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I studied him. “Did you want it to be you? Did you think it should be you?”

He lifted his gaze to mine. “No. I never wanted that shit. Can you imagine me as the cyning?”

“No,” I said, laughing. “Not at all.”

He laughed, too. Then his laughter died out and he furrowed his brow in thought. “Did I grow up, though? Back then, I mean? I was supposed to. I was supposed to protect him and look out for him. But I just ended up, you know, partying a lot.”

“You were a kid,” I said. “We were all kids. You were doing the best you could.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“So was Damian,” I said. I made a face into my beer. “So was Opal.”

“I thought we weren’t feeling sorry for her.”

I smirked. “Yeah, okay.”

“Or him,” said Vincent. “We don’t have to feel sorry for him. He’s the cyning. He’s had everything he could ever want just handed to him. And, oh, sorry dude, sorry you had to marry some hot omega with a rich dad, sorry she bore your children and made you pot roasts.”

“Opal made pot roasts?”

“Yeah. She wasn’t a bad cook. I came for Thanksgiving and Christmas.”

“Huh,” I said. “I can’t imagine her cooking. Did she change a lot?”

He eyed me. “Are we just going to talk about them the whole time?”

I squared my shoulders. “No. Let’s not. Let’s talk about something else. How are you? What is your life like?”

“You know all of it, really. I’m an accountant. I live in Northbrook and commute into the city. I come out here on the full moon to run my wolf, and I go to the gym three days a week to sweat my frustrations out and that’s that.”

“No hobbies?” I said. “You used to play guitar.”

“Still do, sometimes. There’s a bluegrass circle I sometimes go to.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a circle of people with instruments. Mostly guitars, really, but banjos, fiddles, hand drums, too. Someone calls out a song, everyone plays. People sing.”

“Huh,” I said. “So everyone plays together?”

“Yeah, nothing like twenty instruments going. It can get a little weird with people wanting to solo, but they have accepted ways to go about that, and I’m not one to do a lot of fingerpicking, just straight-up rhythm guitar.”

I didn’t really know what he was talking about, but I nodded enthusiastically. “Well, that’s really great.”

“What about you? Hobbies?”

“Not really,” I said.

“You used to draw sometimes,” he said.

“I use that in my job, I guess. For the events we plan, I do a lot of the aesthetics, making sure things look the way we want them to look. My boss says I have an eye for it.”

“And that’s enough?”

I nodded. “Yeah.” Although being back here, remembering the way things used to be, all of the intensity of the wolf instincts and the way we interacted here, it’s like remembering a life with brighter colors and intense volume. Have I been living on mute?

“And you’re single?”