Blood Wolf Dawning

by Rhyannon Byrd

  He frowned as he rubbed a big hand over his mouth, and she realized this conversation was going nowhere fast. Getting it back on track, she exhaled a rough breath and added, “You know, you should probably give Max a big ol’ thank-you.”

  His dark brows started to draw together. “And why’s that?”

  “Because I tried to get him to tell me the big secret,” she explained, crossing her arms over her chest, “but he held firm and wouldn’t budge.”

  Agitation spilled over the quick spark of surprise she’d spotted in his sharp gaze, veiling its light like clouds over the gleaming heat of the sun. “You questioned Max about me?”

  She gave a soft snort. “Cian, I’m not stupid. I know something went down at the ‘briefing’ you held with the others yesterday. It’s obvious that everyone knows something big that I don’t. Not even Jillian would tell me, and that hurt. She just kept saying to ask you about it.”

  He lifted his powerful arms and gripped the back of his neck, then ran his hands up the back of his head, his body so tense and hard he seemed even larger, when his presence was already so overwhelming it blotted out everything else around him. He constantly burned like a pulsing star in the center of her existence, blindingly white-hot and elusive, always too far away to touch, even when he was right the hell in front of her.

  She couldn’t help but wonder if she would still feel that way if he were buried deep inside her. Would she stare up into that beautifully masculine, fallen-angel face and finally feel at home? Or would it be like staring into the eyes of a stranger, cold and lonely and empty?

  Swallowing her grief like it was a bitter pill she’d been forced to take, she choked out, “Is it another woman?”

  Slowly lowering his arms to his sides, he shot her a startled look. “What?”

  “If it’s about your brother, I can’t understand why you wouldn’t tell me. So is there someone else? Up in town? Or somewhere else? Did you learn you have a child with someone? Is that what everyone’s hiding from me?”

  His shoulders dropped as if the weight of the world had just landed on them. “Sayre, stop,” he said, shaking his head. “There are no kids, and there’s sure as hell no other woman. I don’t want anyone but you.” Scrubbing his hands over his gorgeous face, he muttered, “God, life would be a whole lot simpler right now if I did.”

  She flinched, hating that he noticed, those molten eyes darkening to stormy gray.

  Giving her a piercing look, he took a step closer to where she stood. “Let me finish, lass.”

  “What more is there to say? You want me—I believe that. But it’s the connection. You can’t help it. And you don’t want it, Cian. You don’t want to feel that way. That’s why you keep pulling away from me.”

  “You’re wrong,” he said, softly but with an unmistakable vein of anger. Or maybe it was...hopelessness. Something lost and filled with pain. “Despite everything, how wrong and completely shit this is for you, the truth is that I wouldn’t change it. I know that’s unfair as hell to say, but I wouldn’t want this connection with anyone but you.”

  She blinked, more than a little undone, and thought God. Just God. They were pretty words from a pretty mouth on a pretty face. Hard, rugged, masculine—but undeniably beautiful. And yet, it was what was beneath his skin that had her tied in knots. Ever since they’d returned to the Alley, the pieces had been coming back to her. Fragments and memories and emotions. The ones that had drawn her to him all those years ago. That had made her fall for him so hard she was still crashing through space, waiting for the landing. Terrified it would be unforgivably brutal and break her, but secretly hoping, like a fool, that he would be there to catch her in the end. That when she crashed, it would be into him, into the private, most intimate part of him, and she’d be safe. Rather than against the hard, jagged edges he kept trying so hard to hide behind.

  Drawing in a slow, steadying breath, she asked, “If not another woman, then what?”

  Frustration scored his words. “Why, Sayre? Why do you keep pushing this?”

  “Because everyone knows but me. And I deserve to not be left out in the dark, because it’s my life that this brother of yours supposedly wants. Mine, not theirs. And after everything that’s happened, that’s happening now, you owe me this. The truth. What are you so afraid of?”

  The skin around his eyes pulled tight, that muscle pulsing like a heartbeat in his hard jaw. “If I tell you, it will...change things.”

  “What things?”

  “Sayre.” He sounded like a man being forced over the edge from a terrible height, but she knew if she backed down now, he might never tell her. Not until it was too late and she was being faced with a cold, hard reality in the middle of Hell.

  If Aedan were coming for her, she wanted to know what she and everyone else here was up against.

  Thoughts spinning, she studied him, using everything she had to understand him...read him and pick the clues out in not just what he was saying, but what he wasn’t. “Is it me, Cian? You think whatever you confess is going to change me?”

  He scowled, turned away from her and stalked to the window, then braced his hands on either side of its dark, reflective surface. His posture was rigid, his powerful muscles bulging beneath the tight stretch of his skin, making him look exactly like the hard, dangerous creature she knew he could be. He squeezed the sides of the window frame so tightly she was surprised the wood hadn’t cracked, sensing a deep-seated anger and pain seething inside him, and in a dizzying moment of clarity, she suddenly understood what had been holding him back.

  “You think it will change this. Us. The way that I feel about you.”

  He smacked his open hands against the window frame so hard it made the glass shake. “I know I don’t have you. I know that. But I don’t want to lose you, either. I don’t want to lose the small part of you that I do have.”

