can prove the whole chain now,” Bram says. “Not just the bag. The letter he forged to cancel your wellness retreat, too.”
“And let’s not forget he indirectly paid for vandalism.” Reed, from the counter, arms crossed. “We’ve got it in writing.”
“How,” I say slowly, “do you have it in writing?”
“We went and saw Wade last night,” Bram says. “After you went up. The three of us.”
My stomach drops. “You—”
“We’re okay, not in legal trouble, nobody touched him,” he says.
A beat.
“Reed touched him a little,” Ash allows.
“A slap ain’t a crime,” Reed smiles.
Bram talks me through the rest. How Wade wrote everything all out. Longhand. Signed, dated, sworn, witnessed. Every instruction, every payment. And how they took pictures of every text Derek ever sent him.
I stare at the folder.
“So that’s what that is,” I say.
Bram leans forward, picks the folder up off the table and he holds it out to me. “And it is yours.”
I don’t take it. “What am I going to do with this?”
“Anything you like,” he says. “This is enough to open a real case against your ex. Charges with his name on every line. A protective order with teeth.” He keeps holding it there, steady. “Or it doesn’t go anywhere at all, if that’s what you prefer.”
“We have opinions,” Reed says.
“We have extremely loud opinions,” Ash agrees.
“And not one of them is the deciding vote.” Bram looks at his brothers until they’re quiet, then back at me. “It’s your name in that folder, sweetheart. Not ours. We don’t get to decide what happens to the man who did this to you. You do.”
I zone out for a second, then reach for the folder.
You’d drown without me, says Derek’s voice.
I open the cover. Derek’s words in a stranger’s cramped hand. Make her sanctuary leak money. Make her scared. His whole small, vicious campaign, laid out, dated and signed and witnessed by a sworn deputy.
And for once, I’m the one holding the power.
Drown, huh, I tell the voice back. Let’s see who drowns now.
***
I am outside in the sun, and I have decided two things.
One: I am going to nail Derek to the wall with criminal charges. And if he doesn’t end up in jail, I am at the very least getting a protective order. (Bram’s already sent a digital copy of the folder to his colleagues, so we’re expecting things to move quickly from here.)
Two: I am no longer going to think about any of that today.
Today I’m trailing Bram while he sorts out which trees are ready and which ones can wait. He walks the rows fast and barely seems to look at any of it.
“How do you know,” I ask, “when one’s ready to make cider?”
He pulls a folding knife and a little brown bottle out of his jacket, picks an apple off the nearest tree, and cuts it clean in half. Then he tips two drops onto the wet white face of it and holds it out between us.
We wait. The cut goes dark, most of it blue-black, except for a pale star that stays clear in the middle and spreads out from the core.
“Dark part’s still starch. Hasn’t turned sweet yet,” he says. “The sweet comes in from the center and works its way out. More star, more sugar.” He turns it so I can see. “This one needs about six more days.”
I stare at the blue-black stain. Starch conversion tests. I didn’t realize apple farming involved laboratory reagents.
“Here, try it with this one,” he says, plucking an apple from another tree.
I squeeze two drops of the solution onto the cut face of the second apple, watching the dark star expand. “Huh. Six more days?”
“I’d say three,” he says, his laugh warm in the quiet rows. “But pretty close.”
We then have a tasting session. He shaves slices off the knife and hands them over, tree by tree, and makes me tell him what I notice. One’s tart, the next is really sweet. By noon we’ve worked our way down to the cider barn, and that’s where I notice the smell.
The barn is built from old plank wood, and stepping inside is like stepping into the belly of a cider jug.
The air is sweet and sharp, fermenting just a little at the edges, grounded by the cold, mineral note of pressed fruit and wet oak.
Sharp shafts of sunlight pierce the wooden siding, illuminating a fine haze of dust over the rubber belts of an assembly line.
In the corner, a stack of wooden crates sits ready, and a long copper trough runs clean beneath the press.
Along the main wall, a cluster of faded family photos is pinned to the rough timber.
And underneath all of it, when Bram drags the big door shut against the wind, there is him.
Leather and coffee.
I know this smell but it still hits me every time.
My omega lifts her head.
Bram doesn’t notice, or does a very good job of pretending.
He heads over to the press, already stripped down to a grey henley.
The fabric strains tight across his broad shoulders and the thick curve of his back as he hauls a heavy crate of fruit, a single bead of sweat tracking down the side of his neck.
And, look. I walked in here a logical woman with a folder on a dresser and a plan with legal steps to it, but there is something profoundly unfair about watching a hunky alpha work, grunting.
He talks me through what he’s doing while he does it, and I catch maybe one word in three, because the rest of my attention is committed elsewhere.
