SINS OF THE MOON

CHAPTER TWO

RYKER

My cell phone sounded on the massive oak desk like a live grenade.

It was half a signature to the last border treaty when the screen flashed, and even then the name I had crossed out five years ago seemed somehow branded into my chest when I saw it. Sera.

As I opened the preview of the message, I waited three heartbeats before I allowed myself to do so.

“Ryker, It’s Sera. I am aware that I am not entitled to contact you five years after. But our boy is ill. Finn is five. He’s yours. Only your blood in the full moon can save him, says the healer. I’m begging you. Please. I’ll come to you. I’ll do anything. And do not have him die at my hands. I’m sorry. I was scared. I still love you. Sera.”

The words came like bullets through my ribs and lodged somewhere vital.

A son.

I had a son.

The phone was tight in my grasp and I broke the screen at the corners. Five years. Five years of getting up next to Lira and faking that the hole in my chest was just a job. Five years of seeing my father nodding with approval each time he saw me playing the Alpha of the perfect and the perfect mate. And all the while Sera had been bearing my child. Raising him. Hiding him.

I pushed aside the desk, and the chair was dragging on the floor with a lot of noise. The cedar-and-smoke odor of the Alpha house was suddenly too much, too close, too like the night when I had been about to kiss her in the kitchen when my father had told me I would be mated to Lira the next day.

I typed back before I could think.

“Prove it. Or don’t waste my time.”

The response was quick. A photo attached.

I opened it and the globe tipped.

It was some smiling little fellow, five years old, perhaps six, with my own midnight eyes and with the obstinate jaw of my father. His black hair was twisted in the same direction as mine when I was a boy. The tilt of his chin was storm-gray like Sera. My wolf sprang so furiously that my fangs fell half a way before I drew them in.

“He has my father’s jaw. My mother’s nose. How the hell could you hold him out of my hands for five years?”

I sent it, and at once regretted the bareness of the words. But the anger was genuine. It smouldered in my veins like silver.

Her second message struck a second blow.

“Having taken him, they would have done so. Since your father would have referred to it as a mistake. I was too scared that you would prefer the pack to us. I was wrong. I’m sorry. But just now he wants you. I need you. Please.”

I stamped my feet across the study, as the boots bumped on the old carpets. Already the full moon was rising beyond the tall windows, cutting the floor like a blade of silver. I could smell the lighter floral fragrance of Lira floating along the corridor-- she was somewhere in the house with Mira, and was likely reading our daughter a bedtime story as the ideal little family we should be.

On a lie the family was established.

I stood at the window looking out into the pine woods which had been the scene of stolen time with Sera. My thumb was floating above the keyboard.

“Come home. Both of you. Tonight. Bring the boy. In case this is true, you and he sit under my roof till the ritual is complete. No arguments. No running. And Sera--unless you speak the truth to me I vow on the moon I shall never forgive you.”

I hit send.

The three dots were nearly at once visible.

“Okay.”

One word. Five years of iron control was as wide open as it was cracked.

I drew a hand down my face, hard breathing. The idea of Sera returning to walk in the front door of this house--of her standing in this same hall, where I had so nearly lost my head and kissed her that last night--sent my wolf whining and snarling both. The manner in which her smell had enclosed me in the kitchen was still fresh in my memory: honey and juniper and raw need. How her fingers had clenched my shirt, as though I were drowning and she was air. How I had kissed her lips tomorrow night as a promise I had never fulfilled.

And now she was delivering me a son that I had never heard of.

The door of the study banged open behind me.

“Ryker?” Lira spoke gently and with caution, as it always was when she thought I was in a bad mood. She moved in, with her blonde hair floating all about her shoulders, and was clothed in the silk robe I had given her last winter solstice. “Mira is asking you. She wants you to end the story of the moon wolf.”

I swiveled around, holding the phone in my hand. Lira glanced at the broken screen, and at my face. She could scent the difference in my smell--I knew she could. The harsh prick of shock and something more, something that was always hers, Sera.

“Is something wron?” SheI questioned, coming nearer. Her arm touched my hand, and it was light and practiced. “You are as white as a ghost.”

I made my jaws open. “Pack business. Border issue. You need not worry.”

She contemplated me for a long second, that graceful smile of hers never entirely covering her eyes. “You know you can say anything to me, right? We’re mates. Partners.”

The term mates was like ashes in my mouth. I replied by nodding once and sliding the phone back into my back pocket before she was able to view the screen. “I know. Be up in a minute. I have a thing.”

Lira hesitated, and then bent over and kissed me quickly on the cheek. Her smell, clean lavender and cool river stone, was out of place on my skin to-night. Too light. Too *not* Sera.

“Ok,” she said. “Hurry up, she misses her daddy.”

The door closed behind her.

I waited until I heard her footsteps going down the hall, and then drew out the phone once more. The message that Sera had sent was still on the screen.

“Okay.”

I had written another line before I could restrain myself.

“Drive safe. Wait on the border road, I shall meet you at the entrance of Blackthorn country.And Sera. tell the boy that his father is coming to him.”

I sent it, and I pushed away the phone as if it were aflame.

My wolf was now pacing, scraping the inside of my ribs with his claws. A son. A *son*. At the age of five and battling to save his life since I had left my father at liberty to pick me a mate. It was that I had been on that altar and had seen Sera fade away into the shadows and Lira slip her hand into mine as though she were the owner of the future.

I moved about to the window and looked out at the dark pines. The moon now was higher, full and bright and merciless. Somewhere out there Sera was loading a dying child into a car and heading right into the fire we had both just barely gotten out of five years ago.

I was already experiencing the attraction--the very same rough, unattainable chemistry which had almost ruined us once. It remained, and was humming in my bones as though it had never been away.

The door was softly knocked upon.

“Ryker?” Once more, Lira, voice here bordered with a keenerness. “Mira is waiting. And your father has just called--he wants to know why you are not answering the council line.”

I swiveled around, heart racing, and looked her in the eyes across the room. She was staring at me too attentively now, the flawless smile missing.

Before I could answer, my phone buzzed again in my pocket.

I needed no searching, it was Sera.

They were already on the way.

And within an hour or two more the woman whom I had never ceased to love was going to step into my door with the son whom I had never known I had--right before the very eyes of the wife who had never imagined that her whole world would ever be destroyed.

I gulp, and the flavor of guilt and hunger and five years of suppressed desire coated my tongue.

This was going to incinerate all this.

And I was not certain that I wanted to put a halt to it.