People sometimes accused Peter Hale of being a cold sort of man behind his back.

They didn't understand him, but that was all right - he didn't mind. It kept them all at a safe distance, kept them from pushing in too close. Besides, a cold man meant cold hands, and cold hands were best for making pie. Cold hands kept the fat from melting as dough was turned and kneaded, and that made for a more tender, flaky crust.

And anyway, he couldn't bear the heat.

A strange thing for a man who lived and breathed at the doors of ovens, but there it was. Baking heat was a heat he could control, a heat he stared into day after day with a kind of self-mocking spite. Every time he opened the cavernous maw of one of his stainless steel, industrial sized ovens he was facing down a fire breathing dragon, his very own personal hell-demon, and it was never any easier than it had been the day before.

In the beginning, it had been all about proving a point. To himself, to his sister, who hadn't been sure and would've rather he just move back in with the pack and sit quietly, take up stitching or some other ridiculous hobby to keep his hands busy and his mind occupied.

But Peter still had his pride, and when he'd passed the closed-up little storefront on his way to one of his weekly therapy sessions his interest, cold and still as it was, had stuttered to life. The purchase came as more of a whim than anything else - at the time he'd had no business plan, no idea what he was going to do with the space, but he'd taken the restitution money awarded him by the state of New York and made the purchase anyway.

It had been a casual sushi bar before it had been disclosed on. A marble countertop ran the length of the shop; a bar for customers to eat from set one level lower than the prep station on the other side, separated by a long panel of glass. The kitchen opened out behind it, lined with old flat-top grills, a walk-in cooler with attached freezer, and what felt like miles of unnecessary steel shelving. It would have made sense to turn it into another sushi place, but his extra sensitive nose made the scent of raw fish an unpleasant one, and really, Peter didn't know anything about sushi.

Not that he knew anything about pie either.

He wasn't even sure where the idea had come from.

A whole summer spent clearing out the dust, painting the walls in pale blue and white, putting in a sealed, blonde, hardwood floor and not knowing, and then all of a sudden it was pie and he was ordering ovens to be installed in place of the grills and using his business degree to figure out code and inspection requirements, and how to enter into wholesale agreements with local farmer's markets and produce suppliers. It took ages, almost two years to get everything straightened out. Hardly a sound business investment at that point - he wasn't making any money and spending it left and right - but luckily he didn't need it.

Luckily…

More importantly though, for the first time in a long time, Peter had been content.

He'd moved in to the tiny apartment above the shop and spent his days refurbishing the place, keeping it warm and cozy with mismatched tables and braided rugs, lamps with patterned shades and too many throw-pillows, while the store downstairs got a more modern treatment, bright and clean and cool. At night he read up on pie - watching episodes of Good Eats and Martha Bakes, studying tricks and techniques, experimenting with recipes and jotting down the ones he liked in a battered notebook.

In the beginning he was terrible. None of his attempts went well, pie after pie ending up in the bin, but eventually at some point, something clicked. He didn't know what it was - maybe the day of the week he'd baked it, or the order in which he'd taken the ingredients down from the cabinets - but something.

Something finally went right.

It was an apple pie that did it, the classic American staple, and that felt right. It was sweet but not overly so, the apples a little bit tart, soft but not mushy. Sticky, spiced, with a light, buttery crust. One bite and he'd had to put his fork down, push back from the table and just stare. It had taken so long to get to that point, he'd started to think that he never would.

He'd been afraid it was a fluke. For the next thirteen hours he worked at another seven pies, one at a time, all the same classic apple, and while there were small variations in each of them they were all delicious, all minutely flawed, all perfect. The next day he boxed them all up, stacked them carefully into the back seat of his car and drove the twenty minutes out of the suburbs to his sister's house. Not all the family lived there but it was the hub for pack activity, everyone constantly coming and going, sharing space and taking comfort in each other's presence. Once upon a time Peter had done that too, had hung around and teased and cracked jokes and played pranks on his young nieces and nephews just like everyone else.

But things changed, and it had been a long time since he'd dropped by for anything as innocuous as a casual visit.

All three of Talia's children were in the kitchen when he arrived; Laura, Derek, and Cora all situated at the counter finishing up their homework as per house rules. Before he'd been quite close with each of them, but the attack, his brief stint in a coma, and all the mess that came after were still like a fresh wound between them at the time, and they could only model what they saw their elders do by treating him like glass. Though the youngest, Cora was perhaps also the brightest, the most cunning in an unpolished sort of way, and Peter was sure she'd seen the quiet pride in him that afternoon as he cut each of them a slice and awaited their verdict with poorly hidden nervousness.

Derek hadn't understand at all - he'd wolfed his down, mumbled a thank you, and - temperamental teenager that he was - run off to brood in his bedroom behind a locked door with punk music blaring.

