Chapter 46
Luna
I have become exceptionally good at bottle inventory tracking. But then again, given my background as a librarian, I guess it shouldn’t be a shock.
“Eight forty,” I call out, pressing the last sticker square on the last bottle and sliding it down the bench. “Eight hundred and forty bottles of Hollow Gold, all labeled and straight.”
“I feel guilty you’re enjoying this much so much,” Reed calls out from under the bottling line, where he’s currently losing a ten-minute argument with a jammed conveyor. “We must really be depriving you of healthier hobbies.”
“It’s just one of the rare things in my life where the totals are actually going up instead of down,” I shoot back, grinning. “Alphas excluded, of course.”
“So I’m right, we really are depriving you.” A sharp metal clunk echoes from the machine, and the line shudders back into motion with a triumphant wheeze. “I promise we’ll show you a much better time once we get our hands on that two million dollars.”
I mean... I actually, honestly like the count.
We’re almost through the pressing now, which is good news, but it comes with a catch.
Because the pressing, I’ve learned, was never the part that ate up the calendar.
It’s the weeks that follow, while the cider sits in the dark and conditions, before a single bottle can actually go out the door.
So having a high bottle count doesn’t mean we get to coast now.
But that’s fine with me, because I like being out here in the cider barn anyway.
“You’re doing the math face again,” Ash says.
He’s leaning in the big doorway with the light behind him, sleeves rolled, looking too expensive for the room the way he always does.
He’s got the manifest in one hand and that half-smile that still makes me melt.
“Want to tell the room, or keep gloating privately?”
“We’re a hundred and sixty short and ahead,” I say. “I’m allowed to gloat.”
The bond gives me a warm pull. They’re all peaceful, happy. I push a little contentment back down it and feel it land.
“Knock knock.” Jenna comes in sideways with a thermos under one arm and a tin held out in both hands. “Back with the doughnut order.”
“You rock, Jen,” Reed says, surfacing from the machine and wiping a smudge of grease from his jaw onto his shoulder,
Bram comes over from the pallet he’s been loading. “Nuh-uh. You will not touch my doughnuts with those hands.”
Reed touches them with those hands. Bram swats him with a rag, though he’s smiling.
Then Jenna sets the tin by my clipboard and pours me a cap of coffee, because she’s probably clocked that I forget to drink. For a second it’s just the two of us at the end of the bench, the line clattering, the alphas arguing about something behind us.
“You look good,” Jenna says. “Quite the contrast with the first time we met,” she smiles, bumping my shoulder with hers.
I look around. The bottles, the three of them.
“Yeah,” I say. “I think this place is starting to feel like a second home.” Which is the strange part, after everything.
Derek’s still out there somewhere, still not picked up, even with a case against him.
A few weeks ago, that would have owned my nights.
Now it barely reaches me as I feel completely safe surrounded by my alphas.
Reed’s pager goes off on his belt, a flat electronic shriek, and my heart skips before my brain can catch it.
“Sorry,” he says, probably feeling my surprise through the bond. He thumbs the pager quiet and squints at it. “It’s just a small grass fire by a guardrail. My colleagues have got it.”
***
By full dark, the four of us are collapsed on the couch back in the cottage, surrounded by dirty dishes and with nobody willing to be the first one to get up.
Bram’s got his laptop open on the arm of the couch, doing the books or the camera feeds or both. Ash is half asleep against my side. Reed’s on the floor with his back against my shins, working the remote. The fire we lit ticks and pops in the corner.
I’m warm in a way that goes all the way down. I could stay right here, in this exact arrangement of limbs and firelight, for the rest of my natural life.
BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.
Bram’s laptop chimes with the ping of my camera program. Our heads come up and Bram tips the screen toward us. A little red box is blinking in the corner of a grid of gray camera squares.
“Motion,” he says, and taps it. The grid shrinks to one feed. “Barn cam.”
We all lean in. It doesn’t help. The barn sits there on the screen, dark, the cold storage a darker block beside it. Nothing I can see is moving.
“Deer,” Ash says, not opening his eyes. “It’s always a deer. Or Reed’s raccoon.”
“That raccoon has a name and a heart of gold.” Reed’s already sitting up, though, reaching for the laptop. “Pull the clip from when it pinged. Let’s see what set it off.”
Bram scrolls back for the recording. I get up to refill my water while they squint at gray footage. The window over the sink looks straight across the yard at the barn, so I glance out as I run the tap and—
“Holy shit, guys—”