Cronan is angry. Angry that after years of waiting, he's mated to the one wolf he never wanted.
Fen is stuck. Stuck in a state of purgatory that he doesn't know how to escape from.
After learning of his mate's crimes, Cronan never expected to see h...
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I've never cared for Halloween. It wasn't like I was scared of the holiday, or anything in that manner, I just never found the idea of going around to people's doors for candy or dressing up in supposedly scary costumes that were often over-exaggerated versions of supernatural creatures to be interesting.
Not to mention that while I was never scared of Halloween, Eli absolutely was. He hated the holiday with a passion and more often than not, I spent the night on the phone, trying to remind him that most of the costumes and haunted houses he saw were fake and that he was the real thing. There wasn't anything to be afraid of.
I'd initially expected this Halloween to be similar, but there were some differences this year: Cronan and Reuben.
While Eli hated the spooky season, my mate absolutely thrived during it. Our home was covered in decorations, ranging from cobwebs in the corners to an obnoxiously large spider that sat on our roof which had given me a near heart attack watching him try to set up without falling, and even to wrestling CJ into a candy corn costume.
I expected the decorations—they made sense, given Cronan's personality—but I wasn't expecting him to show up with Reuben, of all people, during one of his and Eli's visits and hand me a pair of haunted carnival tickets.
"No," Eli said the moment he saw them, arms crossed over his chest. "Absolutely not."
"It'll be fun," Cronan told him, shifting his gaze to me with a half-pleading expression on his face. "You'll go with me, won't you?"
I'd never been much of a Halloween person, but if Cronan was then I was too.
"Yes."
"Fen!" Eli exclaimed.
"Sorry," I apologized to the beta but there was no way I could've said no, especially with the way Cronan was beaming at me.
Eli groaned dramatically, throwing his hands up in defeat. "You are whipped. I can't believe this."
Cronan chuckled, leaning in to kiss the top of my head. "It's not being whipped. It's called being supportive."
"Right," Eli muttered, crossing his arms again. "And what exactly do you think you're supporting here? A nightmare factory? Haunted carnivals are designed to make people miserable."
"Or they're designed to be fun," Reuben piped up, wrapping his arms around Eli from behind.
Eli shot him a look of pure betrayal. "You are the reason I'm never trusting anything carnival-related again."
"I swear, you're acting like I did something terrible," Reuben replied, clearly enjoying the banter. "All I did was jump out of a coffin once."
"That's exactly the problem!" Eli snapped. "It wasn't 'just jumping out of a coffin,' Reuben. You screamed like a banshee and had a chainsaw!"
