Most of the time, Adam managed to think of omegas in general as people like his dad. It was better than thinking of them as people like all the other omegas of the Hathaway pack, who had been so caught up in their ideas about mates and packs that they just kept insisting it was all as it should be until his dad was dead.

The day after the empty moon, Adam found himself having difficulty holding on to that perspective. There had been looks before, speculative and amused, but they had been wrong before. There hadn’t been any harm in it, Adam had thought.

Now, though. After that empty moon night, after Casey slept pliant and trusting in his arms, Adam couldn’t deny anymore what was happening. He had failed to properly warn Casey about this possibility before they spent the full moon together, and now here they were.

Casey was starting to bond to him. Whatever chemical reactions were kicked off by spending a full moon together, Casey was clearly suffering from them. He didn’t even like Adam, he fundamentally disagreed with Adam’s work, but some inexorable brain chemistry was turning him quiet and agreeable, making him believe that he had to be. He didn’t even seem to notice what was happening to him; he’d given Adam a shy smile when they woke up together, nearly two hours past dawn on the first day of the waxing moon, and said nothing more about it.

Adam spent the whole day waiting for the other shoe to drop. Casey was bound to come to his senses, or he would notice what everyone else obviously thought and realize what was going on. Someone would say something to Casey, surely. But Casey was still shooting Adam shy, thoughtful looks by the time they left the Midwives’ House and returned to the guest house for the night. Once they closed the door behind them, Casey was gazing longingly at the front of Adam’s shirt—not with lust, but eyeing a comfortable place to cuddle up.

Those sweet quiet hours the day before while they’d sat together by the fire pretending to do anything other than leaning into one another were branded into Adam’s brain already. He knew he wasn’t going to manage to say no if Casey said Could I? again like he had then.

Before it could happen, Adam cleared his throat roughly and gestured toward his bedroom—not the one they had shared the night before. “Excuse me. I just have to.”

Without even pausing to let the incomplete sentence trail off, Adam turned and walked away.

He paced the small room, trying to come up with the words he would have to say to make Casey understand. So much of what had been happening for the past two weeks had been unspoken, invisible. It was hard to point to anything Casey had really done that he shouldn’t. Stop wanting to touch me. Stop not arguing with me constantly. Stop smelling so warm and good all the time.

It sounded stupid even to Adam. Worse, he suspected that if he said it out loud, it would still sound stupid, but Casey would look hurt instead of disdainful.

Adam wasn’t good at this. He’d never come close enough to being in a relationship to figure out how to end one. He’d never had anything as close and long-lasting as the last few weeks with Casey. That was exactly why he had no business being with Casey like this. He had thought it was safe. Casey didn’t like him. Casey had sworn to poison him if he ever went too far. But what if going too far meant that Casey couldn’t tell anymore?

He stopped short and stared at the wall, wondering suddenly why his dad had never poisoned his father. He’d had a whole lab. Some of the journals had been about biochemistry, and his dad had had access to wolfsbane, more than just the kind he smoked. His dad had been miserable, had cried, had wished Adam hadn’t been an alpha like his father. Why hadn’t he...?

Adam scowled and pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. That was alpha thinking. Why didn’t you just murder someone to solve your problems? Maybe it wasn’t really a problem at all, if you weren’t willing to kill him to get free. He knew how unhappy his dad had been, and he knew whose fault that must have been.

But his thoughts skittered to the packet of forwarded mail he’d picked up just before the empty moon. It had included a letter from his father, who sent one every year around this time, though Adam couldn’t think of any special significance to early November. Adam hadn’t read the letter, hadn’t even opened it, but he knew it would say what all the other letters had said, in his dad’s plain printing, a few letters wobbling unsteadily here and there, the writing of a man who rarely wrote anything.

I miss you. I hope you’re doing well. Let me know if you need anything. There’s a place for you here. You’re always welcome.

The letters had always made him angry before, but now... now he was starting to wonder if they weren’t as false as he had always believed—told himself—that they must be. Thinking about it now, after all this time spent immersed in pack life again, he thought that the letters sounded a lot like his memories of those last two years he lived with his father, the silences in that little house they shared, the empty places no one filled. The way his father had just smiled a little, when Adam had announced he was leaving for college, planning on grad school afterward, and said quietly, “I hope you like it better than your dad did.”

But he had to be remembering that wrong, or his father must have been lying, because his dad had been a scientist. He must have loved school. He must have—

Had his father really said your dad? Why had he been sure that his father had disapproved of that? Adam knew he remembered his dad yelling about being called by the wrong terms.

