Blood & Moonlight

Chapter Two — The Audacity of Him

Kendra POV

I found the last of my cheerleading trophies under the bed wrapped in an old Sunridge University hoodie and I sat back on my heels and just looked at it for a moment.

Sunridge. God. I missed it already and I hadn't even left yet.

I'd spent my entire freshman year earning my spot on that squad — not because I needed to prove anything, but because I loved it. Because there was something that felt close to flying when a routine came together perfectly, when your body did the thing it had been built to do and the crowd reacted like you'd handed them something. I was head cheerleader by the end of November of my sophomore year. Youngest in the program's history, my coach had said, which she seemed more excited about than I was. I was just glad to be doing what I loved. I had friends there, real ones — people who knew my schedule and my coffee order and which dining hall to avoid on Thursdays. I had a life that I had built from scratch with my own hands after Josh and James left for California and it was finally starting to feel like mine.

And now my father was asking me to pack it into boxes.

I pulled the trophy out of the hoodie and set it carefully in the open box beside me. Taped the flaps. Labeled it in black marker: FRAGILE / KS ROOM. I had a system. I had to have a system or I was going to lose my entire mind.

The rumble of an engine outside was low and distinctive enough that I heard it even through the window, even through the hum of the AC. I straightened up without thinking about it, crossed to the window, and looked down at the street.

Black truck. Enormous. The kind of vehicle that announced itself three blocks before it arrived.

I already knew before he got out.

Bryan stepped down from the driver's side and I clocked him from above the way you clock something unexpected — the brain doing that little recalibrating thing where it goes wait, hold on, run that back. He was tall, which I'd always known, but the last time I'd seen him up close I'd been fourteen and he'd still existed in my mind as big brother sized, which was a category distinct from whatever category he now occupied. Six foot three, and every inch of it had grown into something that had no business standing in my mother's driveway in the Arizona heat like that.

He was wearing a plain grey t-shirt. That was it. A plain grey t-shirt and it had the audacity to fit him the way it did — stretched across a chest and a pair of shoulders that had clearly spent the last five years doing nothing but existing in a gym. Dark wavy hair, that same tousled mess that somehow looked deliberate without trying, slightly longer than I remembered it. Square jaw, sharper now than it used to be, dusted with stubble that sat exactly at the line between intentional and couldn't be bothered. His arms were —

I stepped back from the window.

No, I thought firmly. Absolutely not. We are not doing that.

He was still Bryan. He was still the same person who had spent the last several years of my life oscillating between ignoring me completely and being inexplicably cold when he couldn't avoid me, which was not the behavior of someone who deserved to be observed through a window like that. It didn't matter how he looked. It didn't matter that time had apparently decided to work exclusively in his favor. He was annoying and he was my step-brother and I needed to go downstairs and ask my father about the white dresser before somebody tried to wrap it with the ugly blue tape that left marks.

I smoothed my tank top. Checked nothing in the mirror. Went downstairs like a person with a normal amount of feelings.

Daddy was just inside the front door supervising the first round of boxes being carried out to the van. He had that expression he always got when he was managing logistics — focused but calm, not stressed because nothing stressed my father, which was either very admirable or slightly unnerving depending on the day. He looked up when I appeared and his face immediately did the thing it did for me specifically: softened, almost imperceptibly, but I'd known that face my whole life.

"Hey, princess." He pressed a kiss to the top of my head.

"Daddy." I got straight to it. "The white dresser — is that going in the new place or are we getting a new one? Because if it's going in the new place I need to pack the mirror separately, the screws are—"

I caught it in my peripheral vision first. That specific quality of stillness that Bryan had always had — the kind that wasn't really stillness at all but something more like extreme self-containment. I turned my head.

He was standing at the end of the driveway. Looking at me.

I had a specific face I put on when I needed to not react to something, and I put it on now. I looked at him the way I looked at mildly interesting strangers — a single assessment, neutral, moved on. He was dusty from the drive and the sun was behind him and he still somehow managed to look like something that should come with a warning label.

"Oh," I said. I kept my voice light, bored-adjacent. "You came in the truck." My gaze moved pointedly to the F450 sitting at the curb like a monument to overcompensation. "Did you need it to be bigger? I feel like you could've gone bigger."

Something shifted in his jaw. A micro-tension that I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't spent years learning how to read a face that worked extremely hard to give nothing away.

"Appreciate the input," he said. His voice was — it was deeper than I remembered, which was unfair in a way I refused to examine. "How's that cheerleading flexibility treating you? Must be nice to be able to fit your whole head up your own ass."

