The difference between being actually in heat and not quite in heat turned out to be that Casey could actually fall asleep between rounds of sex and was still marginally coherent during them. He still needed, and his scent was obviously strong enough to have an effect on Adam, but the whole experience was missing a layer of total-brain-takeover. Casey was probably going to be able to remember practically all of it.

They’d fucked five or six times before the moon was sinking behind the trees through the west-facing window, casting long sharp shadows through the room.

Adam was fucking him again, with Casey lying on his belly and Adam blanketing his entire body. They weren’t knotted, but Adam was still moving slowly, nuzzling and kissing at the back of Casey’s neck and his shoulders. It was good. It was what he needed, what he wanted, and Casey was going to come soon, but there was something else—an itch under his skin that wasn’t for sex. Something else he needed. Something that scared him, something that he was too tired to fight off with sharp words and distraction.

Another slow thrust jolted pleasure through him, somehow still shocking after a whole night of overwhelming sensations. Casey’s breath caught and his eyes prickled, and he realized what was about to happen a second before his eyes flooded with tears, not from pain or tiredness but this unnamable something rising up in him.

He tried to keep his breathing steady—there was enough sweat and sex in the air that Adam might not notice one more salt scent—but he only managed a few breaths before Adam went still on top of him. He raised his head and brought a hand to Casey’s wet cheek.

“Case?”

The soft, weary familiarity in Adam’s voice sent another spasm through Casey’s body, another rush of tears spilling to wet Adam’s fingers. It felt like grief, like fear, but sweet somehow, something raw and tender. Something that ached in every beat of his heart.

It was stupid. It was just another feeling he was having toward an alpha that didn’t make any sense. Adam probably knew why Casey felt like this and Casey wasn’t going to ask. He wasn’t going to let his stupid brain malfunction end his full moon night before he wanted it to end.

Casey shook his head and reached back, grabbing Adam’s ass and pulling him close. He wouldn’t be able to speak without sobbing; he could already feel that tightness threatening in his throat. But after the last thirteen hours he didn’t need words to make himself clear to Adam.

Don’t stop.

Adam hesitated for another few seconds, and then Casey felt Adam’s forehead resting against his hair, and Adam’s hands settled over Casey’s wrists. Casey hauled in a shaky breath and then Adam was moving, fucking him hard and steady, faster and faster. Casey felt teeth at the back of his neck, just touching, and let out a wild sob as he came. Adam followed him.

His hands stayed tight on Casey’s wrists, his cock in Casey’s hole, his body covering Casey’s, while Casey sobbed. It didn’t last long, but he felt as if he would have flown apart without Adam to hold him down, and yet Adam being there to hold him was why he was crying in the first place. The whole thing made him uselessly furious.

He felt the setting of the moon, its grip on them snapping like one last fraying thread letting go.

A sob turned to a snarl in Casey’s mouth and he struggled out from under Adam as Adam pulled away to free him. Casey stood for a moment in the middle of the attic room, naked and sweaty and panting, wetness dripping down his thighs, his teeth bared at nothing in particular. He didn’t dare try to fight Adam right now. There would be more tears, and he would see it in Adam’s eyes. Adam would know what it really meant, and once Casey saw he would have to know too. The moon was down—his head was clear. He wouldn’t be able to forget this.

Casey closed his eyes and did what he had to do anyway, to be absolutely sure that this moon’s consequences wouldn’t last beyond the dawn. He shifted to his wolf shape, slim and small and dark-furred, and bolted down through the trapdoor, down the stairs and out of the guest house. He raced into the unfamiliar woods, trying to outrun the knowledge that even if he avoided getting pregnant, he wasn’t going to be able to avoid what was waiting for him in Adam’s eyes.

In the days that followed, as the moon waned, Casey became exceptionally skilled at avoiding looking at Adam’s eyes. He forgot why he was doing it, forgot that it was even something he was doing and not just a coincidence. He was irritated most of the time instead, especially any time Adam tried to talk to him about anything but practicalities.

He shifted every morning, six mornings in a row, to make sure nothing could take root in a womb that kept changing shape. He dreamed every night of being trapped under a layer of fur, his tongue flopping when he tried to speak, his hands turned to useless paws. He woke up with tears on his face, and the sound of Adam’s heartbeat just outside the door of whatever unfamiliar room he was sleeping in.