  “Then you’re just going to have to trust me.”

  A low, humorless laugh jerked from his chest. But he remained silent, his shoulders heaving with the harshness of his breaths.

  “It isn’t that hard, is it? I’ve trusted you. With my life. With my body.”

  He groaned as he leaned forward, pressing his forehead against the glass. “Don’t want to lose that.”

  “Then trust me when I say that you won’t,” she told him, taking a few cautious steps closer, wanting so badly to reach out and run a soothing touch over the rigid length of his spine, his broad shoulders stretching the cotton of his T-shirt until she was surprised it hadn’t shredded. “So long as you’re honest with me, you won’t lose anything.”

  Quietly, he said. “No, Sayre. I’m going to lose everything. I don’t see any other way.”

  “Just tell me. Now.”

  He turned then, the look in his beautiful eyes so dark and pained, it made her gasp. Voice little more than a choked thread of sound, he rasped, “I’m...a...vampire.”

  She blinked, thinking she must have heard him wrong. “Um, say that again, please.”

  “My father is part vampire, and he passed the bloodline onto me. It’s not as dominant as my wolf or my human sides, but it’s there. A part of me.”

  “Ohmygod,” she breathed, her thoughts flying so fast she couldn’t keep up with them. So many things were crashing together in her mind, mysteries that suddenly made sense, holes filled with an answer that she’d never, ever expected.

  He drew an unsteady breath. “God didn’t have anything to do with it, lass. It’s pure evil.”

  She straightened, glaring daggers at him. “Bullshit.”

  * * *

  Cian figured it was his turn to look surprised, because she’d just shocked the hell out of him.

  “Don’t look so stunned,” she snapped. “You’re a lot of things, Cian Hennessey, but evil isn’t one of them.”

  He l
aughed low and rough, the bitter sound making him cringe. “I wish that were true. But you don’t know the things I’ve done.”

  Her gaze glittered with challenge. “Then tell me. If this is part of the reason you left me, then I deserve to know.”

  “Sayre,” he said with a tired, wrecked sigh.

  “Tell me, Cian.”

  Almost as if he had no control over himself, he could hear the graveled words bursting from his throat. “At the age of fifteen, we’re fully matured, at least physically. At that point, if we consume blood as one of our main food sources, we can halt the aging process.”

  Her eyes went wide. “Have you ever done that?”

  He gave a jerky nod, and stared at the pulse rushing at the delicate base of her throat, unable to meet her eyes as he said, “I spent a decade by Aedan’s side at the age of sixteen. I...I was angry, at my parents, because of...well, because of him.”

  He turned, braced his shoulder against the wall beside the window and explained it all. Everything. How he hadn’t learned of Aedan’s existence until he was fifteen. Aedan’s mother had been killed, and the boy had come to live with them at his father’s estate in Ireland. He’d been...God, he’d been so angry, when he’d realized what it all meant for his family. That his father had betrayed their mother, their vows, their so-called love, and taken another woman. He’d felt as if everything he’d ever believed had been turned upside down, torn apart and destroyed, his rage toward his father so consuming he’d burned with it. A raw, seething rage toward everyone and everything, except strangely enough, for the boy.

  The connection between him and Aedan had been...impossible to resist. They’d bonded over their shared hatred of their father, and that bond had grown fast and furious, until they were nearly inseparable. Though his arrival had changed the way Cian looked at his family, destroying everything he’d believed about honor and loyalty and the kind of man his father had taught him to be, he’d never blamed Aedan. He’d seen Aedan as the innocent. The one without blame, and it’d been obvious that the boy’s life with his mother had been nothing like the supposedly perfect childhood Cian had been given. One that, it turned out, had actually been built on nothing more than lies. Unable to let it go, with Aedan by his side, Cian had searched and investigated, uncovering more and more of his father’s infidelities, each new discovery making his hatred for the man grow.

  And his mother...Christ. That had been the straw that broke the camel’s back as they say. The one that had driven him away, setting him on a path of destruction.

  Voice graveled and raw, he told Sayre of how he left home, and began his life as an angry sixteen-year-old with Aedan at his side, as if it were the two of them against the world. “I seduced innocents,” he growled, the guttural words stark with disgust. “Got them in my bed, or against a wall, or over a table, and used them. Fed on them, whether they were willing to give me their blood or not. Killed the dregs of society for sport. Because I could. I was angry at everyone and everything, other than Aedan, and I took it out on whoever was unlucky enough to catch my eye.” A quiet, painful laugh fell past his lips, and he squeezed his eyes shut, as if that could somehow shield him from what was happening. “I thought I could take what I had finally started to see that my father glorified—a vampire’s power and strength and ruthlessness—and shove it in his face. Show him what a bastard he was. But the joke was on me, because he didn’t give a shit what kind of destruction I caused.”

  Softly, she asked, “And what about your mother?”

  “I don’t know,” he whispered, the words halting and low. “The last thing I said to her was how pathetic I thought she was for continuing to stay with him, for not leaving him, after what he’d done to her. I told her she embarrassed me for being weak, and then...”

  “Then what?” she persisted, when his voice had trailed off.

