SINS OF THE MOON

CHAPTER THREE

SERA

The highway smeared before the headlights like a black ribbon unwinding right into my past.

I had one hand on the wheel and the other on the blanket Finn had in the back seat, and was peeking into the rearview mirror about every few seconds. My son was huddled close to the pillows I had puffed around him, and his little chest was up and down too quickly. He was flushed and restless with the fever, yet awake, those midnight eyes--the eyes of Ryker--studying the dark pines as they swept by the window.

“Mama,” he said, in a hoarse voice. “Will we really see my real daddy?”

The query struck me like a blow on the breast. I gulp, and the guilt and the honey-juniper of mine own scent stinging with nerves. “Sure, baby, we are. He’s waiting on us at the border.”

Finn moved down under the blanket, and winked. “Does he know me?”

I gave a smile that I did not mean. “He does now. I said to him tonight. He wishes to meet you more than anything.”

The falsehood was nasty, but the reality was more. I had held Ryker out of his son five years because I was too much in terror that the pack would tear Finn to pieces the moment they discovered with whom he was really born. Fear was throttling me now, as the miles between us and the Blackthorn lands narrowed.

The car smelled of hospital antiseptic, and of the strawberry juice I had given Finn earlier. The full moon, shining giant and silver, sat outside and lit the road, making everything too sharp, too real. My wolf was pacing impatiently under my skin, and was attracted toward the north like a magnet. Toward him. Five years later the same chemistry still pulled, even if we would not have admitted it, the same as the night before Ryker had subjected us to the forced mating ritual.

I had the memory of that night in the kitchen stamped behind my eyelids. Ryker breathed his breath on my lips, his forehead against mine, his hands on my hips. “Tomorrow night,” he had said, voice gravelly with promise. “No more games.” I had nodded, heart hammering, already aching for him. Then dawned and Marcus declared the mating union with Lira Voss. Ryker was a statue at that altar, with his jaw clenched, when I was watching in darkness with two months of his child already in my belly. It was a walk with nothing but a suit-case and a broken heart that I had walked away with the same night.

And here I was coming right back into the fire.

My phone was ringing in the cupholder. I quickly looked at it--the name of Elias on the screen. My stomach twisted. I had left him a note on the kitchen table that Finn had gone a turn and I was rushing him to an expert in the north. I hadn’t mentioned Ryker. I couldn’t. Not yet.

I let it ring. Twice. Three times. Then silence.

The little voice of Finn brought me back. “Mama, you’re crying.”

I touched the back of my hand and wiped it on the cheek, and found it wet. Only fagged out, sweetie. The moon is watering my eyes.

He stretched out and touched my shoulder with a hot scrumpling hand. “will daddy like me?”

Daddy, the word of his mouth came close to breaking me. I had never allowed him to address Elias so. Not once. He will love you, Finn, he will love you as much as the moon loves the night, as I do.

Another buzz. This was an Elias text this time.

“Where are you? The note says specialist but your car’s gone. Call me.”

I turned my back on it and looked on the road. The border was now within a couple of hours. I might already be sensing the change in the atmosphere, the slight change of the trees, the manner in which the wind bore the faint scent of cedar-smoke of Blackthorn land. The reaction was involuntary before my mind could prevent it: my pulse quickened, my thighs clenched, a low warm ache blooming low in my belly that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the man at the head of this road.

Five years and my wolf could still tell me just how Ryker used to feel--alive, wanted, claimed.

I was jostled back to reality by the coughing of Finn, which was a wet, painful sound. I touched him behind and gripped his knee. Hang on, baby. Here we are nearly there. “Your daddy will make you better. I promise.”

“Speak of him, tell me about him again, half-closing his eyes, said Finn. The tales you would tell me when I was small.”

I gulped down the lump in my throat and maintained my voice level, despite being overwhelmed by the memories. “He is big. he is strong. his hair is as black as yours and his eyes as black as the night sky just before a storm. When he was a boy he would run with me under the full moon and now he makes me laugh even when the world is so heavy. And when he looked at me it was like the moon was shining to us.”

Finn smiled faintly. “Sounds nice.”

“He is sweet,” I said to myself. “He will be delighted to see you.”

The path turned, and the border marker was in sight--high stone pillars cut in with the Blackthorn crest, and shimmering in the moonlight. My heart clash against my ribs. A black truck was parked on the inside of the line with its headlights going through the dark. Even from this distance I knew it was his. The same truck that he drove when we snatched some time together on pack lands.

I stopped the car, and brought it to a halt a few feet short. My hands were trembling to an extent my gear shift was almost missed.

Finn raised himself a bit, looking through the window. “Is that him?”

Before I could answer, the truck door opened.

Ryker stepped out.

Five years had only rendered him still more devastating. Taller. Broader. Black shirt shadows were cut on his harsh jaw and the harsh lines of his shoulders by the moonlight. His black hair was somewhat longer, and was falling over his forehead, and those midnight eyes were more fixed upon my car than he could see right through the windshield into my soul.

My breath caught. It struck me like a blow the chemistry--his smell sweeping the night air up here, cedar and smoke and uncooked Alpha strength. Five years of longing leaped my wolf forward, whining. The low and sudden burst of heat between my thighs was slick and insistent, and I needed to hold the steering wheel to prevent stopping and running into his arms.

Ryker was looking at me, then at the back seat where Finn was staring at him with a big, curious look. Something uncivilized and bestial flashed across his face--pain, anger, wonder, all in one glance. He made a step toward the car, another, his fists clenched at his sides as he was struggling to resist the very pull I struggled with.

I unbuckled and got out on wobbly legs, the chill of the night making no effort to cool the glow on my skin. “Ryker--so,” I said, barely above a whisper.

He paused several feet off, near enough that I could see how his chest came up and down too quick. Near enough to catch a whiff of the storm on his perfume. “Sera.” His voice was coarse, bordered on all that he was not saying. “He is like me, all right.”

I nodded, and my eyes stinging with tears. “He does.”

Ryker looked down at my left hand; at the narrow gold ring Elias had placed on my finger five years earlier. His jaw tightened. “You’re still married.”

The words were suspended between us like a sword. I was about to say, to make him understand it was never true, that it was merely to save Finn, but the weak voice of Finn made its way out of the car door. C

“Mama. is that Daddy?”

“Mama… is that Daddy?”

Ryker’s entire body went still. His gaze flew back to mine, dark and stormy and brimming five years of questions I did not know how to answer in a parking lot on the fringe of pack lands.

I swung towards the car, and my heart ached. Honey, honey, get you out of there, so you can see him.

However, when I was about to take the back door, my phone began to ring once again--the name Elias appearing brightly on the phone screen. Just as we reached this point another group of headlights made their appearance in the distance, behind us, and were rushing down the border road.

Nostrils flaring, Ryker swiveled his head towards the lights coming his way. Something dangerous came into his scent.

“It is not a Blackthorn car,” said he, low and tense. “Who the hell is following you?”

My blood ran cold.

Elias.

He had followed my cell phone. Or the car. Or both.

I turned around and looked at Ryker, the man I had never ceased to love, standing there under the full moon with our son but a few feet distant, and realized that the life I had been trying to protect five years was beginning to slip out of control much faster than I could manage.

Elias was coming because of his coming.

And when he arrived here all this--my marriage, my lies, the slip-sham slip-sham bridge he had driven so beautifully to get to Ryker--was going to blow up in the face of the one man I was going back to get our child.