The shower turned on down at the other end of the hall. Casey wouldn’t hear him easily from under the water. Adam could...

Yes. That was the obvious solution. Adam could call someone for help, or at least advice. He shuffled through the extremely limited possibilities for who to call—not Beau, happy with his omega who he’d married within a day of meeting him, and certainly not Rory. There was only one real choice. If Adam was worried that Casey couldn’t protect himself, he should be talking to the man who had killed people for Casey’s sake already and would again if he had to.

As soon as he thought it, Adam remembered what Casey had told him the day before, which had seemed too important to possibly be forgotten. Casey’s close warmth had blotted it out, turning all of Adam’s thoughts soft-edged, but he should have called Alpha Niemi already. Casey had seen someone watching him, someone whose scent he knew.

Adam sat down on the bed and pulled out his phone.

“Adam,” Alpha Niemi said. It had only rung twice. In a stern, unamused tone, he said, “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Adam blew out a breath. “Someone’s following Casey.”

He heard how dramatic and definite that sounded and backtracked; he didn’t actually have evidence to back that up, not firsthand.

“I think. He saw someone a few days ago—he didn’t tell me until yesterday. But he thought it was the same scent that he caught the other day, and something about being here reminded him of it too. He kept looking at the door, and he said that was who he was expecting to see. He may not even realize it, but I’d bet he’s noticed signs that the man is following him.”

“Huh.” Niemi sounded thoughtful, but not surprised—and not especially concerned. “But he hasn’t done anything threatening. Casey knows how to make a hell of a lot of noise when he feels like he’s in danger.”

Adam’s throat went tight as he remembered Casey saying I’d be sadder and scareder without you in a voice that barely carried to the edges of the room.

“Still,” Adam said. “Do you really want to wait for it to get to that point? Clearly something is going on, just like you were worried about.”

“Mm,” Niemi said, a little doubtfully. “Well, something is happening. This isn’t the scenario I was worried about yet, and if it goes anywhere, it’s not like you’re not surrounded by people who will back you up.”

Adam opened his mouth to point out that the man had never gotten close enough to be detected while they were surrounded by pack—and then closed it, thinking of Casey in that bar in Dover. They hadn’t been there an hour before Casey had gotten a text message checking up on him, because the pack expecting their arrival knew it had been longer than it should since they left the pack before.

He felt suddenly superfluous, compared to that network of surveillance. “Oh. I suppose that’s so.”

On the other hand, that network had demonstrated one massive blind spot.

“Still I... I think it might be better for him to return home,” Adam tried. “He, ah, that is, I—we—”

“Whoa, whoa,” Niemi said, a hint of sharpness in his tone. “I’m gonna stop you right there, son. If you’ve got some issue with Casey, you need to talk to him about it.”

Adam swallowed staring down at his hands, trying to articulate what felt so impossible about that. “It’s not... he’s not the problem. I am. I don’t think he can see it, but... you sent him out with me for his own good, when he didn’t want to leave. I don’t... I don’t think it’s good for him to be anywhere near me anymore.”

Niemi was silent for a few seconds, then he said, his voice a little gentler. “I think you’re wrong. And I know that it’s something you have to discuss with Casey. If he asked me for advice, I’d give it to him, and if I had reason to believe he was in danger, I’d do everything in my power to protect him. But so far all I’m hearing is an alpha who cares an awful lot about his happiness trying to go about it in exactly the wrong way.”

Adam gritted his teeth against the urge to argue, to shout. He should have known no one would listen to him, any more than anyone had ever listened before.

“Fine,” he said, and hung up before he could say something worse.

He sat with his head in his hands for a while, trying to think of the right words to say to convince Casey, or anyone, that Casey had to get the hell away from him. Everything he could think of that might work turned cruel, and the whole point was that he didn’t want to hurt Casey.

Maybe he could just bide his time. There were only a handful of packs left to visit; they’d be done before the next empty moon. He would have to go back to Maryland eventually to do proper analysis and write up results. Then he could look into expanding the survey to more omegas and start developing further stages, publishing preliminary results...

He would go back to work, and Casey would go home, and that would be that. The separation would sting, but it would be a natural result of the circumstances, like the end of a summer that had arrived all out of season.

Of course, there was another full moon ahead of them, right in the empty spot in their schedule where his refusal to visit the Hathaways had created a gap. No one else had filled it, and it would leave him and Casey with time on their hands when the moon would be shining most brightly on them.

