Chapter 5:What the moon sent

I don't know how long we sat there.

Long enough for the red moon to shift further across the sky. 

Kael hadn't moved from his log.

He hadn't spoken either. Hadn't pushed. Hadn't filled the silence with uncomfortable sympathy or clumsy questions or that particular brand of pity that felt worse than being ignored. He just sat there calm and solid and present like he had nowhere else to be and no opinion about how long this was going to take.

I pressed the cloth to my knuckles one more time and looked at him sideways.

He was looking up at the moon.

And I don't know why but that was when it really hit me what he looked like. Properly. Because the first time I had seen him step out of the dark I had been too frightened and too raw to take him in properly. Now, in the deep red moonlight, with the forest quiet around us and his face tilted up and his expression open in the way people's faces only get when they think nobody is watching

I felt my breath do something strange.

He was beautiful.

And I don't mean that the way people mean it about Damien who was all sharp edges and cold authority and the kind of looks that made you nervous before they made you anything else. Damien's beauty was a weapon. You felt it like you felt a blade precise, intentional, designed to cut.

Kael was nothing like that.

His face was all strong lines and quiet warmth, a jaw that could have been carved from dark wood, cheekbones that caught the moonlight like they were built for it, full lips that were relaxed right now in a way that made him seem, against all logic, approachable. His eyes, when they weren't on me, were darker deeper like the amber had gone all the way down and kept going.

But it wasn't just his face.

It was the way he existed in space.

Damien took up a room with noise. With a presence that crashed into you, that reminded you constantly of his power, his rank, his authority. You always knew Damien was there. He made sure of it.

Kael was different.

His presence didn't crash. 

And he smelled incredible.

Cedar and dark river water and something underneath that I had no name for. Something that made Selene curled and wounded inside me lifted her nose.

Stop it, I told her.

I am not doing anything, she said primly.

You are sniffing him.

I am simply breathing. In his general direction. That is allowed.

I looked away from Kael before he could catch me staring.

"Can I ask you something?" I said.

He looked over. "Yes."

"Why are you still here?"

He thought about it. Actually I thought about it not the polite half-second pause people give before saying what they already decided to say, but a real pause. Like the question deserved genuine consideration.

"Honestly?" he said.

"Please."

"Because you looked like someone who had been left alone too many times." He said it simply. No performance. No careful softening. Just the words, plain and direct and somehow more devastating for it. "And I didn't want to be another person who walked away."

The forest was so quiet.

I stared at my hands.

Selene, I said internally.

I know, she said softly. Do not cry.

I am not going to cry.

Good.

I am simply experiencing

Don't you dare say strong emotions

...I was going to say a moment of feeling, she said with great dignity.

Same thing.

It is absolutely not.

I pressed my lips together to stop whatever was trying to happen on my face and looked back up at the moon.

"What is your wolf's name?" I asked.

Kael went very still.

Not frightened . More the way a person goes still when something unexpected happens and they need a second to process it. Because wolf names were private things. Intimate things. You didn't ask a stranger their wolf's name and you certainly didn't answer if they did.

We both knew that.

He looked at me for a long moment with those warm amber eyes.

"Storm," he said.

And the second the word left his mouth everything changed.

A voice.

Not Selene's voice. Not my own. Something broader and deeper like a sound you feel in your chest before you hear it with your ears. Like thunder that starts far away and rolls toward you slowly so you feel the vibration before the noise.

Selene.

I grabbed the tree behind me.

Selene slammed forward against my ribs so hard I gasped.

Storm, she breathed. And her voice had gone completely different. Reverent. Shaking. Like she was hearing something she had been waiting for without knowing she was waiting. Lyra, That is Storm. He is speaking to me. Across pack lines. He is speaking to me across

"Your wolf," I said out loud. My voice sounded strange. Thin. "He just said Selene's name. Inside my head."

Kael was on his feet.

I hadn't even seen him stand up. One moment he was sitting on the log and the next he was standing, and his whole body had changed, still calm, still controlled, but charged now, like the air before lightning. His amber eyes were fixed on my face with an intensity that hadn't been there before.

"I heard him," Kael said quietly.

"That's not why I pressed my hand to my temple. "That's not possible. Wolves don't communicate across pack lines. That is not a thing that happens. That has never been a thing that

"I know what's possible." His voice was low and careful. "Storm has never done that. Not once. In twenty six years." A pause. "Not with anyone."

We stared at each other.

The blood moon pulsed.

My scar burned suddenly and sharply and I grabbed my collarbone with both hands. Not from pain. From the feeling underneath it. That warm, vast, ancient thing that had been stirring in me since the rejection, pressing now against my ribs like it wanted out.

Two, the moonlight voice said. Soft as breath.

Two.

And this time I understood the shape of it.

Not all the way. Not completely. My mind wasn't ready to hold it completely yet.

But enough.

Enough to look at Kael Dawnridge standing in the red moonlight with his impossible amber eyes and his world-on-fire aura and the echo of his wolf's voice still vibrating in my bones and understand that the moon was not done with me tonight.

She had not made one decision.

She had made two.

"I should go," I said.

The words came out fast. Defensive. I was on my feet without fully deciding to stand.

Kael stepped back immediately. Gave me room without being asked, without making a thing of it, like giving people space was just something he did automatically.

"Of course," he said.

I turned to leave.

"Lyra."

I stopped.

I didn't turn around. I wasn't sure I could look at his face right now and hold myself together. But what can the heart do