There’s a grinder that chews the apples down to a wet brown mush.
He scoops the mush onto a square of cloth, folds it into a flat little parcel, lays a wooden rack on top, and starts the next one.
Cloth, rack, cloth, rack, his forearms working with every scoop.
I sit on an upturned crate and enjoy the show.
“You’re staring,” he says, a low rumble cutting through the creak of the press.
“I’m absorbing,” I say. “Holistically.”
He pauses, his hands resting on the wooden rack, and looks over his shoulder at me. His gaze is warm, holding that quiet, steadying pressure that always makes my chest feel tight in the best way. “Are you cold? There’s a clean wool blanket in the chest behind you if you need it.”
“I’m not cold,” I say. “I’m fine right here.”
His eyes linger on mine for a second, reading my face, before he turns back to the press.
“Good.” He fits the heavy iron plate over the top of the stack, grips the big iron screw, and leans his weight into the turn.
The tower of racks groans, sinking down on itself.
The first juice threads gold down the sides of the cloth and pours into the copper trough.
He glances up at me, a sheen of sweat at his hairline, his breathing slightly shallow, and I stop pretending I came in here to learn about making cider.
I get off the crate, cross the barn and lay my hand on his girthy cock through his jeans.
Something behind his eyes breaks, his gaze turning dark and wild.
“Fuck, Luna...”
Then his mouth is on mine, hard and desperate, his tongue licking deep into my mouth. One of his broad hands spreads wide between my shoulder blades, the other cupping the side of my face. He walks me backward, his heavy weight driving me until my spine hits the timber wall, pinning me completely.
“Off,” I gasp, my hands fumbling at the hem of my shirt.
“Let me.” He does it himself, slow, his knuckles dragging slowly up my ribcage.
He unhooks my bra and his mouth closes over my nipple, sucking hard, a loud moan slipping out of me.
Fresh slick is already drenching my thighs, and when his hand slides down into my leggings, his fingers finding me dripping and swollen, his breath stutters against my neck.
“Beautiful,” he rasps, his fingers sliding deep, drawing a gasp from me. “You’re soaked.”
“So I passed the modified starch test,” I whisper, a breathy laugh catching in my throat.
He laughs, too, but it turns into a growl when I wrap my fingers around his hard cock through his jeans, again.
He presses me down onto a folded canvas tarp in the corner, stripping my leggings off.
He shucks his jeans before kneeling between my thighs, leaning over me to notch his wet tip against my opening.
Then, he pushes in slow, the sheer width of him stretching me until the air is knocked clean out of my lungs.
“Yes,” I sob, arching my back. “Stretch me.”
My omega is completely satisfied, purring so hard my sternum vibrates with it.
I lock my legs around his waist, and he drives the rest of the way home, a deep, unified groan tearing from our throats.
Every single thrust is heavy and bottomless.
The base of him is already beginning to fill, the swelling knot catching at my entrance, dragging over a spot that whites the world out.
Good girl. That’s it. Let me. My nails dig into his shoulders. The coil inside me cranks up, tight and unbearable, past the reach of thought.
Then his knot swells to its limit, locking him deep inside me, and I come apart on a cry. He follows me seconds later with a sound torn straight from his chest, his hips snapping flush against mine.
I keen, my inner walls clamping down around him as he fills me past capacity, spilling into me while we both lie locked together and shaking on the canvas.
Bram drops his forehead to mine. His chest heaves. His thumb strokes along my cheekbone.
“There she is,” he breathes.
We stay locked together, breathing, his weight a roof pitched over me.
My omega has gone boneless and unbearably smug.
I scent-mark his throat, dragging my cheek along the leather and the coffee until it’s mine, until it’s all over me, and his purr starts up under my ear, an enormous low rumble I feel in my back teeth.
For a while there’s nothing in my head at all.
Eventually the knot eases. He goes soft and slips out of me slowly, taking his shirt to gently clean me up. Then, he places my leggings within reach, and presses his mouth to my forehead.
And that is when something hits me, coming up out of nowhere. A wave that starts behind my navel, right where his knot was, and rolls up through the whole of me. It’s hot. It wants. It cramps suddenly, my whole body clenching down around the nothing where he just was.
And a whine comes out of me, high, thin and entirely involuntary.
Bram goes still.
“Luna.” Bram’s hands frame my face. I can barely hold him in focus. “Hey. Look at me. What’s happening? What do you need?”
What do I need?
It’s almost funny. There is exactly one thing in the entire world, and it has a very short name.
I drag him down onto me. “More. Knot.” My voice comes out low and rough.
The last thing I see clearly is his face changing, the worry burning off it into something dark and focused.
Then his mouth is at my throat, and white closes up over my head.