He would think of something. Maybe they could go back to the Niemis for those days. Casey could do whatever he normally did for a full moon. Adam could claim that he wanted to spend a full moon the proper old-fashioned way, running shifted in the woods with the pack. He hadn’t shifted on a full moon since he was too young to resist the pull. He had used to shift on the empty moons, with his dad, and spent them curled together in a furry heap.

He frowned, staring into space. Just his dad? Had his father been there, too, when he was small? How small had he been when it started being just him and his dad? By those last few years with the Hathaways, he’d been spending empty moon nights shut in his room alone, and his father’s heartbeat had always been in the next room, planted between Adam and the rest of the world.

He thought for half a second of spending an empty moon curled up wolf-shaped with Casey, but that felt somehow even more dangerous than the way they had spent it. He would feel too much, as a wolf, and his alpha instincts would only be harder to keep in check.

Anyway, he got the impression that Casey didn’t like shifting much. The shift Adam had seen, moments after the setting of the full moon ended their night together, hadn’t looked like a joyous thing at all. Casey had shifted back even before he’d returned the guest house. He’d shifted again, like clockwork, each of the next five mornings, and Adam had started to suspect that it had something to do with not getting pregnant—Casey certainly did it with all the enthusiasm of someone taking a pill, and the six days after they spent a full moon together were the only times Adam knew of him shifting.

Adam couldn’t remember the last time he’d shifted himself. He tried to make time for it once or twice a year, taking a weekend and booking a few acres somewhere he could run and be sure he wouldn’t come into contact with any other wolves. It was what he was, after all, and he had to get the urge out of his system from time to time, the same way he handled his sex drive with masturbating or the occasional late-night hookup. There was no point denying that it felt good to shift, run, hunt. He just had to control that urge, and keep it well away from anyone he could hurt that way.

Still. There were plenty of other alphas in the Niemi pack; if he went out to run on their territory during a full moon, they wouldn’t let him do anything he shouldn’t. They would keep him from bothering Casey, if Casey didn’t want to be bothered.

Casey, Adam suspected, driving the heels of his hands into his eyes, was going to want to be bothered unless Adam did something drastic to change his mind. But that just brought him right back around to his fruitless attempts to think of how to warn Casey away from him.

Maybe he’d been wrong to try Alpha Niemi. Maybe one of the midwives would be more inclined to get Casey away from him? Maybe...

Adam realized how close the sound of Casey’s heartbeat was—and that the shower had shut off a while ago—a moment before Casey said, softly but right outside his door, “Adam? May I come in?”

He ought to say no, or just say nothing at all. The last thing he should be doing was reinforcing the bond Casey was developing with him. Adam should be avoiding close contact. He should—

But his heart was beating a little faster than it should, and he was hungry even after just minutes to see and smell and touch Casey again. He hardly paused at all to fight with his conscience before he said, “Yes.”

Casey opened the door just a little at first, poking his head through the gap. His hair was damp, his curls tousled and mostly flattened, though here and there already starting to spring up as they dried. He was smiling, hopeful and slightly mischievous, and Adam couldn’t help smiling back, breathing in his warm, clean scent.

Casey stepped all the way inside then, and Adam straightened up from his slouch, sitting back to meet his eyes. Casey didn’t stop until he was straddling Adam’s thighs, perching lightly on his lap. He was wearing sleep pants but no shirt, and his warmth was radiating out all over Adam, turning his thoughts slow and drowsy.

It took Adam a few extra seconds to understand when Casey said, “Okay if I sleep in here with you tonight?”

Adam blinked at him, and then the words registered.

Then they hurt, sharp and deep at the center of his chest.

He’d only just resolved to keep his mouth shut, absorb whatever hurt he felt so that he wouldn’t hurt Casey instead, but the shock of that pain knocked his resolve from his mind. All that was left was a sick horror at the thought that he was stealing this—that Casey didn’t really mean this and would look back on it with disgust when he was finally free of Adam’s influence.

“Why?” Adam blurted.

Casey’s brow wrinkled—not hurt yet, just baffled—and Adam said, “You don’t even like me.”

It came out almost pleading, and Adam twisted to turn his face away as soon as he’d said it, his eyes squeezed shut like that would save him from smelling and hearing Casey’s reaction to that.

He waited for the audible eyeroll, the withering remark, or, worse, some frantic, emotional denial of what he knew was true.

