Blood & Moonlight

Bryan POV I had built my life around control. Every morning at Crestwood University started the same way. Five-thirty a.m., before the sun had any real business being in the sky, I was already in the campus gym — iron in my hands, sweat on my back, the burn in my muscles the only thing loud enough to drown out everything else living inside my head. I ran the trails along the ridge when it rained. I ran them harder when it didn't. I showed up to class, kept my grades where my father expected them, kept my head down, kept my circle tight. Marcus would say I was boring. Marcus could say whatever he wanted. Control was the only thing I trusted. My phone buzzed on the bench beside me mid-rep on a Wednesday morning. I didn't stop. It buzzed again. I glanced at the screen without dropping the bar. Dad. I racked the weight, sat up, and answered. "You're up early," I said. "I need you to come home." His voice was measured — Aaron Montgomery didn't do panic, not openly — but I'd known that voice my whole life. There was something underneath it. Something being held back. "Not home home. Arizona. I need you here to help with the move." I went still. "The move." "We're coming to Washington. All of us." A pause, and in that pause I heard everything he wasn't saying. "It's time to bring the family closer to the pack. Things are shifting, Bryan. I'll explain when you get here." I stared at the far wall of the gym. Someone's music was bleeding through their headphones across the room, tinny and distant. I felt like I was underwater. "All of us," I repeated. "All of us." He hung up before I could say anything else, which was either mercy or cowardice — with my father, sometimes those were the same thing. I sat on that bench for a full minute. Didn't move. Just breathed through it the way I'd been taught, the way I'd taught myself — slow counts, caged chest, everything locked down. Then I stood up, grabbed my bag, and started making arrangements to be on the road within the hour. My truck ate the miles between Washington and Arizona like it was born for it. The black F450 was the one indulgence I'd allowed myself — built for hauling, built for towing, built for long roads and no questions asked. Marcus called it compensating. I called it practical. The truth was somewhere in the middle, and it lived in the fact that every road trip I'd taken in it in the last five years had been running away from something, not toward it. I turned the music up and let the highway unfold. The memories came anyway. They always did when it came to her. Didn't matter how hard I drove or how loud the speakers were. Some things don't respect volume. I was eight years old the first time I saw her. My father had come home one night with a look on his face I hadn't seen since my mother died — purposeful, decided, something already done that couldn't be undone. He told me we were taking in a family. A woman named Maggie and her four children. The pack elders had requested it. That was all he said. I didn't ask why, because you didn't ask Aaron Montgomery why when he looked like that. They arrived the following evening. I remember Maggie first — silver-haired, blue-eyed, composed in the quiet way of someone who had already survived the worst thing that could happen to them and simply kept moving. Then the twins, loud even in their silence, eyeing everything with that specific twin language that didn't need words. Then the baby, barely a few months old, bundled and sleeping. And then the little girl. She was barely three. Tucked against her mother's side, one tiny fist curled into Maggie's shirt. She had the same silver hair — wisps of it, baby-soft, catching the porch light like something out of a dream — and when she looked up at me, her eyes were the most startling thing I had ever seen. Crystal blue, pale as shallow water over white sand, huge in her small face. She stared at me with zero fear, which was unusual for a child staring at a boy twice her size who hadn't smiled yet. Then she reached out her little hand toward me like she already knew me. I didn't understand what happened in my chest that night. I was eight. I didn't have the language for it. All I knew was that something clicked into place that hadn't been in place before, like a door I hadn't known was missing suddenly being on its hinges. An instinct, bone-deep and ancient, that said: protect her. Stay close. Don't let anything near her. I took her hand. She smiled at me like I was the most obvious thing in the world. I-10 carved through the desert and I watched the landscape flatten and brown. Arizona always felt like a different planet after Washington — all heat and exposed earth, no cover, no tree line. My kind didn't love it. Too open. Too lit. She was never ugly. I want to be clear about that, even if only to myself, even just in my own skull where nobody could hear it. There was never a version of Kendra Smith that wasn't the most beautiful thing in any room she walked into. Not as a child, not through those in-between years, not now. She'd been born looking like that — her mother's silver hair, her mother's blue eyes, something else entirely her own in the way she carried herself, like the world was soft enough to walk on and she'd never been given reason to think otherwise. I had made myself her reason, eventually. The memories hit in pieces the way they always did — not linear, not clean, just shards. Sitting at the kitchen table, coloring books spread between us, her little tongue peeking out the corner of her mouth in concentration. Her crying in her room at night, that small muffled sound coming through the wall, and me lying awake listening to it until I couldn't anymore — until I'd get up, cross the hall, open her door, and she'd already be lifting the covers for me like she knew I was coming. "I dreamed about Daddy again," she'd whisper, her face pressed against my shoulder. "I know, princess." "Does it get less sad?" I hadn't known how to answer that at eight. I'd lost my own mother four years before to something I still wasn't allowed to fully understand — vampire raid, pack elders, a night my father never talked about in front of me. I knew what grief tasted like. I knew it didn't get less sad as much as you got better at carrying it. "Yeah," I'd told her. "It does." She'd believed me. She always believed me. That was the thing about Kendra that I hadn't been prepared for — she trusted me completely. Blindly. She had from the very first night. And I had spent the next fifteen years being simultaneously the person most worthy of that trust and the person most likely to destroy her with it. Puberty hit me like a freight train. Fourteen — things changed. The pull I'd always felt toward her intensified in ways I didn't have words for and absolutely wasn't equipped to handle. I started noticing things I had no business noticing. The way she laughed. The way she moved. The way she smelled — that specific scent that was only hers, warm and sweet with something cool underneath it, like sugared vanilla and fresh mint. It was everywhere. In the house, in her room when I passed the door, in the car, in the kitchen. Everywhere she'd been recently, she'd left