He was irritated about that, too, but he never spoke of it. Adam never actually knocked on his door, and always walked away a minute or two after Casey woke up.

They stayed a whole week with the Onalaska Niemis because they weren’t expected by the pack up near Eau Claire until Sunday, and each day had them visiting a few more far-flung small packs and families who the Niemis were in touch with. It meant extra hours in the car with Adam, and snow had turned overnight from an occasional picturesque occurrence into a force to be reckoned with. Casey couldn’t keep riding with the window down, so he spent hours immersed in Adam’s scent, his jaw clenched hour after hour so the pointless, sourceless anger boiling in his belly wouldn’t burst out into words.

He had a nasty feeling that Adam wouldn’t rise to the bait anymore. He didn’t want to think about why.

Casey tried to focus on the people they were meeting, instead. He’d never met people who lived like this, only distantly affiliated with a big pack and living essentially on their own, in their immediate families or with two or three families making a little pack. He tried to ask questions without sounding like he was passing judgment and also without sounding like an idiot who’d never been outside the pack lands before.

He asked about their plans for the holidays, which was usually safe. At the first house they visited—Lily, an omega who lived with her alpha husband and their four kids, plus her sister, who was a beta and helped wrangle the kids so Casey and Adam could talk to Lily mostly-uninterrupted—the answer was, “Oh, we’ll go to the pack for Solstice—except Rose, she’s got her—what’s it called, Ro?”

Rose, sounding slightly exasperated, called back from the next room, “All-Species Lesbians United.”

“Right,” Lily said, smiling and rolling her eyes a little. “So, you know, they’re doing their own thing and it’s all very important and political and enlightened and nothing to do with this human girl Ro—”

“Shut up or I will run screaming into the snow and leave you to deal with the kids,” Rose hissed.

Lily winked.

Casey wondered if any of the All-Species Lesbians were omegas, but it didn’t seem like Rose wanted to be asked. Adam just cleared his throat and dragged the topic back to the study.

At the next house, Casey tried the same gambit on Ryan, an omega who was expecting his first child in the spring and lived in one half of a duplex with his alpha’s best friend’s family on the other side.

“Oh, well,” Ryan grinned. “The pack’s all here, right? We’ll have a bonfire out back and Riley will get to be Solstice Alpha again—gonna be a few years before our little one can take a turn. And then Van’s taking me to Florida for Christmas, since it’s our last one without a little someone all excited to open presents under the tree.”

“So not visiting the big pack?” Casey heard the words coming out of his mouth and realized they were a mistake even before Ryan’s expression darkened.

“I’m not gonna drag out two decades of dirty laundry in front of people I met five minutes ago, but let’s just say there’s a reason we moved fifty fucking miles down the road,” Ryan said. “Visiting the midwives to make sure this one is doing okay is plenty, thanks. That’s why I was excited when Lil told me about this study thing—if I could just go to the human hospital or something, I would not mind that at all.”

Casey did not look over at Adam, and tried not to flush red-hot with embarrassment, feeling young and sheltered and horribly naïve.

Adam said, in his calmest measured tones, “I’m afraid we’re still some way from being able to properly educate human doctors for omega obstetrical care, but this is certainly the first step. If you’d like to just look this over...”

Casey got up and walked out to the car without another word. Adam was obviously doing just fine with this particular omega, and Casey had someone else he needed to talk to.

He pulled out his phone and opened up a text to Rory, tapping out a long-overdue question. What do you think about Adam’s study?

It took a few minutes for Rory to answer. Casey paced down the street, studying the houses where humans lived with no packs at all. They were all different colors and styles, defiantly individual, not like the matching rows of homes he was used to seeing on the pack lands.

His phone buzzed, and Casey stopped where he was and opened the message.

I’m glad he’s doing it. If he’s right about being able to develop better suppressants, obviously that would be a good thing. And Spence is really excited about the gene testing and proving that our dad is the source of my omega genes. And being able to know whether he’ll be an omega if he chooses to be bitten.