  He opened his eyes and turned his head to look at her, his breaths coming hard and fast, his throat burning. “She died before I ever made it back to see her again.”

  “Oh, Cian,” she whispered, her gentle voice cracking. “I’m so sorry.”

  He flinched, but buried the pain beneath the rage that had been his constant companion for so many years. Even when he’d been playing it up as the womanizing jackass, trying to act as if he didn’t have a care in the world. “Don’t be sorry,” he snarled. “It was her choice. I begged her to leave him, to go back to her pack and start a new life. But she refused.”

  With an impossibly sad look in her eyes, she said, “You sound so angry with her.”

  “I am. I always will be. She didn’t fight for herself.”

  She nodded, her dark eyes soft with understanding. “And she refused to let you fight for her, didn’t she?”

  He blinked, feeling just as lost as he had all those years ago, and stunned that Sayre had read him so perfectly. Swallowing, he managed to say, “She forbid it.”

  She took another step toward him, close enough now that he could feel the delicious heat of her body against his arm. “Did you ever think that maybe she was protecting you?”

  His brows pulled into an even deeper scowl. “From what?”

  Almost afraid of how easily she could seduce him—intoxicate him—he watched as she lifted one smooth, perfectly freckled shoulder. “I don’t know. But if you’re anything like she was, then I think it’s a possibility that you need to look at.”

  “Christ,” he groaned, closing his eyes as he dropped his head back on his shoulders. It was barely past nine, but he was exhausted. Tired down to his very bones, the revelations of his sins draining him in a way that physical exertion could never do. When she prompted him with the gentle touch of her hand against his bare forearm, he said, “I will, Sayre. I will. Just...not now.”

  “Will you tell me the rest?” she asked, her other hand softly stroking his spine, her position at his side cocooning him in warmth. He knew she was asking for the rest of the story with Aedan, but he simply didn’t have it in him to unearth any more skeletons that night.

  “I’ll give you the long version tomorrow, if you want it. The short version is that I finally got my head on straight, and realized what I was doing. What I had become. I...I went against Aedan because of it, righting one of his wrongs, and he took it as the ultimate betrayal, swearing to take his revenge against me one day.”

  “And then?”

  He lowered his head, and could no more stop himself from looking at her beautiful face than he could stop needing air. “Then I tried to go home, but I couldn’t stand to be near my father. So I bit the bullet and decided to visit my mother’s family. After she’d married my father and became pregnant with me, she’d never returned, knowing they would never accept us as vampires. She never even told them the truth about my father’s bloodline. They had no idea when I’d been born, or how old I was meant to be. I came to her relatives as her teenaged son, and that’s when I met the Runners.”

  A soft smile touched her lips. “You found a home with them, and wanted to stay.”

  Nodding, he said, “I did. I stopped drinking blood as a main source, allowing myself to begin to age again, and when I was old enough to be a Runner, I moved here permanently. I became one of them, and I left that old life behind as best as I could.”

  With a slight catch in her voice, she asked, “So then you can grow old with your friends?”

  “I can. I can grow old and die, if that’s what I choose.” A wry grin tugged at the corner of his mouth. “And I will, Sayre. There isn’t a single goddamn part of me that wants to live forever.”

  Chapter 12

  Sensing his exhaustion, Sayre took Cian’s hand and led him back through the quiet rooms of the cabin, until they’d reached his bedroom. Trying not to blush like the virgin she was, she pulled his shirt over his head and tossed it to the floor, the sight of his broad shoulders and all those har
d-edged muscles on his abdomen making her mouth water. The guy was just too freaking gorgeous for words. Taking his hand again, she pulled him with her until they were lying down in the middle of the bed, the open window allowing the wind and moonlight to filter in, their heads resting on the pillows as they lay on their sides and gazed at one another.

  Keeping her voice soft, she asked him questions as they popped into her head, both serious and silly, and he answered each one in a deep, husky rumble that made her shiver with awareness, her body heavy and aching with desire. He explained that garlic didn’t have any affect on him, and he could see his reflection in a mirror, as well as walk into a house uninvited. When she asked about sunlight, since it was rumored among the Lycans that they shared the night with vampires, he explained that he was naturally more nocturnal than a human, even more so than his fellow Runners, but that the sunlight didn’t physically harm him.

  She had no idea how much time had passed when his breathing deepened and his eyes fluttered closed, sleep overtaking him as his voice trailed off. She could sense him relaxing in a way that was whole and complete, as if he were resting easier now that he was no longer carrying the burden of so many secrets, and she had to bite her lip to stop herself from saying his name. If he needed sleep, then she would simply lie there and watch over him, while everything that he’d told her carefully worked its way through her mind.

  There was still so much that she didn’t know, or understand. But there was also so much that now made sense, like pieces of a puzzle slowly working themselves into place. The way that his arrogance had most likely been a cloak he’d used to hide his self-loathing for the things that he’d done when he was young. She’d also wondered, over the years, if his relentless womanizing was because he’d had his heart broken at some point. And now she knew that he had. Just not by a woman. By his family.

  But he had a new family now. One that he could claim, if he would only stop running long enough and let it happen.