Alpha Moon (The Cain Chronicles) (Seasons of the Moon) (8 page)

Rylie backed away from the door as he approached, pretending that she had been beside his desk the entire time.

“Here you go,” Bert said. Instead of handing the water bottle to her, he set it on the corner of the desk.

“Thanks,” she said, lowering herself to the chair. “Where do I sign?”

He had been the one to suggest that they check out the land he was selling together, so it was surprising that he readily handed her a pen without asking to go into the mountains. He wiped his palms dry on his slacks as she began to sign.

Bert seemed to flip the pages too slowly, no matter how quickly she signed. Almost like he was wasting time.

As each page turned, the tension in the air climbed. Rylie skimmed each page, reading the terms, but the words seemed to blur. She had a hard time focusing past his scent. His adrenaline was increasing, along with his heart rate.

Rylie’s pen hesitated on the last pages, which only lacked her signature, and his. The agreed figure was printed on a table at the top. “Oh,” she said, “I haven’t even paid you yet.”

He laughed. “Oh. Yes.”

“Let me go get it,” she said.

“Have your friend get it,” Bert said quickly.

Rylie frowned. “No…I think I’ll get it.”

Before he could keep arguing with her, she jumped to the door, stepping into the waiting room.

“Is it done?” Jessica asked.

Rylie ignored her and went to Abel’s side. “Something’s up,” she said, dropping her voice to a whisper so that her mom wouldn’t hear. “He already had everything notarized, and he reeks of fear.”

Abel didn’t look at her. “Union’s here.” He sounded so calm that, for a moment, Rylie wasn’t certain that she had heard him right.

She swiveled to look out the window. Two black SUVs had just parked at the curb.

Her heart hammered. “This was a trap. They’re going to arrest me.”

“Who is ‘they’?” Jessica was right behind her.

Rylie shut her eyes, trying to take deep breaths.

Her mom had heard them.

“Jessica,” she began, but she didn’t get a chance to finish.

“Are those from the Office of Preternatural Affairs?” Jessica asked, stretching on her toes to look around Rylie’s head. “They’re all over the city, but I’m surprised to see them…” She trailed off, staring at her daughter hard, as if her brain had just caught up with what she had heard. “Why are you worried about the OPA arresting you?”

A surge of dizziness overwhelmed Rylie. She grabbed Abel’s arm to keep standing.

“I can explain,” Rylie whispered.

“Why would they be after
you
, sweetheart?” Jessica asked again, louder this time, hands clutching her purse like a teddy bear. Even as she asked the question, Rylie could already see the dawning comprehension in Jessica’s eyes.

“They’re werewolves,” Bert said, laughing hysterically from the door to his office. “Werewolves!”

Abel tore away from Rylie, crossing the waiting room in a flash. He fisted Bert’s suit in both hands and lifted him off of the ground.

“
What did you do?
” he roared, shaking Bert.

“Abel, no!” Rylie shrieked. It wasn’t from fear of what he would do to Bert—it was the acute awareness that this right here, with Abel holding a man two feet off of the ground, shouting in his face, would be her mother’s first impression of werewolves. Because now she knew. She
knew
.

Jessica backed away from Abel, shaking her head slowly. She fumbled for the doorknob.

Rylie caught her mom’s arm. “You can’t go out there,” she said, locking the door and pulling the shades. “The Union’s waiting.”

“But—”

“
No
, Mom!”

Abel carried the real estate agent into his office. “Tell me!” he shouted, shaking Bert again, who was spluttering incoherently.

“I saw the surveillance footage on the news—and when I saw you three having lunch at Poppy’s, I called the hotline. They told me to hold you. They said they would take care of it. That’s all I did!”

Abel slammed Bert to the desk.

“Finish signing the papers,” he growled. “And then thank whatever god gave life to a tiny-dicked weasel like you that I’m not making you sign in blood.”

“Abel!” Rylie gasped.

Bert wasn’t arguing. With his back flattened to the desk, he signed. Abel shot Rylie a look.

“Finish it,” he said.

She had no idea how legal paperwork signed under threat by werewolf could possibly be, but she signed. Everything was notarized. It was done. The land was hers.

Abel tossed the envelope onto Bert’s chair, then dropped him. “Sit,” he said in a low growl, golden eyes dangerously bright.