Casey felt worse than embarrassed, then; he felt ashamed, nearly sick with it. He knew Rory. He knew Rory was terrified of midwives when they met, for good reason; that he’d been without proper care for years; that he’d dosed himself with stolen suppressants until they made him dangerously ill. Even now, even married to Beau and wildly in love, Rory was nervous about going into heat and needed calming medication to handle full moons. And the whole mess with his family, his father rejecting him when he was a kid, his human baby brother... of course he was glad for the study.

Casey hadn’t thought about Rory at all, hadn’t thought to ask his friend about this until now. He’d just... well, he’d just formed an opinion of Adam’s work while he was in the last few hours of a two-week-long panic attack and hadn’t bothered to reconsider whether that opinion was really justified. He was an idiot, and he owed Adam an apology, but he already knew he wasn’t going to be able to bring himself to actually apologize any time soon, not with everything that was already unspoken between them.

Not when Adam could absolutely crush him just by thinking, “I told you so,” too loudly.

Casey hunched his shoulders as he looked down at his phone, blinking rapidly against the cold air, which had to be the only reason his eyes felt so prickly. Speaking of suppressants, I forgot to ask how the full went! Was the dose I left for you okay?

Yeah! Still not a real heat, I think even if I hadn’t taken the pills, but it was. Um. It was good. Really good. :)

Well, that was one way Casey hadn’t let Rory down, at least.

Then Rory sent another message. How was yours? ;)

Casey groaned and locked his phone, shoving it into his pocket as he stalked back toward the Nissan. He flung himself inside and sat with his arms folded across his chest, letting all his prickly, awkward feelings boil back into anger. Anger was safer, and would keep him warm.

They stopped for lunch at a little place at the intersection of two county roads, mainly because there was no gas station next to it, so the food wouldn’t be flavored with the fumes. It wasn’t actually snowing for the moment, but the ground was pretty well covered. Casey had his boots on and his winter coat, and when he got out of the car he found himself staring at the snow-covered expanse of a harvested field, rolling away from the road in gentle hills.

He stared at it, transfixed, until Adam said, “Go on, then.”

Casey’s head whipped around, scowl already in place, his gaze going automatically to the cloud of steam from Adam’s words instead of Adam’s face. “What?”

“Go,” Adam said, and he rolled his eyes and added, “if you want to, I’m not telling you what to do. But it won’t put us behind if you blow off some steam running around in the snow.”

Casey clenched his jaw and turned his head to stare at the snowy field again. He was aware that now he didn’t want to do it because Adam had told him to—because Adam had diagnosed what it was Casey wanted to do before Casey had quite realized it. He was also aware that that was a stupid reason not to do something he wanted to do, something that would feel good. He stood there, frozen against the tangle of feelings burning in his throat that wanted to be a scream.

Fucking Adam, knowing things about Casey that Casey didn’t know himself. Fuck him.

Casey didn’t look over at the quiet sound of footsteps. He didn’t move a single muscle until he heard the door of the restaurant open and close, and Adam’s scent disappeared into a gush of hot, food-scented air.

Then Casey took off running—no warm-up, no hesitation. He bolted from a dead stop, crossing the parking lot and jumping a low fence that marked the edge of the field. He hit the ground sprinting the best he could on the other side.

The ground wasn’t as even as it looked from a distance—the earth was frozen in its plowed furrows, but the snow had drifted smooth over the top, disguising contours large and small. Casey didn’t go far before he sprawled flat in the snow. He screamed in rage at the dirt, the snow, the gray wintry sky, and then he pushed up and started running again, stumbling and staggering, leaping and twisting ridiculously to keep his balance.

He yelled whenever he found enough air in his lungs. The snow-covered earth and the cloud-covered sun swallowed up the sounds, equally unimpressed.

He was halfway across the field when he came to the top of a little hill and froze, even before he realized why.

There was a man standing among the trees, in the windbreak that marked the other side of the field. Just standing there, perfectly still, watching Casey.

Casey’s breath sounded loud in his own ears, his heartbeat a thunder that drowned out the occasional roar of a car going by.

The man was closer to the road, standing tall. His cheeks were faintly pink, from cold or something else, and the occasional stir in the air ruffled his hair, uncovered like Casey’s was. It was too far to catch a scent, with the air so cold and still and the man covered up for the weather, but Casey knew he was a werewolf.

