Blood & Moonlight

Chapter Five — Whiskey and Impossible Things

Bryan POV

The ceiling of room 214 had nothing interesting about it.

I'd been staring at it for forty minutes — I knew because the digital clock on the nightstand had gone from 11:47 to 12:31 and I'd watched every increment of it with the specific uselessness of a person who knows they should be sleeping and has no intention of doing so. My body was tired. The kind of tired that came from six hours of driving and three hours of manual labor in Arizona heat, the kind that should have put me horizontal and unconscious by ten o'clock. My body had its priorities. My brain had different ones.

The wall between my room and the one next to it was standard hotel construction — drywall, insulation, the usual — which meant it was doing its job. I couldn't hear anything from the other side. That was fine. That was correct. I absolutely was not lying here with the specific awareness of exactly which room was adjacent to mine and exactly who was in it.

I was looking at the ceiling.

Bryan.

My father's voice landed in my mind with the particular clarity of the pack link — not like a sound, not quite like a thought either, but something in between, a communication that bypassed the ears entirely and arrived directly as meaning. I'd grown up with it since I was old enough to shift. The pack link was as natural to me as breathing. My father's link specifically had a quality I'd never been able to articulate to anyone outside the pack — like a handshake, like a signature, immediate and unmistakable.

Come down to the bar. I need to talk to you.

I was already sitting up.

I pulled on shorts and a t-shirt, ran a hand through my hair without looking at the result, and took the stairs rather than the elevator because standing still in a small box at twelve-thirty in the morning sounded like exactly the kind of situation I didn't need. The hotel bar was off the lobby — the kind of place that existed to be open late for business travelers and people who had difficult conversations to have, dim lighting, low music, a bartender who understood that his job included being invisible when required.

My father was at the end of the bar.

I had never been in the habit of looking at my father the way other people did — with that particular reaction that strangers had when they encountered him for the first time, the slight recalibration, the involuntary reassessment. He was my father. I knew his face the way I knew my own, without assessment. But occasionally, from a distance, I caught it the way an outsider might: Aaron Montgomery at forty-five was a man who looked like the architect of something. Six foot three, shoulders like a doorframe, the kind of build that hadn't softened with age but had simply become more settled in itself, more deliberate. Dark hair swept back from a broad forehead, the silver at his temples the only concession to the years. Strong jaw carrying a close beard, dark eyes that had the same quality of stillness I'd spent my whole life trying to replicate. He was wearing a white button-down rolled to the forearms, a watch, the ring he'd never removed since my mother died.

He looked up when I sat down.

The bartender appeared without being summoned, which was good instinct, and I ordered a whiskey. My father already had one — amber, two fingers, barely touched.

He waited until we were alone.

"Arizona was compromised," he said.

The glass arrived. I wrapped my hand around it and didn't drink yet. "Compromised how."

"They found us." He said it the way he said most difficult things — with the directness of someone who believed that softening the delivery of bad news was a disservice to the person receiving it. "Not recently. They've been watching for at least three months. Maybe longer. We caught the trail too late."

I processed this. "Arizona is human territory. The sun—"

"I know what Arizona is." He took a slow sip of his drink. "They're getting bolder, Bryan. That's the pattern we've been watching for two years now — they push at the edges, they test the territories we thought were safe by virtue of climate and geography, they pull back when we notice and then push further the next time. They're not retreating anymore. They're advancing."

I stared at the amber in my glass. "Which faction."

"We're not certain yet. The scouts are working on it." He set his glass down and turned it slowly on the bar. "The point is, Arizona gave us the illusion of safety. Human territory, blazing sun, conventional wisdom said they wouldn't risk it. They risked it anyway. We can't assume geography protects us anymore."

"So Washington."

"Pack territory. Our ground, our rules, our surveillance. I can have three dozen wolves on a perimeter inside an hour in Washington. I can't do that in Arizona." He paused. "It's where we should have been all along. I waited too long because the kids were settled and Maggie was happy and I kept telling myself another year, another few months." He shook his head once. "That's done."

I drank.

The whiskey was good — something aged, smoother than it had any right to be for a hotel bar. It settled into my chest with a warmth that had nothing to do with the heat outside.

"After all this time," I said, keeping my voice level. "Fifteen years of protecting them. Moving with them, keeping them under pack surveillance, the whole operation — and it's still just because of what they think she is?"

My father's expression didn't change. "They don't think anything. They know."

"She's a witch who doesn't know she's a witch," I said. "She can't use what she doesn't know she has. She's not a threat to them, she's not an asset to anyone because she can't access — "

"That's not how they see it." His voice was quiet. Final. "The potential alone is enough. What she is doesn't require her active participation to be valuable to the wrong people."

I looked at my glass. Said the next thing carefully. "The medication."

"Still working. Maggie manages it." He picked up his drink. "Kendra takes it every morning. As far as she knows it's been helping her sleep, managing the anxiety she's carried since her father died. She has no reason to question it."

I sat with that for a moment — the image of Kendra taking a pill she'd been given by her mother for years, trusting it, not knowing it was a leash on something she didn't know she carried. She'd been a good sleeper as a kid. I knew because I'd been the one crawling into her room when she wasn't. The anxiety explanation had probably tracked for her, had probably felt plausible, and she'd never had reason to look underneath it for anything else.

She trusted us.

All of us. Every person in that house. And all of us had been keeping pieces of something from her that she had the right to know.

I pushed the thought back. Now wasn't the time for that particular guilt.

"I want you closer," my father said. He turned on the barstool to face me more directly, and there was something in his posture that was less Alpha and more just — father. The distinction mattered. "The new property has a guest house. Full kitchen, private entrance, your own space. I'm not asking you to give up your independence. I'm asking you to be on the same property."

