Blood & Moonlight

Chapter Twelve — Welcome Home

Kendra POV

I smelled the trees before I saw them.

That was the thing about Washington that hit you when you'd been living in Arizona long enough to forget — the air was different, fundamentally different, not just in temperature but in composition. It came through the cracked window with a depth to it that Arizona's dry heat never had. Green and cold and layered, the specific smell of a place that had been growing things for a very long time without interruption.

We'd been driving through the outer edge of the Seattle metro for about twenty minutes — the kind of outskirts that wasn't suburban but wasn't rural either, that occupied the particular in-between space where money bought distance from the city without sacrificing access to it. The commercial stretches had thinned out. The gaps between buildings had gotten longer. And then the gaps had become continuous and the buildings had become trees, tall and dense and close to the road, the kind of Pacific Northwest forest that had presence rather than just scenery.

I had my knees pulled up to my chest, watching it go by. The last few hours of the drive had settled into something that wasn't exactly comfortable but wasn't hostile either — a kind of mutual exhaustion that had filed the edges off both of us. I'd stopped performing indifference sometime around the Oregon border and Bryan had stopped performing nothing, and we'd just been two people finishing a long drive.

The truck slowed.

I looked up from the window.

We'd turned off the main road onto something narrower — a private lane, paved but unmarked, running through a dense corridor of fir trees on both sides. The canopy above was enough to reduce the grey November sky to a filtered suggestion, the light coming through in pieces rather than all at once. It felt intentional. It felt like a transition.

Then the lane opened into a small clearing and the gate was there.

Reinforced was the right word for it — solid black iron, substantial, the kind of gate that communicated something specific about what it was protecting. Tall pillars of the same stacked grey stone on either side, security camera discreet but present at the top of the right pillar, the whole thing set into a stone wall that extended into the tree line in both directions.

Bryan reached up to the sun visor without looking — the casual reach of someone accessing something they've used many times before — and pressed the button on the small black transmitter clipped there. Then he turned.

Slowly. Deliberately. He looked at me with that expression — the one that was half smirk, half something else, the particular look that lived in his eyes when he knew something I didn't and was taking exactly the amount of time he wanted to before sharing it.

"Welcome home," he said.

The gate opened.

It unfolded as we came up the driveway — piece by piece, the way a very large thing assembled itself when you approached it properly. Dad's SUV was behind us, but I wasn't looking at it. I was looking at the house.

It was — I mean. It was a house the way the Grand Canyon was a hole in the ground.

Two stories of stacked grey stone and dark steel and glass, the kind of architecture that had decided the line between the inside and the outside was a suggestion rather than a rule. The exterior was grey schist stone, the real textured kind, cut in irregular horizontal courses that caught the Washington light and held it differently at every angle. The framing between them — the structural bones of the thing — was dark matte steel, almost black, making every edge deliberate. The roofline was low and wide, extending out in deep flat overhangs that sheltered the upper terraces, the whole silhouette pressed low and broad against the tree line behind it the way structures sat when they'd been designed to belong somewhere rather than impose on it.

The windows were massive. Floor-to-ceiling, the glass in large rectangular panels framed in that same dark steel, and through them — even from the driveway — you could see the warm amber glow of the interior lighting, the honey color of it against the grey stone exterior like the house was lit from inside by something that was genuinely alive. The garage ran along the right side of the house: three bays, doors in the same dark charcoal as every other metal element on the property, proportioned to handle serious vehicles without looking institutional.

The landscaping was managed but not manicured in the sterile sense — more like curated. The lawn was deep green the way Washington lawns were green, the kind of saturated color that Arizona forgot existed. Natural stone edging. Ornamental grasses at the bases of the stone pillars. Climbing vines up the left side of the facade that had clearly been here long enough to mean something, their late-autumn rust making a precise argument against the grey stone around them.

The moving trucks were already in the driveway. Three men in grey shirts coordinating with the efficiency of a company that had done this particular kind of job many times, which given the volume of furniture coming off the trucks, was good.

Bryan put the truck in park. I realized I hadn't said anything.

"Dad bought this?" I said. Which was not a complete thought but was the best I had available.

"He had it built." Bryan opened his door. Got out. "Two years ago."

"Two years—" I climbed down from the passenger side and stood on the stone driveway and looked up at the house. "He's been planning this for two years?"

Bryan came around the front of the truck, hands in his jacket pockets, and looked at the house with the expression of someone who had been here before and was watching me see it for the first time. "He plans things."

That was accurate. Aaron Montgomery planned things the way other people breathed — continuously and without apparent effort and far in advance of when the planning would be required. I stood there for a moment more and then my mother appeared from the SUV and came to stand beside me and put her arm around my shoulders and I heard her exhale with the specific quality of someone arriving at something they'd been hoping for.

"Come see the inside," she said.

The interior was what the exterior promised and then some.

The entry was double height, stone floor that matched the exterior, a wall of glass running all the way up one side of the foyer that looked out into the side yard and the trees beyond. The staircase was architectural in the way that very good staircases were — floating steps in dark oak, steel cable railing, the whole thing designed to take up as little visual space as possible while being structurally immense. The main living area opened directly off the entry and I stood in the middle of it and turned slowly and tried to decide where to look first.

The ceiling was high. The floors throughout were wide-plank dark oak, warm underfoot, the kind that absorbed the ambient light from the massive south-facing windows and gave it back slightly warmer. The kitchen at the back of the main floor was the size of the entire first floor of our old house, stone counters, a range that meant business, an island that sat eight. A fireplace in the living space that was floor to ceiling stone, matching the exterior, with a firebox large enough to be architectural on its own.

