Blood & Moonlight

Chapter Nineteen — Don't

Bryan POV

The dinner had been cleared and the table had descended into the comfortable aftermath of a Thanksgiving meal done right — the kind of post-feast atmosphere where conversation slowed and people distributed themselves around the house in small clusters and nobody was in a hurry about anything. Marcus Senior and my father had moved to the living room with the easy continuation of a conversation that had been running through dinner and would probably run through the evening. Mrs. Reed and Maggie were in the kitchen doing what they'd been doing all day, which was talking about food while being in proximity to food. Kyle had disappeared upstairs with the quiet efficiency of a seventeen-year-old who had reached the limit of adult-conversation tolerance and was exercising his right to exit.

Marcus appeared at my elbow while I was stacking the last of the dishes.

"Come outside," he said. "I've got a ball in the truck."

I looked at him.

"Twenty minutes," he said. "I need to move after that meal or I'm going to be useless."

This was true of him in a general sense — Marcus Reed at rest for more than two consecutive hours was a man who became progressively more restless and then progressively more annoying about it. Three years of this had taught me that the easiest solution was to give him somewhere to put the energy before it became everyone's problem.

I set the dishes down. Grabbed my jacket from the hook by the door.

The back of the property was open past the pool — a flat stretch of lawn between the tree line and the edge of the stone terrace, wide enough to throw a decent distance, the grass holding up under the cold November air. The sky was fully dark now, the outdoor lights from the house casting a warm amber glow across the first thirty yards of it. Marcus had changed into sweats he'd apparently kept in his truck with the preparedness of someone who treated post-Thanksgiving football as a standing appointment.

He spiraled the ball out on the first throw — clean, tight, the muscle memory of someone who'd been throwing since before they could drive. I caught it one-handed and sent it back with enough heat to make him take a step back absorbing it.

We fell into the rhythm of it. No conversation for the first few minutes, just the back-and-forth of the throw, the specific meditative quality of a task that required enough attention to occupy the body without demanding anything from the mind. My shoulder loosened up after the third or fourth throw, the post-haze residual stiffness working itself out the way it always did with movement, and by the tenth throw I felt closer to functional than I had since Friday.

The cold helped. The open air helped. The physical simplicity of the thing helped.

I was in the middle of thinking that this had been a good idea when the light changed in the window behind Marcus.

I tracked it with the peripheral awareness that I maintained at all times near the house — the specific monitoring that wasn't surveillance so much as the constant low-level orientation of the wolf toward the one point in its environment it considered primary. The large window at the back of the house, the one that ran floor to ceiling along the rear wall of the second floor corridor, catching the warm interior light as someone moved through it.

Kendra.

She was in the soft cream sweater still, moving through the corridor with the unhurried pace of someone winding down after a long day, and she glanced out the window — one of those casual, directionless glances toward the dark outside that people made without thinking — and caught the sight of us on the lawn and her expression shifted into a small smile. Small, genuine, there and then gone. She kept walking toward her room.

I caught the ball Marcus had thrown.

Held it.

Sent it back.

"Okay," Marcus said.

I looked at him.

"I'm just going to say it," he said, and his tone had shifted from the easy post-dinner looseness into something more deliberate, the particular mode he used when he'd decided something needed to be said and had been thinking about when to say it. He caught my throw and held it. "Your step-sister is smoking hot."

I set my jaw.

"Like — without even trying." He shook his head with the expression of a man arriving at a conclusion he found genuinely noteworthy. "Cream sweater, hair down, not doing anything. Smoking."

I held out my hand for the ball.

He threw it. I sent it back harder than I needed to. It hit his hands with a crack that made him shake them out before he threw it back.

"That's a lot of pace," he observed.

"Throw the ball, Marcus."

"I'm throwing the ball." He threw it. Caught mine. Threw again. Worked his jaw for a second like he was deciding whether to continue, which was already the answer because Marcus Reed only did that calculation when he'd already decided. "It must be rough, right? Seeing that every day and not being able to—" He paused, choosing the rest of it. "I mean. She's technically your step-sister. Technically."

The word technically delivered in the specific way that meant he was making a point about the technically.

My pulse was audible.

The throw I sent back had significantly more behind it than the last one. Marcus took an actual step back catching it, the impact of it traveling up his arms visibly, and he looked at the ball and then at me.

"Just saying," he said.

"Don't."

"I'm not doing anything, I'm just—"

"Marcus."

He held the ball. Tilted his head. The look he gave me was the one that meant he had more information now than he'd had five minutes ago and was processing the update to his map in real time. He'd had this look at the dinner table when I'd said she's fine. He was having it again now.

He threw the ball.

I caught it.