I held his gaze for exactly as long as I felt like it. Then I turned back to my father and spoke two precise sentences about the dresser, because I was not going to let Bryan Montgomery in a grey t-shirt derail a conversation about furniture. Daddy said the dresser was coming and I should use the blue tape for the small screws because that's what we had.

I walked back into the house. I took the stairs. I did not look back.

My room was half-packed and waiting for me when I dropped onto the edge of the bed and let myself feel exactly how frustrated I was without any audience for it.

Here is what nobody had adequately explained to me: we were leaving. We were leaving Arizona — the house I'd grown up in, the town I'd grown up in, the life I'd slowly and carefully constructed — to move to Washington. Which, fine. My father had his reasons, he always did, and they were almost never fully shared with me because apparently that was just how things worked in this family: decisions got made, boxes got packed, and explanations appeared eventually in the form of careful non-answers that somehow left everyone feeling informed without being told anything.

What I didn't understand was why now. Why the middle of my sophomore year. Why not, I don't know, at literally any other point in my life when the disruption would have landed slightly softer.

I had loved Sunridge. That probably sounds straightforward but let me be specific about what I was leaving: I was the youngest head cheerleader that program had ever had. My routines were watched. My girls trusted me. I had built real relationships — not the polished, performative kind that came with being visible, but actual ones, the kind that showed up with food when you were stressed and remembered which things you'd mentioned only once in passing. Those didn't come easy. Those had taken time.

All of that, done. Packed up. We're moving.

And because that apparently wasn't enough, because the universe decided my situation required one additional element of complication —

Bryan.

Bryan was moving back in.

Into the guest house, my father had told me, as if the guest house was somehow a separate planet from the main house and I wouldn't see him every single morning over breakfast. As if guest house Bryan was a different, more manageable Bryan than regular Bryan. As if I hadn't spent the last several years quietly adjusting to the reality of a life where he mostly wasn't present, where the space he used to take up in a room was just air again and I didn't have to navigate the specific emotional minefield of him.

I pressed my fingertips to my temples.

At least when Josh and James had left for California, there'd been relief in it. I loved my brothers — obviously, completely, the way you love something that has been annoying you for your entire life and you'd be devastated without — but living with the twins was a specific category of experience that required recovery time. They were a lot. Constant, loud, conspiratorial, always in the middle of something that somehow involved me even when I'd done nothing to invite it. Every boyfriend I'd so much as mentioned had somehow ended up uncomfortable and unwilling to make eye contact within a week. I didn't know how they did it. I had theories. None of them were flattering.

They'd been gone a year. California, which felt appropriately dramatic as a destination for Josh and James. I'd gotten used to the absence. More than used to it — I'd started to appreciate the breathing room.

Now I had Kyle, which was a different situation entirely. Kyle was seventeen and mostly communicated through shrugs and the occasional grunt of acknowledgement when you spoke to him directly. He wasn't malicious. He was just there, in the way that younger brothers were there — occupying space, eating everything, periodically appearing to ask if I was okay when he caught me at the wrong moment, and then retreating immediately because neither of us wanted to sit with whatever that was. He kept to himself. He was manageable. I could work with Kyle.

What I was less certain I could work with was Bryan Montgomery ten yards from my bedroom window in a guest house that probably had a gym in it because that was the kind of life my father provided, existing in my daily environment like nothing had changed, like the last five years of deliberate distance hadn't happened.

Because he had changed. That much I could admit to myself in the privacy of my own room with no witnesses. I had expected him to be the same, more or less, and he wasn't. People grew up over five years — that was normal, expected, fine. But Bryan had grown up in a way that was irritatingly specific and I had not been adequately prepared for it and I was annoyed at myself for not being prepared, which was its own separate problem.

He'd looked at me from that driveway the same way he'd been looking at me since I was a teenager — like he was deciding something, like I was a problem being assessed — and I had felt it in a way that I did not want to unpack and absolutely was not going to.

He was my step-brother.

He was also, historically, kind of an asshole.

Case closed.

I pulled my knees up to my chest and sat on the edge of the stripped mattress in my half-packed room and took one slow breath in, let it go, and looked around at what was left. Three more boxes, maybe four. The items on the windowsill. The photos I'd left for last because taking them down made it too real.

Washington. A new school. A new city. The same pack of moving boxes and the same family that kept making decisions around me, for me, without quite including me — and Bryan, apparently, as a bonus complication I hadn't asked for.

I took another breath.

Okay, I told myself. Fine.

It didn't feel fine. But it was something to say into the quiet of an almost-empty room, and sometimes that had to be enough.

I reached for the packing tape and got back to work.