The front door rattled.

A muffled voice said, “This is the Union. Open up!”

Rylie slammed the inner door and locked that one, too. All four of them were confined in the back office. But how long would it last? How long would the Union try to enter peacefully before breaking windows? She could only hope that the threat of werewolves on the other side would make them cautious.

Jessica had backed herself into a corner, face pale.

“Someone needs to tell me what’s going on,” she said in a strangely calm voice, as if she had snapped, gone somewhere far beyond panic.

“Your daughter’s an Alpha werewolf,” Abel said. “I’m her mate. The government’s out to get us, and we just bought land to turn into a sanctuary where they won’t be able to find us. That explanation enough?”

“Alpha,” Jessica echoed. “
Mate
?”

Rylie’s head throbbed. She clutched her temples in both hands, fighting back the urge to cry. It was the wrong time for tears—she needed to think, formulate a plan, figure out how they would escape without the Union following them.

“I’m so sorry, Mom,” Rylie whispered.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because it was a secret. And when it wasn’t a secret anymore, when the whole world knew, it was because some senator got assassinated and everyone feared us,” she said. A sob ripped from her, making her body shake. “I don’t want you to think that I’m evil.”

Jessica’s face melted into disbelief. “Oh, baby,” she said.

“When would I have told you anyway? When I stopped visiting you during the summer? When you stopped calling during holidays? When I sent you a
wedding invitation
and you never responded?”

“You sent me a wedding invitation?” Jessica asked.

Now that Rylie had started crying, she couldn’t stop. She pressed her face into Abel’s arm. He rubbed her shoulder—an awfully comforting gesture, considering he was still glaring death at Bert and growling low in his throat. “It doesn’t matter. I didn’t get married. But you didn’t know that, did you?”

“Sweetheart, I never got an invitation.” Now that the first rush of shock had passed, Jessica was composing herself. It was a visible process: sweeping her hair behind her ears, tugging her shirt into place, grabbing the lipstick out of her purse. She didn’t put it on, but holding it seemed to give her strength. “When did it happen?”

“The wedding?”

“The…bite,” Jessica said stiffly.

“At summer camp. When I was fifteen.”

She paled with the second punch of shock. “Oh. When you disappeared for two weeks.” Rylie nodded mutely. “I had no idea.”

“You haven’t had any idea about who I am in ages, Mom,” she said. “Maybe ever.”

A ghost of a smile crossed Jessica’s mouth. “And you don’t know me, either. Not if you think I would care that you’re a werewolf.”

“You don’t?”

The pounding on the front door grew louder. Jessica straightened her spine, eyebrow lifted. “Of course not. You’re my daughter. You could be
gay
, and I would still love you.”

Rylie felt a confusing mix of relief and anger—like being gay was somehow worse than being a werewolf? She would never understand her mother.

But maybe she didn’t need to.

Jessica carried on. “And Alpha, you say? That means you’re…what, the head werewolf?”

“The most powerful of them all,” Abel said.

Hearing that coming from a man twice Rylie’s size seemed to mean something to Jessica. Her smile grew. It wasn’t a happy smile, but a proud one. “Of course she is,” she said.

The pounding outside silenced. Footsteps creaked in the lobby. Shadows crossed over the frosted glass of the door.

The Union had come inside.

“Oh God,” Rylie whispered, hugging Abel’s arm tighter. All it would take was one well-aimed silver bullet, and they’d have her.

Abel turned to Bert. “Is there a way out through the back?” Abel asked.

“Just past the bathroom,” Bert said, raising a shaking finger at the short hallway beyond his desk. It was concealed by the fronds of a huge fern and an Asian-style room divider.

“There’s no point in running,” Rylie said. “They’ll follow us.”

“Unless they catch the werewolf,” Jessica said.

Abel stiffened. “Not happening.”

Jessica set down her purse and took a deep breath. “You were identified off of surveillance footage. That’s what he said, right? You and I are practically twins, sweetheart. A few years won’t be distinguishable through low-quality video. I’ll go out there.”

“You could be arrested,” Rylie said. What she didn’t say was,
You could get shot
.

Her mom seemed to understand both. She blew out a long, steadying breath. “They won’t hold me for long. They’ll realize I’m human soon enough.” She pointed at the hall. “Go.”