He didn’t move, didn’t gesture or speak, but he was waiting for Casey to come to him. Casey knew that.

Casey’s knees went weak as a scent-memory returned to him—the scent he’d smelled in Dover, that rush of alpha that had once surrounded him in warmth, holding him close. Casey ran a hand through his hair to dispel the memory-sensation of it pulled strangely tight, and then he remembered Adam watching him do that. Adam, coming for him on the sidewalk, grabbing him by the shoulders when Casey didn’t answer, lost in memory.

Suddenly it was Adam’s scent filling his nose, an even warmer memory. Adam in the car beside him hour after hour, Adam dozing beside him during the full moon, Adam’s fingers and cock wringing pleasure from his body with every touch, Adam under and over and inside him.

Casey looked back toward the little diner, the familiar boring blue Nissan parked outside with a handful of others. He could see the messy scar of his own path across the field from there to here, but no sign of Adam. Casey was on his own this time, but he knew that if he stayed out here much longer, Adam would reappear. Adam would come and find him—Adam wouldn’t let him stay lost.

Casey looked toward the windbreak again, to the man who stood there waiting for him.

No one was there.

Casey shook his head, stumbling forward a few steps, and then stopped when the ground dipped and he lost sight of the spot where the man—werewolf—alpha—had been standing. Had he been there? Had Casey really seen anything? Was he going to run the rest of the way across a snowy field just to see... what? Footprints, maybe, which wouldn’t prove anything? Or an absence of footprints, which might or might not prove that Casey was losing his mind? A scent that Casey might or might not be imagining, that certainly shouldn’t have been able to carry so far on cold air from a man holding still and with most of his skin covered?

Adam was back there in the restaurant where it was warm, ordering lunch. Casey’s stomach growled, and he shook his head and turned back, trotting along the churned-up path he’d taken. Every time he reached a high spot he looked back, but he saw nothing but the undisturbed field and the bare trees of the windbreak, and the first flurries of snow starting to fall in between.

When he stepped into the restaurant, having brushed off most of the snow but still damp and disheveled, his hands and face red with cold, for a moment he was conscious of nothing but a wall of heat and food-scents and brightness. But as soon as his eyes focused, they found Adam sitting in a booth facing the door. Casey met Adam’s eyes without thinking about it, and it took a couple of breaths before he could look away.

That was when he saw the steaming mug sitting across from Adam, a slice of lemon and jar of honey waiting beside it.

Casey’s eyes prickled and he told himself it was the cold, or the change in temperature, or something. He didn’t think of anything but sliding into the seat waiting for him, and wrapping his hands around the warm mug. He didn’t meet Adam’s eyes again.

It wasn’t until they were back in the car, until they’d driven down the road past that windbreak and another and another, that Casey muttered, “Thanks.”

In his peripheral vision, Adam just nodded and didn’t say anything.

A few days later, after they’d relocated up to Eau Claire and the waning moon had become a shrinking crescent, Casey’s occasional sporadic exchanges of texts with various pack members back home erupted into an actual phone call from Auntie Mark.

Casey knew, just looking at the screen, what the call was about and the shape that it would take. If he was about to be told what his options were, or what had already been decided, it would be Granny Tyne. If he were going to be poked and prodded, that would be Auntie June. Auntie Mark meant they weren’t going to push, which meant... Moon only knew what, but he could probably blame the inter-pack gossip mill for it.

“Hi, Auntie,” Casey said, picking up the phone. He was alone, for a wonder, holding the fort in the Midwives’ House in case an emergency came to the door while the local midwives were all elsewhere on various cases and errands. Adam had gone to drop off a box of samples at a post office and pick up more supplies.

Casey considered the odds that Auntie Mark knew that Casey was genuinely alone, with no one easily able to eavesdrop on the conversation. They were... aggravatingly close to one hundred percent.

“Hi, Case,” Auntie Mark said, sounding half distracted, like he’d called Casey in the middle of doing something else. Casey had actually fallen for that a few times in the first year after Auntie Mark joined the Niemi pack and moved into the Midwives’ House, when Casey was all of sixteen. “Just wondering about your plans for the empty—we need to know pretty quick if you’re going to want someone to come up and join you, but Gil let us know he’s coming to town. We could ask him to detour and spend the empty with you if you need him, or if you just want to see him.”

