Hour of the Moon

Chapter 23: Betrayal

Sin Danced on Our Mouths Like a Dare

Keiran

Sin danced on our mouths like a dare, and the rain pretended to be mercy.

He tasted like thunder made human—ozone and restraint—and I answered him with all the yeses I'd taught myself to bury. The Mustang's metal was a cold spine against my back; his body was heat pressed to every part of me that remembered how to be a woman instead of a performance. My fingers slid into his rain-heavy hair and the shiver that went through him traveled back into me, a pulse swapped in the dark.

"Look at me," he breathed.

I did. At first his eyes were onyx, a stone polished by patience; then the color shifted, molten rising through dark—amber, gold, something wild looking out from the same face. I felt awe like a hand at my throat. The man and something older shared his gaze, and instead of fear, recognition moved under my skin, a creature waking.

"You shouldn't say my name like that," he said, voice low, undoing itself. "Like it's an answer."

"I don't know how else to say it," I said, rain beading on my lips, the word Waya a bruise and a prayer.

He gathered me without asking, the way a storm gathers a shoreline, inevitable and exact. One hand at the small of my back, one at my hip; he walked me into the night until the hood of the Mustang took my weight and I felt the world tilt to make room. His thigh found the space between mine, not cruel, just certain, and my breath forgot its manners. Every rule I'd kept for safety lost its language all at once.

"This isn't right," I said into his mouth.

"Maybe not," he said into mine, and kissed me like a vow that understood ruin and still signed its name.

Waya

I had loved Nani my entire life. That love had a season to it, an honest winter that shaped the rest of the year. I had worn it like a backbone. With Kieran, there was no inheritance, no childhood map, no clean line I could point to and say this is how it started. She stepped into my field of gravity and the wolf inside me stood up to listen. I did not feel like an imposter or an Alpha or a story I was borrowing; I felt like a man whose body had finally found the temperature it was built for.

"Say it," I said, because control is a kind of reverence. "Say you want this."

"I do," she said, voice trembling, and the truth of it ran through my nerves like lightning looking for ground.

Her mouth opened to mine—hunger disciplined by mercy; mercy lit through with hunger—and I let myself take and be taken. My hand bracketed her jaw; my thumb swept the corner of her mouth where rain had made her shine. The small, aching sound she gave me was the kind that rewrites what you think you know about survival. I kissed that sound until it belonged to both of us.

The gold came back at the edge of my sight when her pulse beat against my lips. I didn't plan the lean, the slow descent of teeth to skin; it was an old instinct, older than my name, older than the roads we were breaking. I stopped with the faintest graze, a promise of pressure, a warning signed with breath.

"Don't," she whispered, and part of me heard do.

"If I mark you," I said, tasting rain and her and the clean line we were about to end, "I won't stop."

"Then don't stop," she said, and it wasn't bravado. It was the exhaustion of a woman who had been good in all the wrong directions and finally turned toward true.

She kissed my forehead with a tenderness that unmade me, then my cheek as if blessing the place restraint lived, and the wolf inside me lay down in that touch like even wildness wanted a home.