“No,” Rylie said, but Abel was already dragging her away.

He gave Jessica an appraising look over Rylie’s head. Her bigotry aside, he seemed to approve of what he saw. “Thanks,” he said, and then he turned to Bert, scooping up Rylie’s copies of the paperwork. “We paid you. The papers are signed. That land is
ours
, and you’ll turn nothing over to the OPA, or I’ll eat you.” He punctuated that statement with a flash of his very white teeth.

Bert nodded frantically.
Anything
to get them out of his office.

“You can’t do this,” Rylie said to Jessica.

“I’ll see you soon, sweetheart,” she said, hand on the doorknob.

Abel’s arm was an iron bar around Rylie’s waist. Even twisting with all of her werewolf strength, it wasn’t enough to break free.

He hauled her down the hall and out the back of the building.

The air was silent on the street behind Bert’s office—weirdly calm, after the tension inside. People were wandering between restaurants and shops, chatting quietly. Clouds drifted in the sky.

Rylie tensed, prepared to hear the gunshot that would mean her mother had been killed.

It never came.

RYLIE WASN’T BRAVE
enough to pick her mother up from the Office of Preternatural Affairs’s detention center, so Summer volunteered for the job—maybe a little too enthusiastically. There was a weird glint in her eye when she left. Rylie had a feeling that Jessica was about to “meet” her granddaughter, with total honesty this time. And she was
really
grateful she wouldn’t have to be there for that conversation.

She sat on a tree stump with her knees hugged to her chest as Abel erected a tent-cabin nearby, waiting for word from Summer. Watching her mate work shirtless in the sun was enough to make the most impromptu camping trip interesting. She had been hiding on their new property since Friday afternoon. Rylie had been tense the entire time, expecting the Union to find her at any moment. But they hadn’t. It had been silent. Even peaceful.

Their new property was perfect: two thousand acres of wilderness surrounding a supposedly uninhabitable valley of the Appalachian Mountains. Rylie hadn’t seen the entire thing as a human yet, but she had spent three days exploring its boundaries as a wolf, and the wolf was
very
satisfied. Dense trees, a river, cliffs, a hundred caves—she suspected it would take years to see every inch of her new property.

Developers would arrive soon to build real cottages, set up generators, and dig wells. Until then, Rylie and Abel would live in a tent-cabin—better than sleeping on the grass under the empty sky.

She blushed as she watched the flexing muscles of Abel’s back. Of course, there were worse things than sleeping with his arms as her only shelter.

The clearing that they had chosen as home was bordered on one side by cliffs, and on the other by a small lake. A huge waterfall fed into it. Its top was so tall that the water misted before it reached the surface, leaving Rylie’s hair pleasantly damp when she stood on the shore.

Soon, that little clearing would be occupied by Seth, by Summer and Abram, by the pack. For now, it was just Rylie and Abel and the trees.

Even with her mom arrested by the Union, life was pretty good.

Abel buried a final stake into the ground. “There we go.” He stepped back and dusted his hands off on his jeans. “Look good to you?”

Rylie watched the flex of his abs, the twist of his shoulders. The remaining scars on his chest only served to accentuate his muscles. The ridges were as fascinatingly labyrinthine as the forest, and as interesting to explore.

“Yes,” she said.

He gave her a sideways grin. “I worked up a sweat. Need to wash it off. Want to swim?”

“In
that
?” Rylie eyed the lake. “It’s all ice melt.”

“I’ll keep you warm,” Abel said. He dropped his jeans, baring the vee of his Adonis belt, his muscular thighs, and…everything in between. Her face started burning all over again.

It took her two tries to speak. “I don’t know…”

“Did I just hear a ‘yes’?”

Abel’s hands clamped down on her arms. He hauled her off of her feet.

“Abel!” she shrieked.

In a flash, he flung both of them into the water. Rylie barely had enough time to suck in a lungful of oxygen before she was slapped with frigid water. Her skin prickled and burned. Her dress was sodden, tangled between her legs.

She hit the sandy bank and pushed up, but Abel was in the way, all hot flesh to make up for the cold water.

His mouth claimed hers. She parted her lips more in shock than invitation, but he took advantage of it, tongues tangling and teeth nipping. Rylie tasted melted frost, the meat on his breath, the very masculine and animal and so completely
Abel
flavor of his lips.