"She seeing anyone?" he asked. His voice had a quality that was deliberately casual, which was the specific tell that the casualness was not. "Because I wouldn't mind — you know. Getting to know her a little better. One on one. If you know what I'm saying."

The throw left my hand before I had time to make any decision about it.

It was not a football throw in any category that the sport would recognize. It was the product of a full-moon-depleted wolf with what remained of its reserves being concentrated into a single point of contact between my palm and the leather of that ball, aimed at the chest of my best friend with the full weight of fifteen years of suppression and three hours of watching him aim that smile at the one person in the world I couldn't claim.

It hit him square.

He went back two full steps — not falling, Marcus was built to absorb impact and had the footwork of someone who'd been doing this for years — but two actual steps back, his arms wrapped around the ball, his eyes wide in a way they almost never were.

For a moment neither of us said anything.

Then he laughed.

It was not the warm, unguarded dinner-table laugh. It was the shorter, careful one — the laugh of a man who had just received new information delivered at speed and was deciding how to hold it. "Okay," he said. "Okay. I was kidding. You know I was kidding."

I looked at him for a long second.

He held up one hand, the ball still tucked under his other arm. "I was kidding."

I turned and walked back toward the house.

"Bryan." He said it to my back, not as a challenge, just as acknowledgment. The way Marcus said things when he understood the conversation was over and wasn't going to push it.

I kept walking.

The house was warm.

I stood in the mudroom for a moment, both hands on the shelf above the coats, looking at the wall, waiting for my pulse to get back to something that passed for normal. The heat of the thing was still in my chest — not anger exactly, or not only anger, but the specific compound of everything that particular conversation had detonated. Marcus asking if she was seeing anyone. Marcus saying one on one. Marcus applying his particular skill set to the problem of Kendra like she was a problem to be applied to, like she was the same as anyone else he'd aimed that smile at in three years of knowing him.

She wasn't.

The wolf didn't need to tell me that. I'd known it since I was eight years old. I'd known the exact shape and weight and irreversibility of it for fifteen years, had built an entire architecture of management and restraint around it, had sat at that dinner table tonight and cut my turkey with the specific patience of someone who had been practicing this and was going to continue practicing it.

Marcus wasn't wrong about the technically.

He wasn't wrong about any of it, including the part that I hadn't let him finish saying.

That was the part that lived in the back of everything — the thing I didn't examine directly, the structural element of the situation that I'd built the management around without ever naming it out loud to anyone. The technically was real. We shared no blood. We had no legal status beyond the arrangement of two adults who had a practical reason to be in the same household. The stepsibling category existed because it was the only available container for what we were, not because it was accurate to what the imprint made her.

She was mine in a way that had nothing to do with any of that.

She was also twenty years old and didn't know what I was, didn't know what she was, didn't know that the watching feeling she'd had in the city parking lot was real and had a source and that the source was being managed by people who were trying to keep her alive. Didn't know that the reason she'd grown up inside the invisible radius of a pack she didn't belong to was because I'd been eight years old in a hotel hallway and the wolf had looked at her and the world had reorganized itself.

She didn't know any of it.

And Marcus Reed, who was my best friend and my future Beta and the person I trusted more than nearly anyone else in the world, had just stood on the lawn and asked if she was single in the specific tone that meant he was considering making her not single, and something in me had answered that with the total clarity of the wolf doing what the wolf did when someone made a particular kind of claim about something that had a particular kind of status.

I heard the door behind me.

Marcus came in, the ball still in his hands, his expression carrying the specific look of someone who had worked out what they were going to say during the walk back.

He set the ball on the shelf.

Looked at me.

"I won't," he said. Simple. No elaboration, no qualifying language, none of the Marcus Reed charm deployed in the direction of smoothing something over. Just the flat, direct statement of a Beta's son who knew when to be a Beta's son. "Whatever's happening there — I don't need to understand it. I won't."

I held his gaze for a moment.

He meant it. That was the thing about Marcus underneath all the other things about Marcus — when he gave his word on something that mattered, it stayed given. It was why he was going to be good at what he was going to be. It was why I'd never once had to question whether he had my back in three and a half years, not once, not on anything.

"I know," I said.

He nodded. Picked up his jacket from the hook.

"Protective big brother energy," he said, as he shrugged it on. A small shake of his head, more to himself than to me, the look of someone filing a piece of information under a category that made sense to him. "Didn't know you had it in you."

He went back to the living room.

I stood in the mudroom for a while longer.

Above me, through the ceiling, I heard the faint sound of her moving in her room — the specific creaking pattern of her floor I'd already learned from below, two steps toward the window, pause, the slight adjustment of the glass wall that meant she'd pressed her hand against it. Looking out, probably. The way she did sometimes in the evenings when she thought no one was watching.

The wolf was very still.

I pushed off the shelf and went upstairs.