Blood & Moonlight

Chapter Six — Twenty-Four Hours

Bryan POV

I woke up at six without an alarm.

Pack instinct. My internal clock had been running on its own schedule since my first shift at fifteen — something about the biology of it recalibrated every system, including sleep, so that I woke naturally with the light and at whatever time I'd told my body to surface. I lay there for approximately ninety seconds, looked at the ceiling that had given me nothing useful the night before, and got up.

Shower. Jeans. The dark green henley I'd packed on top because it was easy to grab. I ran my hands through my hair without looking at the mirror, which was a habit, and I was out of the room by six-fifteen with the particular efficiency of someone who had been well trained and never fully untrained.

The dining room off the hotel lobby was the kind of space that existed in corporate hospitality vernacular as a complimentary breakfast area — a generous term for a room with individual tables, a waffle station, and the smell of mediocre coffee doing its best. The good news was that at six-fifteen in the morning, it was mostly empty. The better news was that my father had apparently beat me here.

He and Maggie were at a table by the window, two cups of coffee already in play, the particular quiet of two people who had been together long enough to exist in comfortable silence before a long day of travel. My father's posture was what it always was — settled, unhurried. Maggie's silver hair was down, catching the early light, and she was reading something on her phone with the relaxed attention of someone who wasn't worried about whatever it was.

I crossed the room. My father looked up when he heard me — he always heard me coming, same as I heard him — and something in his face settled further, the specific way it did when something expected arrived on schedule.

"Morning," I said.

"Morning." My father reached forward and pushed a full cup of coffee toward the seat beside him. He'd poured it already. Black, no sugar, which he'd known since I was old enough to have an opinion about it.

Maggie looked up from her phone and smiled — the warm, unguarded kind. "Good morning, sweetheart. How'd you sleep?"

"Fine." I sat, wrapped my hands around the coffee mug. "Better than I thought."

Which was almost true. I'd eventually slept. Four hours was functional.

My father drank from his cup. Set it down. "You mind going up and getting Kyle and Kendra? We should eat before six-thirty if we want to hit the road at a decent time."

"Sure." I pushed my chair back.

He reached into his shirt pocket and held out two key cards. "In case either of them doesn't answer."

I took them.

The elevator to the third floor. Then the hallway, the particular quiet of hotel mornings where everyone was either still asleep or moving too carefully to disturb it. Kyle's room was first, according to the room assignment my father had relayed last night.

I knocked.

Nothing.

I knocked again, three solid raps with the back of my knuckles.

There was a sound from inside — the specific quality of someone rearranging themselves in a bed that did not want to give them up. Then Kyle's voice, muffled through the door and committed to exactly one register of communication regardless of time of day or circumstance:

"Yeah, I'm coming."

I left him to it. Kyle had never needed supervision. Kyle needed to be informed of what was happening and then left to process it on his own timeline, which was fine by me.

I moved down the hall.

Kendra's room.

I raised my hand and knocked — the same solid knock, enough to carry through the door without being aggressive about it. I stood with my hands in my back pockets and waited. Counted to ten. Knocked again.

Nothing.

I exhaled through my nose. Looked at the key card in my hand.

Right.

I swiped it. The light went green. I pushed the door open slowly, just enough to register the state of the room before committing to entry, and what registered was: dark. Completely dark, curtains pulled tight, the kind of blackout that hotel drapes were specifically engineered to create. Ordinary human eyes would have been useless.

Mine were not.

The shape of the room clarified itself in the low light — the familiar layout, the luggage rack with her bag, the desk she hadn't used, the bathroom door ajar. And the bed.

She was asleep.

Completely, genuinely asleep, in the particular way that Kendra had always slept — deeply, totally, the way some people simply commit to unconsciousness when they go under. I'd known this since childhood. She'd never been a light sleeper. She could sleep through things that would have woken anyone else, and she woke up slow and protesting every time.