Gil had been sort of his big brother growing up, as Callie had been sort of his big sister. He was Alpha Niemi’s older child, five years older than Callie, who was two years older than Casey. Gil wasn’t an alpha—something he insisted on as vehemently as Callie insisted that she was one—but he also wasn’t the furthest thing from an alpha Casey had ever known.

Casey tried to remember Gil’s scent, to think of how it would likely affect him. He hadn’t done great with the local alphas here, and he was already having nightmares all the time, and—

For a second his nose filled with the remembered scent, not of the foster brother he’d known since he was six, but that strange alpha whose scent he’d caught on the street. The one he’d seen—imagined?—in that snowy field outside Onalaska. He remembered being small, held against an alpha’s big body, face tucked in against the alpha’s shoulder...

Casey ran a hand through his hair and shook his head, visualizing Gil again. Like Callie, like Alpha, but different... Gil hadn’t ever returned to the Niemi pack full time after his exchange as a teenager, but he visited when he could. The last time he had come home had been close to two years ago, and he had listened with a crooked smile while Casey griped about how everyone still thought of him as poor dear little Casey.

When Casey ran out of steam, he’d said, “Yeah, I know the feeling.”

It wasn’t exactly the same for Gil—his difficult years had arrived when he was a young adult, and hardly any of that had happened where the Niemi pack could see it. Still, the gossip mill had kept everyone up to date, right up until Gil went to Alaska for a year to get himself back in balance. He’d been fine since then, if a little restless, but he still got worried looks from Alpha and Callie and everyone else.

Casey thought of the way he’d leaned into a hug then, and Gil had kissed the top of his head. Casey had felt understood. Safe. And he had done his best not to notice the distinctly almost-alpha tang to Gil’s scent, which filled his nose in memory now.

His eyes jolted open, pushing the scent-memory away as it sent a rush of adrenaline through him, sharp and decidedly unpleasant. “Uh. No, I think... not Gil. Tell him I miss him, though?”

“Sure thing,” Auntie Mark said. “You want somebody else, then? First empty moon away from home, that’s hard on anyone.”

It didn’t need to be said that it would be harder on Casey, poor dear sheltered homebody that he was. Casey could barely even get mad about that; he’d spent the last empty moon sleeping in Auntie Mark’s room, even if he hadn’t let himself climb into anyone else’s actual bed since Pappa Otso died.

The thought had barely formed before he was thinking of climbing into Adam’s bed. The full moon had been the first time—the only time, because Casey hadn’t touched Adam since—that they’d fucked in a bed, let alone spent an entire night sharing one.

It was a stupid thought. He and Adam had fucked a handful of times, but the empty moon wasn’t about sex. It was about belonging, and safety, and comfort. Pack. Family.

Casey thought of the weight of Adam’s body covering his, the soft kisses Adam pressed to his shoulders and the back of his neck. His eyes prickled again and he hid his face in his hand, thinking that family could, after all, mean at least two different things. There was the family you came from, and the family you made with somebody else.

His voice came out a little strangled when he said, “I, uh... I think I... can I... text you?”

There was a two-second hesitation, like he’d actually succeeded in surprising Auntie Mark a little. “Of course, Case. And if you change your mind anytime up to noon on the day, you just say and we’ll fix it for you, you know that.”

Casey shook his head, keeping his eyes hidden even though there was no one to see. He didn’t want the pack fixing things for him, and he didn’t think they could fix this. He didn’t even know if it was, technically, a thing that needed to be fixed.

After another little pause, Auntie Mark said, even more gently, “You want to talk about it, Case?”

“No,” Casey said, and even that one syllable wobbled a little. His heart was beating faster, fear and grief overtaking him, but Auntie Mark wouldn’t be able to smell that, at least. “No, I... I’ll text you.”

“Okay, then,” he said softly. “You want me to catch you up on what’s happening around here?”

Casey inhaled through his nose—not a sniffle—and said, “Yeah.”

“Well, let’s see. Amy’s grown at least an inch since you saw her...” Casey closed his eyes and listened to all the gossip until it was almost as if he hadn’t been away from home for nearly three weeks. Auntie Mark kept chatting away in the same easy, unconcerned voice until Casey heard a familiar car pull up outside. Auntie Mark paused, alerted by some change in Casey’s breathing or a faint sound carrying through the phone.