What he got was Casey’s hand resting softly on the back of his neck and Casey leaning in closer. His forehead came to rest against Adam’s temple as he said, “Who says I don’t?”

Adam felt himself go even more rigid. “You said you don’t. Weeks ago.”

Casey drew back, and Adam felt the weight of his gaze, quiet and thoughtful. Not mindlessly denying it or laughing it off, but not snarling at him the way Casey should, either. “Adam. Look at me.”

Adam opened his eyes.

Casey was frowning down at him, not annoyed but baffled. “So, first of all, I didn’t realize quite how seriously you were taking it when you said I didn’t like you and I didn’t argue with you, which, for the record, is not the same thing as telling you I don’t like you.”

Adam didn’t really see how, when the underlying case was the same, but he didn’t argue.

“Secondly,” Casey said, tilting his head a little. “You can’t think of anything that’s happened in the last few weeks that might possibly have changed my opinion of you? My feelings about you?”

Adam didn’t close his eyes, but he had to look away from Casey’s patient gaze. “I know exactly what happened, and I know we didn’t discuss it properly beforehand. I didn’t...”

He knew it was his fault, knew that he should have done more to prevent it, but even now he didn’t know how to say that without also saying that Casey didn’t know how to handle something that was uniquely an omega’s to handle.

“The full moon? Knotting me?” Casey prompted, still sounding far too gentle. “You think, what, your studly alpha pheromones have turned my sweet little omega brain to mush and I’ve forgotten what a pain in the ass you are, pun fully intended?”

Adam shook his head, struggling again to think of how to say it, how to argue. How to make Casey understand the obvious: this was wrong, and an awful idea.

“I just think... emotions are brain chemicals, and the moon, it...”

“You weren’t a different person under the moon,” Casey said. “Neither was I. The moon doesn’t draw anything out of us that isn’t there to start with. You’re not a bad guy, Adam, and you’ve been good to me. There’s no reason I shouldn’t like you, which is good, because I do.”

“My work,” Adam started, because that was the crux of it, wasn’t it? Casey hated the project. He thought the project would be misused, that it would hurt omegas more than it helped.

That made Casey’s heartbeat do something funny. “Adam, did you not... no, of course you didn’t. Why did you think I walked out when we were meeting with Ryan, after he told me how important the study was to him?”

Adam kept his gaze fixed on the little valley of Casey’s sternum. “You were upset. You didn’t like him saying that—talking about packs that way. You think omegas should live in packs.”

“Wow, are you ever bad at this,” Casey said, not sounding particularly surprised by that revelation. He put his hand under Adam’s chin, tipping it up. “I was embarrassed that I hadn’t thought about how different other people’s experiences were than mine. My pack saved me, and my pack has been a good place for me, and also—I’m gonna say this one time and you are allowed to say it never—when I first heard about your study, and when I met you, I was really upset and emotional and that affected my judgment. But I heard about what Ryan said, and I talked to Rory and thought about why he was in favor of your study, and I realized that there are people it’s going to help. And I was too embarrassed about how wrong I was to say so, because I figured you’d be at least a tiny bit of a dick about it and I wouldn’t be able to handle it.”

Adam’s lips parted, but he couldn’t think of what to say. That didn’t sound like a chain of events that was wholly the result of altered brain chemistry, and also... “There’s a joke there about my dick and you handling it but I can’t think of what it is.”

Casey smiled. “I’ll take it as read. But I’m sorry I let you go on thinking I didn’t believe in your work. I know it’s important to you, because of your dad.”

“He was,” Adam swallowed hard. “He was the only person...” He didn’t even know what he was trying to say, but he couldn’t get the words out anyway.

Casey was already shaking his head. “You’ve got me now, whether you like it or not. At least for now—at least for tonight, unless you tell me right now that you’re kicking me out of your bed.”

He should. It was the obvious right thing to do. Kick Casey out of his bed, kick him off the project, send him far enough away that Adam could never hurt him. Adam would still have his work. He would live. Casey would be safe. That was what mattered.

But the words still didn’t come, and Adam found himself shaking his head, a tiny, tentative movement.

“All right,” Casey said, ducking his head to Adam’s, but not for a kiss. He nuzzled at Adam’s cheek, brushed his lips over Adam’s temple. “Then the rest is just figuring out how we make it work, huh? Lie down, I’ll get the light and then we can talk.”