I stood in the doorway for a moment and had the specific, familiar, exhausting experience of having to argue with myself about something I wasn't going to do. The distance between the door and the bed was maybe fifteen feet. There was half a bed empty beside her, white sheets, cool room. My wolf had an extremely clear and thoroughly developed position on what I should do with those fifteen feet and that empty half, and I shut it down the way I always shut it down — with the deliberate application of every rational argument I'd ever assembled about why this was not something I was going to do.

I walked to the curtains instead.

The fabric was thick, the kind that had a specific satisfying weight when you pulled them. I took both panels and drew them back in one clean motion.

Arizona morning light came through the windows like a deliberate decision.

From the bed, a soft sound — halfway between a sigh and a complaint, the particular vowel of someone whose sleep had just been interfered with against their will. I turned.

And I stopped.

Every system I had — wolf instinct, rational thought, the fifteen years of carefully constructed self-control — all of it hit a wall at the same moment and just stopped.

She'd shifted when the light came in, the way a body does when it registers an intrusion without fully waking. She was lying slightly on her stomach, her upper body angled into the pillows, her right arm folded up so that her hand rested near her face, the way children sleep, the way people sleep when they feel completely safe. Her hair was in a messy bun from the night before, the silver-blonde of it catching the morning light, loose pieces falling across her cheek. Her face was soft and slack with sleep, completely unguarded in a way that Kendra's face was almost never unguarded when she was awake.

The hem of the oversized Sunridge shirt she was sleeping in had ridden up.

Past the curve of her waist. Past her hip. Bunched up at the small of her back like it had made its own decisions in the night and landed where it landed, where it had no business landing from a situational standpoint, exposing the full line of her from the dip of her waist down. Small, black lace. A cheeky cut that the shirt had been covering until it wasn't anymore — the kind of thing that might as well have been nothing, the dark lace sitting against the tan skin of her hip, the curve of her pulled-up knee, one leg slightly bent and the other straight, the smooth line of her thighs against the white sheets.

My pulse hit my eardrums.

That was the only word for it — it didn't beat so much as impact, over and over, a full systemic reaction that I was aware of in every part of me simultaneously. The blood moved. My wolf didn't scream — screaming implied something with a ceiling on it. It was more like a frequency, a constant vibrating thing, MINE MINE MINE running through every available channel at once.

I stood there for three full seconds that felt like structural failures.

Move, I told myself. Say something. Do the thing you came here to do and leave.

I cleared my throat. The sound came out controlled. Barely.

"Kendra." My voice was steady. I was unreasonably proud of that. "Get up. Breakfast."

From the bed, the specific sound of someone who had registered noise but refused to grant it any authority: "Mmm." A pause. "Five minutes."

"We're leaving at six-thirty."

"Five minutes, Bryan."

I was going to say something else. I had the next sentence ready — something practical about the drive, the timeline, the table downstairs — when she moved.

Just a shift. Just the small readjustment of someone settling deeper into comfort, the slight repositioning of a sleeping body looking for a better version of where it already was. She turned her hip slightly, pulled her bent knee a little further, and the motion went through her in a wave — and her hips moved with it, a slow, absent, completely unconscious thing, and I stood there and watched it happen like a man watching something he had no language for.

The sound that came out of my chest was not a sound I'd authorized.

Low. Barely audible. A vibration that lived in the register below actual sound and above impulse — the specific thing my wolf did when it was at the limit of something. I locked it down before it became anything further, clamped my jaw shut with a force that put real pressure on my back teeth, drove my fingers into my palm hard enough that the knuckles went white.

Her scent in this room was everything. It had been strong yesterday in her room at the house. Here it was concentrated differently — close, warm, the particular depth of it that came from hours of sleep, the sweet warmth of her layered with the mint underneath and something softer than both, something that had no name and that my wolf had been cataloguing for fifteen years with the patience of something that understood it was waiting for an inevitable thing.

I held my breath.

It did nothing. The information was already in my blood.

You need to leave, I told myself. Not a suggestion. A direct, first-priority command. Right now. Walk out of this room and close the door and breathe air that doesn't have her in it.

"Get up," I said. The words came out sharper than I intended, the edge in them a product of control being stretched too thin. "Now, Kendra. Let's go."

I turned.

