All Chapters of BENEATH THE CRIMSON MOON : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

She had questions.Troy had tea.That was how their morning started. Him at her door before sunrise with two cups and that easy unbothered expression that she was beginning to understand was armor and not personality. Her standing in her doorway with her wrapped knee and her coin and three weeks worth of suspicion that had finally sharpened itself into something she could use.She let him in.He handed her the tea.She took it because she needed both hands warm for what was about to happen."Sit," he said, nodding at her knee."I am fine.""You walked on that all night.""I did not walk on it all night," she said. "Someone carried me. Wrapped my knee. Folded my coat. Put my boots by the door." She looked at him over her cup. "Left a coin under my pillow."Troy looked at his tea."Interesting," he said."Troy.""Very mysterious," he said. "Grimwall is full of generous strangers."She pointed at him. "You are doing that thing.""What thing.""The thing where you say words that mean noth

He left at midnight.Troy took the long route east, through the mill district, past the river, out onto the dirt road where the cobblestones stopped and the trees started. He did not shift. He walked in as a man and he was going to walk out as a man.The clearing was three miles east.The pack was already there. Seven of them. Standing in a loose circle, breath clouding the cold air, eyes catching the moonlight.Marcus spoke first.Troy had known Marcus since he was fifteen. The man had trained him. Taught him to track, to shift, to separate his wolf from his human side when the mission required it. He was the closest thing Troy had to someone who actually knew him.Which was exactly why the look on his face right now was hard to take."You look terrible," Marcus said."Thank you Marcus," Troy said."Drak knows about the library," said a voice to his left.Rena.They had trained together for two years before Drak sent Troy to Grimwall. Run the same paths. Eaten at the same table. Cove

The bird was dying and Tyra could not look away.It was on her windowsill when she woke up. Small. Brown. One wing folded at an angle that made her chest hurt just looking at it. Its eyes were barely open and its chest was moving in the kind of quick shallow bursts that said it was working very hard just to stay.She opened the window.It did not fly away.She picked it up with both hands before she could think about it. Slow and careful. It sat in her palms and looked up at her and she looked back at it and neither of them moved.Then something happened.Warmth. Starting deep in her chest and moving down through her arms like it knew exactly where it was going. It reached her hands and kept going, passing through her skin and into the bird in one long steady current that she felt leave her the way you felt a breath leave your body.The bird went still.Her heart stopped.Then the wing straightened.She watched it happen. Could not look away. The bent broken thing simply corrected its

He did not come.Tyra sat on the edge of her bed until midnight with her coat still on and her boots still laced and told herself she was not waiting. She was just sitting. People sat on the edges of their beds sometimes. It was a perfectly normal thing to do at midnight in a dark room when someone had promised to tell you everything and then simply did not show up.She blew out her candle at half past midnight.Lay down without taking her boots off.Stared at the ceiling.He had said tonight. He had looked her in the eye and said tonight like he meant it more than he had ever meant anything. Like the word had weight behind it this time. Like whatever was sitting in his chest had finally gotten too heavy to carry alone.And then nothing.She pressed her palm flat against her chest and felt her own heartbeat and told herself it did not matter.It mattered.He was at her stall before she arrived the next morning.She walked past him without stopping."Tyra," he said."I am working," she

She walked fast.Troy kept up without being asked and said nothing and she was grateful for that because she had absolutely nothing to say yet. Her mind was still running through the forest. Still watching six men scatter from something dark and enormous that had come through the trees for her specifically.Still seeing his face when he shifted back.Still hearing the sound of it.She turned into Marren Lane and stopped at her door and turned around."Inside," she said.He followed her up the stairs without argument.She lit the candle. Sat on the edge of her bed. Pointed at the chair across from her.He sat.They looked at each other in the candlelight."Talk," she said. "Everything. Start from the beginning and do not stop until I tell you to."He looked at her steadily."What do you want to know first," he said."What you are," she said. "Properly. Not the library version. Your version."He exhaled slowly."Werewolf," he said. "We exist alongside humans in every city in the world.