Adam didn’t know what difference that would make, but Casey sounded confident and authoritative, and Adam let himself believe that that meant Casey knew what he was doing, at least right now. Adam tugged the covers down and stretched out with his head on the pillow as soon as Casey stepped off his lap, and he was barely settled before the light was off and Casey was climbing onto the bed, arranging himself at Adam’s side. He pushed and pulled at Adam’s arms, positioning Adam as if he were just a pillow for Casey’s comfort. Adam let him, too bemused to object.

He didn’t mind, anyway. Pleasing an omega was, evolutionarily speaking, what his big alpha body was for, and if it was useful for more than sex then Casey should get the use of it. They ended with Casey nestled against his side, Casey’s arm and leg draped across his chest. Adam’s arms curled loosely around Casey, and he only had to turn his head to brush his nose and lips against the dark cloud of Casey’s curls.

“Okay,” Casey said, “so now that I’m not drunk and we’re not in public and you can’t shock me with the basic facts—tell me about your dad, Adam.”

Adam froze, his throat closing on the enormity of the question. He felt oddly ambushed, in a way he hadn’t, really, when Casey asked what’s your deal? in that human bar. But Casey hadn’t known what he was asking then, and Adam had known that he wouldn’t have to answer beyond a few bald words to put him off.

“He grew up human, right?” Casey prompted. “No close wolf kin that he knew, I guess?”

That was a simpler question. “No,” Adam agreed. “He didn’t even know werewolves existed until my father bit him.”

Casey twitched and made a questioning noise. “What, he—they didn’t talk about it beforehand? He didn’t want it?”

Adam opened his mouth to agree, then closed it, frowning. That couldn’t be quite right, could it? For all his father’s alpha callousness, he hadn’t kidnapped Adam’s dad. He hadn’t even exactly forced him to stay, not beyond what the circumstances did.

“I think,” Adam said slowly, and then he remembered his dad’s voice, shaky and halfway between laughing and crying. This isn’t what I signed up for, y’know.

And his father’s voice, a low, warm rumble. I told you, hon, you gotta read the fine print.

Adam had been very small, and a wolf, just then. A wolf with... with a rabbit in his mouth. He could taste the blood, hot and coppery, almost sweet. He had brought it into the house, to Daddy and Papa’s bed, proud of himself, and...

Papa had picked him up. Big warm hands, holding him against a broad chest, gently but firmly separating him from his prey. Let’s get you cleaned up, pup.

Adam shook his head sharply, pushing the memory away. He’d been so young; he hadn’t really understood. He hadn’t known yet. But... they had been sleeping in the same bed. They had laughed. And Adam hadn’t been afraid.

“I...” Adam repeated. “I think...” It felt like a betrayal to say it, but then again maybe Casey would understand if Adam told him. Just because things seemed all right now didn’t mean they would stay that way. “I think they loved each other, to start with. It was later that... things got bad.”

Casey hummed agreement, squeezing Adam a little, but stayed quiet, waiting for more.

“Dad just—he didn’t know about omegas. Or at least he didn’t know he would be one. He didn’t ever expect...”

Adam fell silent again. Now he was thinking of Jamie, the bitten omega he and Casey—mostly Casey—had spoken to a few weeks ago. He was the only one they had encountered so far, and he had said that it took more than a year from when he was bitten until he had a real heat. Another year, even spending heats with his mate, until he got pregnant.

It was only an anecdote, not data, but... what were the odds that Adam’s dad had gotten pregnant before he was aware that that was a possibility? That he hadn’t had a choice in the matter? Would the midwives have refused to help him even with that? Casey seemed so confident that he wouldn’t get pregnant without meaning to, and they hadn’t met any omegas who seemed to have an unmanageable number of kids.

For that matter, Adam was an only child, and his parents had still apparently been sharing a bed until he was three or four. He had spent full moons with his dad, which meant his dad had had a way to avoid heats. That had to mean he’d had a way to avoid getting pregnant in the first place, didn’t it?

But he remembered his dad saying, casually and matter-of-factly, I never imagined getting pregnant. I never wanted kids, and I definitely never wanted to give birth to one.

Adam had waited, frozen, for something more, for his dad to say, But I’m glad I’ve got you, or, But it turned out pretty well anyway. He had wanted to ask, and hadn’t known what to say, and the silence had stretched, his dad busy with something else—they were in the lab, his dad was working—not even looking at Adam.

Adam had gone off to wash glassware instead—he’d had to stand on a stool to reach the sink, and cried a little over the hot water, where it wouldn’t be noticed. His dad had smiled when he saw all the clean beakers on the rack, and called Adam my little lab assistant.

