Christmas Moon by Sadie Hart

to be
unleashed. He hadn’t shot her earlier today. She knew what he’d
wanted then. A confession. To have her prove that he was right in
his accusations, to make him a savior and her just another monster
ending up dead.
    She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
    Curling her hands into fists at her sides,
she turned to face him. His face was drawn tight, exhaustion etched
in every wrinkle and the dark bruises under his eyes. He’d slept
even less than her. He stank of sweat and she knew he hadn’t had a
real bath, one with soap, in a long time. She had no doubt he’d
been hunting her for far longer than he’d let on.
    “Look at you,” he said, his cold eyes
flashing as he stepped closer to the window, gesturing with one
hand at the lights illuminating her side yard, “Getting all merry
and shit.”
    “No use living in the past,” she said, voice
hollow.
    “No? Are you done hiding from the truth
then?”
    “I didn’t know what Caesar was going to
do.”
    Rage enveloped him and he lunged towards her.
Bree took a step backwards, her hip hitting the splintered table
and she muffled a grunt, right before his fist slammed into the
wall beside her. “Liar! Stop lying to me! You shared the same
house, the same job. You slept in the same fucking bed.”
    “And how many people have had affairs while
they went home at night and cuddled their ‘loved’ ones? Sometimes
the people closest to you are the last to know.” Hurt and anger
rolled into one and she lashed the words back out at him. She was
so damn tired of feeling guilty, but damn it, if anyone was
going to beat her up over this it was going to be herself. Not some
psycho asshole who thought he knew the truth. “I didn’t
know. He didn’t tell me. He didn’t say a word as he stalked
the woman who was like a daughter to me.”
    There’d been a brief moment when she’d
actually thought Caesar was having an affair, but when the truth
had come out, she’d almost wished he had been. An affair she could
have taken a thousand times easier than having to live with the
fact that he’d killed so many.
    “He was distant, withdrawn, but we’d lost our
daughter. I figured he needed time and space. I didn’t know what he
was going to do. If I had, I’d have done anything to stop him.”
Pain lanced through her heart as the words came tumbling out, one
after the other. Bree let herself feel the pain, the regret, the
wishes—because hiding her emotions in the dark hadn’t done a damn
thing. Maybe pouring them out now was exactly what she needed to
heal, and what he needed to hear. “I am sorry you lost your
brother. I’m sorry that mothers and fathers lost their children.
But I didn’t know until it was too late.”
    Bree winced at the memory. She’d held out
hope that Caesar was good guy until the very end. She’d thought for
sure that he had to be hunting the killer, that he’d never be the
killer.
    She trembled. It wasn’t until the end when
she’d finally accepted the truth. When she’d seen him lunging for
Lennox, spouting off things the real Caesar never would have
said.
    “You mourn him,” the rogue spat.
    Yeah, yeah she did. But she didn’t grieve for
the man he thought she did.
    “I watched him die.” She’d sobbed over his
body, held him, but the man who’d died that day in the barren rocks
of the Boulder Pride’s territory wasn’t the man she’d mourned.
Arianna’s father, the sweet man she’d fallen in love with, that had
been who she had cried for. “But the man who did those horrible
things, he wasn’t the man I married. The man I married was someone
I loved, who loved our daughter, who wouldn’t have done those
things. I mourn that man. And some days I still don’t see how he
became the monster that killed those people. Including your
brother.”
    Denial and rage flashed across his face a
second before he leapt at her. Bree had just enough time to lunge
out of the way. She bolted out her bedroom door just as she heard
the