Casey didn’t actually have to interrupt him to say, “I, uh. I’ve gotta go.”

“Sure,” Auntie Mark said. “Let me know when you decide about the empty. Take care.”

“You too,” Casey said. He hung up just as the back door opened and Adam stepped through, carrying a box slightly smaller than the one he’d left with, a manila envelope resting on top.

Adam must have seen something on Casey’s face; he hesitated there, not sitting down to join Casey at the kitchen table, but not moving on, either.

“I was just,” Casey waved his phone, not quite able to make himself meet Adam’s eyes even now. Especially now. “Auntie Mark called about the empty moon. He offered to send someone from the pack to keep me company, since I’ve never been away from home for it, but...”

“Yeah, of course,” Adam said, and Casey was startled into looking straight at him. He hadn’t thought this was anywhere near an of course kind of question. He hadn’t even thought of how to actually ask.

It was Adam who looked away, setting the box down and pulling out his own phone. “We can drive back to Rochester the morning before, and then get back to the survey the day after—not like we were going to be doing any work around the empty anyway, that’s no time for a stranger to show up and start asking nosy questions.”

“No,” Casey said, and then didn’t know how to go on, totally thrown by Adam jumping to a conclusion miles away from what Casey had been thinking.

Adam met his eyes, and Casey just stared for a moment, wondering what he’d been so determined not to see there. How had he ever looked away? Adam’s eyes were so steady, and every color of the forest was there, a whirl of gray-brown-green like a couple of drops of summer in the middle of dreary November.

“I...” Casey hadn’t come up with a second word for that sentence yet, but he pushed on regardless now that he’d started. “Uh, how do you usually...?”

“Oh,” Adam said, looking down again. He shrugged stiffly. “You know. Home, wherever home is. Doors locked, shades drawn. Sleep through as much of it as I can.”

Casey swallowed, thinking of all his fond, cozy memories of dozing and talking and reading curled up in Pappa Otso’s bed, Pappa’s warm bulk never further than arm’s reach. Auntie Helen used to join them sometimes, or one or another of the apprentice midwives, when there was an apprentice around. The empty moon was for closeness.

“Alone?” Casey asked, even though he knew the answer, and knew the answer would hurt.

Adam shrugged again and nodded without looking up. “I’m used to it. Ever since I left my father’s pack—even before that, really.” His gaze darted toward the box he’d set down—or the envelope on top?—and he added, “I didn’t... didn’t really get on with anyone there, the last few years.”

Since his dad died. Since he was ten years old. Casey felt the grief inside him twisting itself into a knot, hurting for all Adam had already lost, not just for the inevitable loss that awaited Casey in the future. And that meant it was too late to avoid what he’d been trying not to see, didn’t it? If he could already ache like this just thinking about Adam alone on the empty moon?

Adam looked up—he’d caught the change in Casey’s scent, obviously. Just as obviously he didn’t know what it meant. Why should he? Casey had been doing a pretty great job of not knowing himself, until just now, what Adam had become to him.

“I thought,” Casey said, but that wasn’t right, because he hadn’t thought any of this through. “I want,” he tried, and that was true, but the wrong way to say it. “Would you...”

Adam kept looking for another few seconds and then said, “Are you gonna hit me if I try to hug you?”

Casey shook his head, his throat going tight again, and he managed to say, “I won’t even call you names.”

“Well,” Adam said, coming around the table and tugging Casey up from his seat. “Don’t go nuts.”

Casey should have said something to that, probably, but he pressed his face into Adam’s shoulder, and breathed in the warm alpha smell of him, and felt safe and scared and horribly sad all at once. Adam’s coat was open, and Casey shoved his arms in underneath to get fistfuls of his shirt. Adam’s arms closed around him, holding him tight.

“Is this,” Adam said, nuzzling at Casey’s hair, “are you sure you...”

“I’m scared,” Casey whispered. “I don’t know why the fuck I’m so scared or why the fuck it makes me so sad, but I want to be with you for the empty moon. I think I need you. I think I’d be sadder and scareder without you.”