And at the back — the glass.

Two wide steel-framed sliding doors opened onto the back of the property, and through them, even before I went out: the back yard. The steps from outside descended in wide stone tiers into a garden space that had been landscaped with boulders — large, natural, settled into the ground the way boulders settled when they'd been there long enough to belong — and native plantings between them, and then beyond that the flat stretch of the backyard where the pool sat.

The pool was enormous and beautiful and blue-lit from below, the kind of in-ground design that came with a stone waterfall at the far end — water sheeting off a tiered arrangement of the same grey schist from the house's exterior, falling into the pool in a continuous curtain that you could hear faintly even through the glass. The hot tub sat connected to the far right end, tucked slightly lower, steam rising from the surface in the cold November air.

And on the opposite side of the pool from where I stood, across the water:

The guest house.

It matched. That was the first thing — it matched the main house in the same dark steel and grey stone, smaller in scale but identical in material and intention, two stories with the same floor-to-ceiling glass upper level glowing warm against the trees behind it. An exterior staircase ran up one side to the upper deck, steel railing, the whole thing self-contained and private and connected to the main property by a stone path that ran along the pool edge.

Bryan's.

I stood at the back glass and looked at it.

Then I went to find my room.

My room was on the upper level. I took the floating stairs and found the hallway at the top, and found the door with the temporary paper label that the movers had apparently applied to every room for navigation purposes, and pushed it open.

Half set up. The movers had gotten my furniture in — bed frame assembled, dresser against the wall, the desk placed approximately where I'd want it. The boxes were stacked in the corner in the order I'd labeled them, which meant the moving company was either very good or very afraid of my mother's organizational instructions. The room itself was generous — more space than I'd had in Arizona, more space than I'd had anywhere, with ceilings that felt like breathing room and baseboards that were doing something interesting architecturally.

And the window.

The window was not a window. It was the entire wall — one entire side of my room in floor-to-ceiling glass in that same dark steel frame, the Washington afternoon coming through it in pieces, grey and green and cold and specific. I crossed to it and looked out.

The pool was directly below and to the left, the waterfall running quietly, the hot tub steaming. The yard extended to the tree line. The stone path ran alongside the pool.

And directly across the water, straight lines from my floor-to-ceiling glass to the matching floor-to-ceiling glass of the upper level of the guest house: Bryan's room.

I looked at it.

From here, if both sets of blinds were open, we would be able to see each other.

I stood there for a moment with a feeling I couldn't categorize and didn't try to.

Then I went back downstairs to keep exploring.

The chaos of moving day had organized itself into something functional by the time I'd done my full tour — the movers efficient and focused, my father directing traffic in the specific calm way he directed everything, Kyle somewhere in his room with his door closed having apparently claimed his territory immediately. My mother was in the kitchen consulting with one of the movers about where the appliances were going.

I drifted toward the back of the house. The large sliding doors were pushed open now despite the cold, the back terrace becoming a staging area for pieces going between the house and the outdoor spaces. The stone steps leading down to the yard were being used as a casual landing spot for things being sorted.

I stood at the top of the stairs and watched.

Bryan was in the yard.

He'd taken his jacket off at some point. He was working — actually working, the kind of physical work that showed why people like him existed, moving a piece of outdoor furniture that would have required two normal-sized humans and some strategic maneuvering. He handled it the way he handled everything physical — without drama, without apparent effort that didn't actually require it, the economy of motion of someone who had been strong for long enough that strength was just a baseline rather than an event.

His shirt moved with him. The fabric pulled and shifted with every adjustment of weight, with every change in angle, and the arms — I'd been tracking his arms in various configurations for the last twenty-four hours and had not made peace with any iteration of them. The veins in his forearms. The definition that wasn't for show but was just the natural consequence of his specific biology doing what it did.

He set the piece down. Repositioned his grip on something else. Made a low sound — just a breath of effort, a soft deep grunt, barely audible, the kind of sound that wasn't trying to communicate anything and therefore communicated entirely too much.

I bit my lower lip before I'd decided to.

The throbbing was immediate and specific and deeply inconvenient given that I was standing on the back steps of my new home in broad November daylight with my family's moving crew within eyesight.

Bryan went still.

Just for a half second — the specific stillness of something that had caught a signal it was not going to announce. His head was slightly bowed. I watched the line of his shoulders, the subtle change in his posture.

Then he turned.

He looked directly at me across the yard with the unhurried accuracy of someone who had known exactly where I was. The hazel of his eyes in the grey Washington light was a different version of itself — darker, the green coming through more than the gold, something in them that was doing the thing I'd caught in the hallway and in the hotel, the thing that lived below the surface of his face on most days and occasionally wasn't fully buried.

He looked at me.

He smiled — slow, deliberate, just one side of his mouth.

And then he winked.

The warmth that went through me was a complete betrayal of every position I had taken in the last twenty-four hours.

I cleared my throat. Straightened my spine. Turned around and walked back into the house with the measured pace of a person who had been doing something very normal and was now returning to do other very normal things.

I went upstairs.

I closed my bedroom door.

I started unpacking with the focused intensity of someone who needed their hands to be doing something immediate and practical and completely absorbing, and I did not look out my floor-to-ceiling window at the guest house across the pool, and I was very deliberate about not doing that.

Very deliberate.

For almost four full minutes before I looked anyway.