The Ruined Luna

Fourteen

Kyrian

Kyrian was pleased to see Jolene, Jo, he corrected, sitting with the Delgado siblings. He'd worried she would be to nervous and unsure to mingle with the pack. He took it as a sign that he was doing something right when it came to her. Anything to make up for the circumstances that had brought her to his pack.

That he'd had to resort to a purchase still kept him up at night and ate at his stomach. One day she might forgive him, but he wouldn't forgive himself. Modern packs didn't do that sort of shit anymore, and anyone who did deserved to be left in the backwaters of history.

He began to gather a plate of food, intending to grab it and return to his office where an urgent security report that couldn't wait rested on his desk, when he heard it. An unfamiliar but warm, feminine chortle. He turned.

It was like day and night, and an unexplainable jealousy twisted in his belly like a coiled snake. The Jo that sat there, her head close to Winnie, laughing, was nothing like the statue who'd greeted him that morning. Her anger, while more than he hoped for, paled in comparison to her now. Not when the corner of her eye crinkled in amusement, or how her plump lips curved upward in a tempting cupids bow and showed off a set of flawless white teeth. As irrational as it was, as selfish as it made him, he wanted to be the reason she smiled.

His feet were moving before he'd even given the thought life, carrying him across the room until he was an arm's length away, bathing in the sound of her laughter as it died away and their eyes met.

"Hello Jo." He rumbled, taking in the sight of her.

"Alpha." She replied throatily, pupil blowing wide before all expression was wiped clean so fast he was left wondering if he'd imagined the whole thing.

"Winnie. Tripp." He added after a moment, his gaze flickering between the two.

They simultaneously dipped their heads. "Alpha."

Jo continued to meet his gaze long after the others had dropped theirs before her attention returned to her plate.

"Mind if I join you?" he asked, already sitting down beside Tripp before hearing their affirmation.

He didn't know what he was doing, only that he needed to be near her. Just for a little while longer.

Winnifred glanced between him and her brother, before picking up the conversation he'd obviously interrupted.

"Right, well, anyway. So what got you into Forestry in the first place?"

Jo shifted in her seat. "My family used to camp a lot."

"Ah, yeah mine too. Well, not the camping thing, but I grew up in the garden. One day you're making mud pies while your parents harvest bell peppers, then the next you're the one in the greenhouse preparing the seedlings for transplant. How Tripp ended up in pack security still boggles the mind."

Tripp pinched the bridge of his nose. "I had other skills that were of better use elsewhere."

"Being a knuckle dragging barbarian is a skill?"

"Oh, like digging a hole in the dirt takes so much brain power."

"And being punched in the head too many times does?"

The siblings devolved into their usual squabbling, leaving him free to eat and pretend to listen.

Jo pretended too, only she pretended he wasn't there. Normally, a scent would have told him all he needed to know about how someone was feeling. But other than wolf, not even the faintest whiff gave him any clue as to what she was thinking. So, he studied her from his peripherals.