Adam squeezed him tighter, which Casey guessed meant that Adam knew why it made him sad and scared—and then Casey could guess, too. Something bad had happened once, so bad he couldn’t remember it, so bad he was left utterly alone, and Casey had never let himself get too close to another alpha since then.

Until Adam, who had somehow gotten close exactly when Casey thought he was holding him at arm’s length. Casey’s guard had been down when he thought it was highest, and now... now Adam was the person he needed with him at the full moon. Casey didn’t have to put a name on it beyond that. Adam wasn’t going to ask.

“Okay,” Adam said quietly. “If you want me with you, I’ll be with you.”

Casey drew back to ask what Adam wanted, whether he would feel better alone than with Casey, but he was silenced by the look in Adam’s eyes. There was no anger there, only a pain that Casey thought he could feel in his own chest.

Adam ducked his head and then hesitated, as if he might still, after all that, be unwelcome. Casey reached up and put a hand on the nape of his neck, guiding him down into a kiss, tender and careful on both sides.

By the time the empty moon arrived, three days and several hundred miles of driving later—including a stop on the side of the road to search for what was making that noise, which had led to Casey wrapping up four little stone frogs Casey honestly didn’t remember being given in his fall jacket to be stowed in the back seat while Adam stood there pinching the bridge of his nose—Casey was filled with an anxious, fluttering anticipation for it. He knew that part of it was probably being in a strange place for the empty moon, among strangers.

Part of it, also, was that he was experimenting with new strains of wolfsbane for his calming medicines. Every pack had their own unique varietals, cultivated on their own land for their own midwives’ uses. He had been gathering samples everywhere they went, studying the local midwives’ notes and making careful guesses about what effects a slightly different mix would have. The only way to actually test anything, though, was to try it on himself. He hadn’t discovered anything miraculous yet, although under the circumstances he was asking a lot from any medicine.

But mostly, the thing making his insides feel fluttery was the thought of an entire night spent quietly with Adam. He opened his mouth—or opened a text message—a hundred times to say he’d changed his mind, but every time he considered sending Adam away to spend the empty moon out of reach, alone, he knew that would be worse. He couldn’t spend the darkest of nights away from Adam, knowing Adam was alone.

Casey woke up on the morning of the empty moon in the guest house on the Beltrami Niemis’ land. This was the most rural pack they’d visited yet—the others had been fairly close to cities at least the size of Rochester, so they had felt a lot like home. He couldn’t put his finger on what was so different here—the purer smell of pine and snow, the traffic sounds sparser and more distant? But it was just different enough that he kept noticing.

By midday he and Adam were sitting by a fire in the guest house sitting room, Adam frowning into his laptop and Casey making notes on wolfsbane varieties, considering what further tests he could run that didn’t involve ingesting anything.

Casey felt another wave of that odd noticing, and Adam said, “Did you change your mind?”

Casey jerked his gaze over to Adam. “What?”

He felt his hackles up, the urge to argue rising instantly.

Adam shook his head and dropped his gaze to his laptop screen. “You just, uh. You keep looking at the door, like you’re expecting someone to come through. I thought maybe you were waiting for someone from home to get here.”

“No,” Casey said. “Not from—”

He stopped short as the realization hit him. He remembered again: the engulfing alpha scent and the feeling of being comforted as he was wrapped up in an alpha’s arms, held against a broad chest. Even the way his hair was pulled tight wasn’t so bad when...

Casey looked over at Adam, who was looking right at him now, his focus undisguised.

“I keep expecting to see the—” Casey cut himself off again. He hadn’t told Adam about the alpha he’d seen, or thought he’d seen, while he was running in that snowy field. But Adam was paying attention now, and Casey had already said too much to be able to deflect or lie without being insultingly obvious about it.

Casey looked at the door again, trying not to think too hard about it. “I saw this guy, that time when you sent me to run it off last week,” Casey said. “Watching me. I don’t know if he was really there. I know I couldn’t actually smell him, but I was sure it was his scent that I caught in Dover, outside the bar. And... there’s something about being here. It seems like where he should be.”

Adam dropped his gaze, obviously keeping his expression neutral with an effort.

“I know it must mean something,” Casey said. “I know you probably know more than I do about what, but... do we have to... to...”