traces of it, and my body reacted to those traces in ways that made me want to drive my fist through a wall. I told myself it was a crush. A stupid, messed-up teenage crush on my step-sister. I told myself that firmly, repeatedly, the way you tell yourself a lie often enough that it starts to feel true. It never felt true. The first Haze came when I was fifteen. I'd heard about the Haze from older wolves in the pack — the way the full moon stripped your higher thinking down to instinct, the way your wolf side rose up and demanded. What nobody had warned me about was that for an unmated wolf who'd already imprinted, the Haze had a direction. It wasn't just restless energy and the need to shift. It was a name. A face. An unbearable pull toward one specific person who was eleven years old and asleep down the hall, and I had gotten up in the middle of the night and made it three steps toward her door before I caught myself. Three steps. I'd stood in that hallway shaking, gripping the doorframe, and made a decision. I told my father I wanted to start the camping trips. He didn't question it — he was pleased, actually, thought it was good for pack bonding, took me out to the Washington wilderness every full moon. He had no idea what I was really doing out there in the trees. What I was keeping myself away from. That was the other lie I'd been living for years. I turned eighteen and her scent changed. Intensified, deepened, became something my wolf recognized as mine with a certainty that felt less like emotion and more like gravity. I'd looked at her across the dinner table one night — just looked at her, the way I'd done a thousand times — and known with every part of me that was supernatural and ancient and not negotiable that she was my mate. She was fourteen. I left for Crestwood three months later. The Montgomery-Smith house appeared around a bend in the suburban road just as the afternoon was starting to think about becoming evening. A nice house — Dad had always made sure of that. Wide drive, well-kept yard browning at the edges from the summer heat, moving boxes already stacked on the front porch in clusters. Two vans in the driveway. My father's truck. I parked at the curb and sat for a moment with my hands on the wheel, running through the internal checklist I'd built over years of practice. Lock it down. Compartmentalize. You're here to haul furniture and drive a truck, that's it. Don't look for her. Don't breathe too deep. You've done this before. I climbed out. The front door was open. Someone had propped the screen door wide to let the air through, and the AC was running — I could hear the low hum of it, feel the pressure differential as cold air pushed out into the Arizona heat. The scent hit me like a physical thing. Warm. Sweet. That edge of mint underneath, cool and clean and devastating. Five years and it was exactly — exactly — what I remembered, except somehow more. Fuller. Like whatever she'd been growing into since I left had finished itself out and this was the finished version, and the finished version was going to be the end of me. I had stopped walking without realizing it. I was standing in the middle of the driveway like an i***t when the screen door swung wider and she appeared. She was wearing black spandex shorts — the kind that ended high on her thighs and left absolutely nothing to the imagination about the shape she'd grown into — and a small white tank top with a low neckline that pulled tight across her chest. The hem barely reached her navel. Every time she moved I caught the strip of skin at her waist, smooth and tan, and the swell at the top of the tank where the fabric dipped and I had to drag my eyes upward before they finished what they started. She was stunning. I had known she would be. I had mentally prepared for this. I had run every scenario in my head for a few hours of driving and none of them had prepared me for the actual reality of Kendra Smith at nineteen years old standing in a doorway with afternoon light setting her silver hair on fire. That hair. God, that hair. Long and thick and wavy, the color of moonlight and stardust, falling over her shoulders and down her back. I'd seen it every day for ten years and I still wasn't over it. It was the kind of hair that had no business being natural, like something a writer had invented for a character too perfect for real life. And her face. I had her features memorized — I always had — but memory does a disservice to things that need to be witnessed in motion. Her crystal blue eyes, pale and sharp and luminous, ringed with something darker that made them look almost lit from the inside. Her brows, dark against all that silver. Her skin, warm golden tan from the Arizona sun, flawless and smooth. Full lips that were currently open in something she was about to say to my father, who I now noticed was standing just inside the doorway. She hadn't seen me yet. She was mid-sentence about something — something about her bedroom furniture, whether the white dresser was being moved or replaced, her voice carrying that particular energy she got when she was asking for something and had already decided the answer was yes. I watched my father's expression shift into the specific helpless softness he only ever had around her. Then her eyes tracked sideways and found me. The sentence died. She looked at me the way you look at something you weren't expecting — a quick recalibration, a flash of something unreadable — and then her chin lifted and her expression settled into something cooler. Five years could do a lot to a person. Five years of me leaving without a real explanation, of increasingly short phone calls and holidays where I showed up like a stranger, had apparently done something specific to Kendra Smith. "Oh," she said. "You came in the truck." Her gaze flicked to the F450 at the curb with a precision that managed to be both dismissive and pointed at once. "Did you need it to be bigger? I feel like you could've gone bigger." I felt the corner of my mouth pull against my will. Snarky. She'd always had a mouth on her, even as a kid, but she'd learned how to sharpen it since I'd been gone. "Appreciate the input," I said, keeping my voice flat. "How's that cheerleading flexibility treating you? Must be nice to be able to fit your whole head up your own ass." Her eyes narrowed. Her lips pressed together. The scowl that crossed her face was so precisely, specifically Kendra — jaw tight, brows down, eyes cold as the color they were — that something low in my body pulled taut and hot in a way I had exactly no interest in examining. It had always done that. Even when we were younger and she'd made that face at me over something stupid, something childish — it had always done that. Some wiring in me that had nothing to do with reason. She held my gaze for one scorching second. Then she turned back to my father, said something quiet and specific about the dresser, and walked back inside without looking at me again. The screen door swung shut behind her. I stood in the driveway with her scent still wrapping around me from the AC pushing through the gap, and I had one single, crystalline, damning thought: Five years wasn't enough.