That had seemed like enough. Adam had smiled, and didn’t ask any difficult questions. He never wanted his dad to be upset.

“I don’t think he,” Adam said slowly. It was the worst part, but that was what Casey needed to understand, wasn’t it: Adam wasn’t any good to any omega. He hadn’t saved his dad. He hadn’t been good enough to make his dad forgive him for being an alpha.

“I don’t think he wanted me. In the long run. Even if—maybe at the time he thought—or he felt like—but it was just—just—”

Infatuation, heat, a heedless mistake he regretted, and avoided repeating, for the rest of his life. What remained of it. The point was, Adam couldn’t risk Casey making a mistake like that with him.

Casey turned his face down against Adam’s shoulder, his arm and leg gripping tighter around Adam’s body. Adam tentatively tightened his own grip, pressing his face into Casey’s hair only to get a faceful of his scent as it slid into distress and pain. Adam moved his hands automatically, searching for some physical cause, but Casey was breathing without effort, his heart was beating steadily, and there was no scent of blood.

“I’m sorry,” he tried. “I didn’t—Casey, I—”

Casey shook his head and then pushed himself up so that Adam could see his face: flushed and bright-eyed. Adam could smell tears, though none fell as he watched.

“That wasn’t your fault,” Casey said firmly. “I know you’re not going to believe me right now, but it wasn’t your fault that your dad didn’t want you, if he really didn’t. It wasn’t your fault how he became a werewolf, or that he wasn’t ready for how big the change was for him. It doesn’t mean you were a bad kid—and even if you were a difficult kid for him, you deserved parents and a pack who loved you and wanted you.”

Adam wanted to argue, to say that that wasn’t the point, but Casey spoke with such utter conviction that he couldn’t think of anything to say that would match him. He just stared, and finally reached up to cup Casey’s cheek in his hand, feeling the heat of emotion and the quickness of his pulse. Casey closed his eyes, and wetness beaded on his eyelashes; Adam wanted to wipe it away, but didn’t want to be the one to make Casey’s tears fall.

Casey moved after a few seconds, settling himself firmly on top of Adam this time.

“Maybe your dad didn’t like you,” Casey said against Adam’s throat. “Or maybe your dad was dealing with a lot of shit he couldn’t handle and took it out on you because you were little and you were there, and you had to love him anyway. But I like you, and I’m not taking my shit on you any more than I can help. And I know your shit makes it hard to believe me when I say that, but I really hope you’ll try. Okay? Because I don’t deserve some alpha telling me that he knows what’s best for me and I don’t get a say.”

Adam stared at the ceiling, trying to make sense of it, to think things through instead of just letting himself be soothed by Casey’s weight and his warm scent.

His dad had liked him, as much as... as much as he could? Adam had always thought of his dad as a victim, but he’d never quite thought that that meant he had to take his pain into account when he remembered the things his dad said, especially when he said it so calmly, not in the midst of any obvious crisis.

His dad had been younger, when Adam was born, than Adam was now. He’d undergone a change Adam couldn’t imagine, a change that had to have been a trauma—and Adam had to be a constant reminder of that change and the trauma of it. He’d been doing his best in bad circumstances, even in the moments that seemed calm, and... and he’d said things that maybe no one should say to a kid. Not to any kid, even an alpha kid. Even Adam.

For the first time, Adam wondered whether it would have been any better if he had been the omega his dad had said he wanted. Would he have just reminded his dad of his own biology, in equally upsetting ways? And even if being an alpha was the problem, that meant that what was wrong with Adam was a sheer fact of his biology, something he had never had any control over.

His head ached, and his throat felt tight, and it was all too much to think about right now, with memories drifting free that he hadn’t thought of in so long. He realized that he was shivering, and couldn’t quite make the checklist of psychogenic shock symptoms solidify in his mind. But he had Casey’s weight anchoring him to the bed, Casey’s scent calming and settling toward sleep as his heartbeat slowed. Casey was a midwife. If something was wrong, Casey was probably more qualified to look after him than Adam was.

“I like you too,” Adam whispered belatedly, his voice almost steady. “I’ll... I’ll try to listen.”

Casey huffed a soft laugh and said, “Well, that’s a start, anyway. Listen when I tell you to go to sleep, huh?”

“I’ll try,” Adam repeated, but the corners of his mouth were turning up and his eyes were already closed.