There it was.

I'd half expected it. Hadn't known how to prepare for it anyway.

I tightened my jaw. Looked at the bar. Counted the things I was weighing — the safety argument, which was real and not dismissible. The pack obligation, which was also real. Kendra's scent at close range on a daily basis, which was currently the leading concern in my internal risk assessment and something I could not say out loud to the man sitting next to me.

I wanted her safe. That was the constant, the thing that lived underneath everything else, the one thing that had never once wavered in fifteen years of very complicated feelings. Whatever else I was navigating internally, protecting her was non-negotiable. It always had been.

I picked up my glass.

Drank.

Set it back down.

"Fine," I said.

My father's shoulders dropped a fraction — subtle, almost imperceptible, but I'd known his body language since childhood and I caught it. He put his hand on my shoulder, heavy and steady. "Thank you."

We sat with that for a moment. The bar was quiet. The music had shifted to something softer, barely there. The bartender polished glasses at the far end with the professional discretion of someone being paid to exist in the background.

"Refill?" my father asked.

I slid the glass forward.

The second drink loosened the conversation in the way that second drinks were designed to. We talked about Crestwood — my program, the coursework, the specific academic expectations of a pre-law track that my father had constructed opinions about despite never having attended the school himself. I updated him on my grades, which were where they needed to be, which he received with the satisfaction of a man who expected nothing less and was still pleased when reality confirmed the expectation.

"Good," he said. "An Alpha needs more than strength. You'll lead a pack of sixty-three wolves. They need to trust your judgment, not just your teeth."

"I know, Dad."

"I know you know. I'm saying it anyway." He took a sip. "There's also the matter of Crestwood's alumni network — the Montgomery name carries weight in certain circles. Legal and otherwise. I want you positioned."

"I'm positioned."

He nodded. Looked at his drink. Then, with the particular quality of someone transitioning to a subject that had been waiting its turn:

"Have you found a mate?"

I had known this was coming. It always came. It had been coming with increasing frequency in the last year, with the urgency of a clock my father was more aware of than he ever said directly.

I tightened my jaw. Looked at the grain of the bar top — the way the wood swirled in patterns that had no particular meaning and required no response.

"No," I said.

He absorbed this. "You're twenty-three."

"I'm aware."

"The bond doesn't keep indefinitely without—"

"I know how it works."

He looked at me for a moment. I held his gaze because looking away would give too much, and my father was too perceptive by half when it came to his son. There was something in his eyes — not suspicion exactly, more like an open question he'd been carrying for a while and hadn't found the right moment to ask. I'd been living in the space of that unasked question for years.

He let it go.

For now.

"The elders have been in contact," he said instead, picking up his glass. "There's a candidate they feel strongly about. Good bloodline. Good standing." He paused. "Vivienne Blackwood."

I put my glass down on the bar with more care than the moment required, specifically because my first instinct had been to put it down considerably less carefully. I tipped my head back. Looked at the low ceiling of the hotel bar.

"Not her, Dad."

He made a sound that was somewhere between a chuckle and diplomatic neutrality. "She's not—"

"She's a nightmare." I brought my head back level. "She's mean. Not complicated-mean or misunderstood-mean — just genuinely, straightforwardly mean. To people who haven't done anything to her. For no discernible reason other than that she can." I picked up my drink. "She's a bitch."

"Bryan."

"She is. She's a royal b***h and the elders like her because her bloodline is clean and she's ambitious, which they're reading as leadership potential and which is actually just hunger for a title. She doesn't want a mate. She wants a position."

My father had the expression he got when he was trying not to find something funny. I'd known that expression for twenty-three years — the slight tightening at the corner of his mouth, the way his eyes went warm before the rest of his face caught up.

"She's from an old family," he said, keeping his voice measured. "The Blackwood line is one of the oldest pure bloodlines in the—"

"She made a pack junior cry at the solstice gathering three years ago for wearing the wrong color," I said. "She told her she was embarrassing her bloodline. The kid was sixteen."

The corner of his mouth twitched. He pressed his lips together. Lost.

He laughed — actually laughed, a short real sound, the one that didn't perform for anyone. I hadn't heard it in a while. It was a good sound.

"Okay," he said, still smiling. "She's a bitch."

"Thank you."

"She's a well-connected b***h with excellent genetics."

"Dad."

"I'm not endorsing her." He held up a hand. "I'm relaying. The elders relay, I relay to you, you tell me she's a b***h — cycle complete. Find your own mate, son, and this becomes irrelevant."

I drank. Said nothing.

He signaled for another round with the specific authority of a man who had decided the conversation was done for the night. We drank the third in a more comfortable silence, shoulder to shoulder at the bar, the kind of quiet that lived between two people who had spent a long time knowing each other well enough not to fill every space.

Before midnight ended and well before either of us were genuinely the worse for the whiskey — Montgomery metabolisms being what they were, which was deeply unfair to every human who'd ever tried to drink alongside us — we settled the tab and took the elevator up.

My father clapped me on the shoulder at our floor. Said nothing else.

I walked to my room.

Room 214. The key card beeped. I pushed the door open into the same ceiling I'd been staring at before, the same dark quiet, the same wall between my room and the one beside it.

I sat on the edge of the bed.

Washington. The guest house. Daily proximity, daily navigation, daily practice of every control mechanism I'd spent five years perfecting. Vampires closing in on something she didn't know she had, kept manageable by a pill she'd been taking since childhood. A mate I couldn't claim. An obligation I couldn't refuse.

And Vivienne Blackwood as the consolation prize the elders were lining up while I figured out how to survive all of it.

I lay back on the bed.

Looked at the ceiling.

Didn't sleep for a long time.