Bloodthirsty Luna: Unsatiable Cravings

2: Hunger I Could Not Explain

Elona Pov

The hunger sharpened into something almost unbearable.

I turned toward the door before I could stop myself.

A young servant girl stood there, a tray trembling in her hands. She'd come to change the linens. Ordinary. Harmless. Except now I could hear the blood rushing through her veins like a drumbeat meant only for me.

"Elona, don't." Kael's grip on my hand became iron.

"I can smell it," I whispered. "Kael, I can smell it, what is happening to me?"

The girl froze, sensing something wrong though she couldn't have named it. The tray rattled. Porcelain clinked like warning bells.

"Leave us," Kael told her, his voice dropping into something commanding, something I rarely heard from him. She fled without a bow, without a word, her footsteps a fading, frantic rhythm down the corridor.

The moment she vanished, my knees buckled.

Kael caught me before I hit the floor, hauling me against his chest. I clawed at his shirt, dragging in his scent instead, pine, smoke, something achingly familiar, using it to smother the other smell, the one that made my teeth ache in a way they never had before.

"Breathe with me," he said against my hair. "Just breathe."

"I wanted to… bite her." My voice cracked. "I wanted her blood, Kael, I wanted it more than I've ever wanted anything —"

"I know."

"How do you… know?" I shoved back from him, fury flooding in to cover the shame. "You keep saying that. You “know”, You knew this would happen and you let me drink from you anyway!"

Something raw crossed his face. "You were dying. There was a hole in your lung and the healers had given up and you were… dying, Elona. I wasn't going to stand there and recite the risks to you while you choked on your own blood. I can't lose you."

"So instead I get to become a monster."

"You're not a monster,” he Instantly interrupts, and in some way, that was a first relief.

"Then what am I?" I asked him.

He didn't answer right away. Behind him, the hallway sconces guttered, an actual draft slipping through, cold air chasing the warmth from the corridor, and he steered me instead toward the small sitting room at the end of the hall, where a fire was already burning low in the hearth. He kicked the door shut with his heel and lowered me onto the rug in front of it.

The flames caught the gold in his eyes when he crouched across from me.

"Warmth helps," he said. "The hunger, it… it eases near heat. I don't fully understand it either as well, but I noticed it. Come closer to the fire."

"You noticed it. Meaning you've felt this too,” I said. His jaw tightened. That was answer enough.

"Kael." I said his name like an accusation and a plea at once. "What…are…you?"

He stared into the flames instead of at me, and for a moment, the firelight made him look older, tireder, like he was carrying something that had worn grooves into him over years I knew nothing about.

"Something the pack doesn't have a word for," he finally said. "Something my mother warned me never to become fully, and something I became anyway, the night I pulled you out of that river when we were twelve and you'd already stopped breathing."

The room went very quiet. Even the fire seemed to hold itself still.

"That's… that's not possible. I remember that day. You said you got there in time."

"I didn't." His eyes met mine, unflinching. "I gave you something to bring you back. The same thing I gave you three nights ago. It's why the healers have never been able to explain how quickly you heal. It's why you've always run a little warmer than everyone else. It's why, when the Lunemonia should have killed you in a week, it took months instead."

My hands were shaking again, and this time it wasn't hunger. "You've been — you've been “changing”me since we were children and you never told me?"

"Would you have believed me if I did? And besides, it is okay enough if I have to bear all the sins alone for you, Elona. I am still Kael,right? Isn't that what matters?” He replied.

"That's not the point!"

"Then what is the point, Elona?" His voice rose to match mine, something breaking loose in him too. "That I should have let you die at twelve so you could grow up fully human and marry Rylan with a clean conscience? That I should have let you die three nights ago so I wouldn't have to sit here explaining any of this to you? Tell me which version you'd have preferred, because I have replayed both a thousand times and I still don't have an answer that doesn't end with you in the ground."

The fire popped, sending a spray of orange sparks up the flue, and neither of us moved for a long moment.

"You should have told me," I said finally, quieter.

"I know."

"Stop saying that like it fixes anything."

"It doesn't fix anything. I know that too." He dragged a hand through his hair, and for the first time all night, he looked less like the steady boy who'd waited outside her door during fevers and more like a man who'd been drowning quietly for a decade. "I told myself I was protecting you. Maybe I was protecting myself. Maybe I liked being the only one who knew what you really were underneath all that Alpha's-intended perfection everyone expected of you."

"That's an ugly thing to admit."

"You asked."

Despite everything, something in me almost laughed, a broken, disbelieving sound. "Only you would manage to be smug about ruining my life."

"I didn't ruin your life. I saved it. Twice." A ghost of a smile finally cracked through. "You're welcome, by the way."

"Don't."

"You're welcome," he said again, softer, and reached out to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear, the same gesture from the night before, gentle enough that my chest ached with it.

I let him. That was the terrifying part — I always let him.

"Rylan touched my face today," I said, watching the fire instead of Kael's expression. "And all I felt was his pulse under my fingers like a threat instead of a promise. I don't know how to be his Luna and this — whatever this is — at the same time."

Kael's hand stilled against my cheek. "Maybe you're not supposed to be both."

"Careful," I murmured. "That sounds like you're asking me to choose."

"I'd never ask." A beat. "But if you did happen to choose —"

"Kael."

"— purely hypothetically —"

"Kael.”

He finally smiled properly, the exhaustion cracking just enough to let something warmer through, something that made the fire in the hearth feel small by comparison. "I'm allowed to hope, Elona. Even monsters hope."

"You're not a monster, and I am still human, right? You saved me, it is different.”

"You said the same thing to yourself an hour ago and didn't believe it either."

I opened my mouth to argue and found I had nothing. He was right, infuriatingly right, the way he'd always been right about me since we were children hiding from thunderstorms under the same blanket.

Outside, footsteps approached, heavier, purposeful, unmistakably Rylan's, and I felt Kael go still beside me, the warmth of his hand withdrawing just enough to leave a careful, respectable distance between us before the door could open.

"He's going to ask why I smell like you," I whispered.

"Then tell him the truth," Kael said. "Tell him the fire in this room ran cold, and I helped you find another one."

The door handle turned.

I had no idea, yet, which fire he meant, the one crackling in the hearth in front of us, or the one he'd lit in me the moment his blood had first touched my lips. Both, I suspected, were going to burn me before this was over.