“Not if you don’t want to,” Adam said. “It’s all right. We’re safe here. I won’t—” Adam stopped short himself, and Casey would have bet every ounce of wolfsbane in his kit that Adam had started to say I won’t let anything happen. Casey couldn’t guess exactly why he wouldn’t let himself say that, but it seemed like a very Adam thing to do, and Casey didn’t think he wanted to hear it anyway.

“You don’t have to talk about it or think about it if you don’t want to,” Adam redirected. “Thank you for telling me.”

Casey nodded and looked down at his notebook, then over at Adam again. They were both sitting on the floor with various notes spread around them; Casey was sitting on a couple of cushions, half propped against the armchair nearest to the fire. Adam was sitting up perfectly straight-backed on the bare floor, near the stack of firewood and the poker.

Adam was wearing a light green flannel shirt, one of the ones from the Farm Fleet. The shirt had been worn and washed four or five times now, enough for Adam’s scent to be permanently embedded in it; enough for it to have started to get even softer than it had been to begin with. The stretch of shirt between sleeve and hip looked very inviting right now, even as perfectly vertical as it was.

“Could I,” Casey said, and then realized that he’d been quiet for long enough that Adam had resumed working.

Adam looked up sharply, and then dropped his gaze again—all his attention still obviously on Casey, despite the polite pretense. He said quietly, “Anything.”

Adam really shouldn’t go around saying things like that. He ought to know Casey enough to know that Casey might follow that with just about anything.

But the hidden moon was high in the wintry sky, and tonight there would be no moon at all, the darkest of winter nights if not quite the longest yet. Casey only really wanted one thing, and he was pretty sure Adam wouldn’t regret agreeing to it blindly.

Casey gathered up his notes and notebook and moved to Adam’s side, where there was a little bit of floor not occupied by papers. Adam quickly swept them out of the way, making space for Casey to set his own things down and sit.

There wasn’t very much space, though. Casey snuggled right up to Adam’s side, pushing under his arm so he could lean his head against Adam’s chest. Adam held his arm stiffly in the air for a moment—Casey could feel his bewilderment, even caught the tinge of it in his scent. He nestled closer, listening to the startled-quick beat of Adam’s heart, and breathing in this novel variation of his scent that wasn’t angry or aroused.

After a moment, Adam lowered his arm, curling it gingerly around Casey’s shoulders. Casey opened his notebook to a random page and propped it against Adam’s thigh, letting his eyes skim lazily over the words in a vague pretense of doing anything other than cuddling up to Adam. After another moment he felt Adam return at least some of his attention to his own work.

Casey closed his eyes, and felt the weight of Adam’s arm grow heavier as Adam forgot to keep it tensed to pull away. It wasn’t quite like that memory, but it was good. It was Adam; Adam was all right, familiar and hardly scary at all anymore. Casey didn’t look toward the door. He wasn’t waiting for anything.

The night was a strange dim mirror of the full moon night two weeks before. They shared a bed again, though they both wore some semblance of pajamas this time. They mostly slept, instead of mostly fucking—they didn’t fuck at all. But just as there had been quiet, drowsy moments during the full moon, Casey woke again and again through the empty moon night to find Adam also awake.

Casey had shared beds plenty of times—he’d taken the better part of a year to spend an entire night in his own bed instead of Pappa Otso’s when he first came to the Niemis. He’d been in his early teens before he was actually sleeping alone nearly every night.

Adam would never, no matter how old and venerably white-haired he got, be mistakable for Pappa Otso. There were no soft, pillowy curves anywhere on his body. Every time Casey got a fresh whiff of alpha or nestled into a broad, muscular chest, he found himself startling awake, aware all over again that this was something new and different and scary and good all at once.

Of course, every time he jerked awake, Adam would move too, trying to fix whatever Adam thought was wrong, or would ask Casey what was wrong. Casey had to try, through the sleep fog, to explain, No, it’s just that I realized it’s you.

Toward dawn, the process had been streamlined down to Adam mumbling, “Still me?”

Casey nodded and snuggled closer. “Still you, still me.”

“‘Kay,” Adam mumbled, and Casey was thinking fondly that he didn’t think he’d ever heard Adam speak so imprecisely even in the middle of sex when he dropped off to sleep again.