Laura was a little better. She'd made a point to tell him how good the pie was, asked for a second piece which he'd served her, but despite being all of nineteen and next in line for Alpha, or perhaps precisely because of that, she just hadn't been sure what else to do. He could smell the uncertainty on her like burning sugar, and while it had made him shift uncomfortably on his feet, it also made him wonder idly if he could somehow work a caramel into the recipe.

But Cora, thirteen year old Cora, who still braided her hair in pigtails and wore denim overalls so that she could play baseball with the boys, had known exactly what to do.

She didn't talk, didn't coddle or reassure him with platitudes, just broke the strange unwritten rule that had somehow arisen from Peter's flinching discomfort with physical contact and wrapped her scrawny arms around his waist, buried her face in his sweater and held on.

And Peter had hugged her back.

It hadn't been one of those angsty movie hugs that went on and on forever - she let go eventually. But she'd told him she loved him right before she'd run out to the backyard to play, and it had been honest and easy and had felt like something that hadn't happened in a very long time either. Peter's throat had been tight as he'd left, driving back to his apartment above the little shop, and he hadn't been up to doing anything more that afternoon than brewing a cup of tea and wrapping himself in a patchwork quilt, curled up on his couch where he spent hours staring into space, partially in a doze and partway trapped in the painful, vibrant memories his psychologist called flashbacks.

They'd never caught the person who did it. Peter sometimes wondered if that wasn't half the reason he had as many problems as he did. He'd barely been a teenager when werewolves had first come out to the world, but two decade's time hadn't been enough to overcome human fear and hatred of what they couldn't understand, what was different from who they were themselves. A string of local arson and a well-timed Molotov cocktail aimed at the lobby of Peter's small business upstart had been more than enough to serve as a reminder.

He shouldn't have survived it, not even with his werewolf healing capabilities. The chemicals had been laced through with wolfsbane and the surgeons had called it a miracle that he hadn't succumbed to the toxins as fire melted the skin from his bones. As it was, he supposed he had been lucky to have slipped into a comatose state for those first three months, while his body continually shed the damaged cells and attempted to regrow healthy ones, only to have to start the process all over again until the poisons had fully worked themselves out of his system. That of course had taken much longer, but if the pain he'd experienced that first year of recovery after finally opening his eyes again had been any indicator, being absent from his mind at the beginning of it was a gift of mercy.

But beginnings were always difficult.

That wasn't to say that things got any easier, but Peter had certainly built up a high tolerance for pain as the weeks passed. The physical agony eventually receded; after sixteen months in hospitals and intensive care he'd mostly healed and had been remanded to his Alpha's custody with only strict instructions on how to do anything and everything at all and a date book stuffed full of physical therapy appointments to keep him in line. Of course that was only half the battle - Peter had been an angry, fearful, broken-down mess for some time after that. He'd quickly come to feel himself a burden in his sister's home, and the looks and treatment he'd received from the members of his pack had cut like a knife.

Peter had never accepted pity and he hadn't been about to start.

So he'd moved out, gone back to his cold, sterile apartment made vogue by words like modern and chic, when really all it was was clinical and empty. It had felt so much like the hospital with its white walls and stainless steel that it had given him the chills, set nightmares to playing on repeat against the back of his skull every night. The psychological pain might have been the worst of it for him to suffer. Peter had always been confident, cocky, always smirking and taking risks for silly thrills or inconsequential prizes, but the very core of him had been changed by his experience. He became withdrawn, overly cautious, untrusting and unsure of other people. Even his own family were subjected to his change in mood, could only stand silently and awkwardly when he shifted out of reach of a casual touch, when he backed away from a scent marking or ducked out from beneath a soothing hand. He didn't have to see their faces to know that his downcast gaze unnerved them, or that his now quiet, skittish demeanor felt like failure on their behalf.

But Peter knew the truth of it, even if they didn't.

It was up to him to fix himself, if that was what he wanted.

Some days he did, and so he worked at it - went to his physical therapy and his appointments with the shrink, forced himself to go into town and interact with other living beings, since according to his sister the cat he'd rescued from the rain one frigid morning didn't count.

Other days were harder, and he cared less about what he did or what he became, and so he stayed indoors and made tea and let the memories come.

With half the people he knew watching on concernedly and the rest getting after him to find himself a hobby, he'd put more of his hope into the future of the little pie shop than he was willing to admit to anyone, let alone himself. And while Peter was a fairly patient man, it was hard not to hang an Open sign in the window the very next morning after that first perfect pie. Hope was a frightening thing, hot and solid and electric, but the idea of failure at this was even more so, and so somehow he had managed to wait, to hold himself back day after day as he kept at it, learning to turn a one-off into something steady and reliable. Oddly enough after that first one, he found that he actually had a talent for it if he paid attention, if he immersed himself in the process and didn't overthink things. He even came to enjoy baking, found some solace in it, some peace. It was quiet, calming, and Peter was content.

Two years, four months, and seventeen days after purchase, Moonshine Pie was open for business.