Chapter Two
Cross
It wasn't supposed to be like this.
Chapter Three
Parker
There has never been a time when I didn't love Drew Cross. I have loved him every way there is to love someone. I have loved him with the innocent adoration of a younger child idolizing an older one. I have loved him fiercely as a friend and schoolyard defender. I have loved him from a distance with secret, brooding, teenaged lust that bordered on obsession for a while. Then I calmed my ass down and had a conversation with him and was afforded the opportunity to love him as a devoted partner, which also bordered on obsession despite my best efforts to keep it from overwhelming our relationship.
I have loved Drew well and fiercely. I have loved him as a packmate and a lover and a friend. My love for Drew changes with the need, but it is always there. And he has loved me.
My mother held a secret hope from the time we were very young that he and I would share a mate bond. There wouldn’t have been pups, but there would have been love and happiness. She wanted our love to protect us from everything, including the cold truth that even if we were mates, he would have to look elsewhere for an heir... and I would have to accept that. She wanted me to be happy and whole.
I wanted it, too. So much. And we tried. Goddess knows we've tried. We have had every type of relationship possible.
Drew's father, our Alpha, has been as tolerant as possible, but there are limits to everything—especially when balancing the needs of the pack and those of personal desire. Alpha Cross wanted his son to be as happy as my mother wanted hers to be, but the time to be realistic about the situation has come, and it's a hollow pit in my gut.
Drew loves me. I will never doubt that. He will come to me, and I will go to him for the rest of our lives. Any partner either of us might take will have to understand and accept that fact. There is no other way for us.
He will become Alpha when his father steps down, and I will become his Second. That would have been true even if we had the mate bond we wanted so badly. I was always destined to be Drew's Second, and nothing that happens between us will change that. Even during those three agonizing months when we fought and angry silence stretched between us, I was still his Second. And we still found our way back to each other. Nothing will ever change that.
But tonight will test the strength of it.
Drew has resigned himself. He will do what he's supposed to do, what he is required to do. He's twenty-one years old. Thetime for frivolity has come to an end. Regardless of my love or his, or the bond that actually has formed between us due to time and that very love, he is the next Alpha of Pack Cross. It is his duty to secure the alpha line. He'll do it. No matter how it hurts him or me, he'll do it because Drew is a good man and a good wolf, and he will be a good Alpha. He'll do it, and I have to let him.
I have to let him.
The pack depends on my acceptance as much as it depends on Drew's determination to get it done. I have to let him do this. The love we share won't disappear when he takes his Luna. I know it won't, but I'm selfish. I'm jealous. I know myself well enough to know that. I will stand by his side and support him while he completes the ceremony to take this female, this girl, as his future Luna, but I will resent every second of it.
She's just some girl. She doesn't have the history with Drew Cross that I do. She doesn't have years with him. She hasn't seen him at his best or his worst. I have. That's what will carry me through this, and it has to be enough.
The ceremony starts at dusk. Cross and his Luna won't be mating tonight, so there won't be what we crude youths, as Alpha Cross names us, call a full moon fuck. She's only seventeen. There will be another ceremony in a year or two, and that one will involve mating and marking and a full moon fuck. I am completely confident that I will have an even more difficult time enduring that than I will tonight's fiasco.
Cross is nervous. He keeps glancing at me with his big, solemn eyes, and I can feel him silently begging me to give him permission to go through with tonight. My permission is meaningless, but I, like him, will do whatever needs to happen for the strength and betterment of our pack. Cross and I will make it through this like we've made it through everything else.It's going to hurt, and it will be hard, but it's always been him and me, and it always will be.
Outwardly, it looks like a human marriage ceremony. I've never been to one, but I've seen them on TV and read about them. The groom, in this case Cross, stands at the end of the aisle to wait for his bride, or Luna, to come to him. Her father gives her hand to the groom, and that isn't much different than what will happen tonight. Her father will present her to Cross, Alpha Cross, and the entirety of Pack Cross. He will entrust her into Cross's care and protection until their bonding ceremony.
A year.
She will be with us for at least a year before she ever becomes a Luna.
We will endure it because we must. It will be like every other arranged mating between packs. They will perform the ceremony, the packs will celebrate the joining, and then she will take on the role of Cross's mate and future Luna. And when she goes into heat, she and Cross will do their best to produce the next heir to secure the line. Then she will go back to her duties. She may not even choose to stay on pack lands between heats if it takes a few tries for them to make a pup.
I think I might be sick.
Cross and I have had girls. We've even shared a few. It isn't because she's a female. It's because she's going to be inevitably permanent, and there's nothing I can do about it. The only comfort is that Cross and I have a bond that she will never have with him. She is just a means to ensure the well-being of the pack. I am his Second. I am his protector. I am his … I'm just his. And he's mine. Whatever that looks like, he's mine.
He looks at me again, and I give him a firm nod. We can do this. We can get through it.
Unlike the human marriage ceremonies, Cross is facing away from the opening to the clearing. He will be the last to see hisLuna. It has always been this way. I, as his Second, will see her before he does. I am violently torn between hoping that she's a hideous troll that won't turn his head or the beautiful knockout he deserves.
A beauty. Drew deserves a beauty. If he's going to have to procreate with her, I want her to be beautiful. That's what I want to want, anyway.
I really am horrible.
The gathered packs fall into a hush, and I look past Cross's pinched face down the leaf-strewn path and into the eyes of his Luna.