I crossed to the door in four strides and pulled it shut behind me.

It was louder than I meant it to be — the door caught in its frame with a sound somewhere between a close and a slam, the kind that would carry in a quiet hallway and probably into the room I'd just left, which I was aware of approximately half a second after it happened and could do absolutely nothing about.

From inside, muffled but entirely clear:

"What the — BRYAN, what is wrong with you?! You ASSHOLE—"

I was already at the end of the hall.

I put my back against the wall beside the elevator and breathed. Slow, deliberate, the specific pattern I used — four counts in, hold for four, four counts out — that my father had taught me for shift control when I was fifteen and that had turned out to have applications considerably beyond its original intended purpose. I ran it three times. Four. The red edge of my wolf pulled back incrementally, like a tide that argued on the way out.

Go back, it said. She's right there. She's—

No, I told it.

She's—

No.

I stood there until the frequency dropped to something I could operate on. Then I straightened my spine, rolled my shoulders back, and went to find the elevator.

The dining room had added Kyle by the time I got back. He was at the table with a plate that had roughly twice the food on it that any reasonable human should consume before seven in the morning, earbuds half in, the picture of relaxed teenage indifference. He'd nodded at me once when I sat down, which I returned, and then we both ate in a silence that neither of us found problematic.

My father watched me over his coffee cup for exactly as long as it took him to determine I wasn't going to offer any information. Then he looked back at his plate. Maggie passed me the orange juice.

"She's coming," I said, answering the question no one had asked.

"I assumed," my father said.

Twelve minutes later, Kendra appeared.

Skin-tight low-rise jeans — the dark kind, the kind that sat at the exact edge of where jeans technically started — and a fitted tank top, silver-blonde hair down past her shoulders, the look of someone who had made being annoyed about being awake somehow aesthetic. She said good morning to her mother, which was warm. She said good morning to my father, which was warm. She looked at me for approximately zero seconds and said nothing, which was pointed.

She sat down.

She made herself a plate with the controlled efficiency of someone who was hungry and irritated and had decided to do both things at once without making a production of it.

I drank my coffee.

The seating conversation happened after plates were cleared.

My father pulled up the map on his phone — twenty-three hours and change, depending on traffic and stops. The SUV was loaded. The truck was loaded. Division of passengers was, logistically, already determined by what the vehicles could hold.

Maggie said it with the matter-of-fact efficiency of someone who had already thought it through and was presenting a completed decision rather than a discussion: "Aaron, Kyle, and I will take the SUV. Kendra, you'll be with Bryan."

Kendra's head came up. "Can't I ride in—"

"The SUV is packed to the headrests." Maggie picked up her coffee cup. "Your other option is the back seat wedged between a floor lamp and the box with all the kitchen things, for twenty-three hours, and before you suggest it I will tell you right now that we are not making extended stops on a twenty-three-hour drive because you're uncomfortable."

Kendra looked at the table.

Looked at me.

I made a low sound in my throat that I hadn't planned — not a word, not quite — the specific register of a man who had just been handed a situation and was in the process of evaluating its full implications and not finding any of them good.

"That's fine," Kendra said. The tone of it was not fine. The tone of it was I have reviewed my options, I have found them all unacceptable, and I am selecting the least bad one under protest. She picked up her juice glass. Took a long sip. Set it down. Rolled her eyes at some point during this sequence, a slow deliberate rotation that committed to its own category. "Fine."

I tightened my jaw.

Twenty-three hours.

Twenty-three hours in the cab of my truck with Kendra's scent in an enclosed space, with no exit, with no walls, with no way to walk out of a room when I hit a limit. Twenty-three hours of her in the passenger seat, close enough to touch, close enough that every breath I took would be her — the warmth of her, the mint of her, the specific everything of her that my wolf had been cataloguing since I was eight years old and would continue cataloguing at high volume for the entire length of the state of California.

Great, I thought. Perfect. Fantastic situation, Bryan. Really worked out well here.

Maggie refilled her coffee from the carafe on the table, looking at nothing in particular, wearing an expression of complete serenity.

I drank the rest of my water.