Luna POV
My laugh was still in my throat when my phone rang.
2:07 a.m.
I almost ignored it. Priya was mid-story, the funny one about her disaster date, and we were both curled up on my couch with popcorn between us and a bad movie playing on mute. It was the kind of night that felt soft and easy, and I did not want to break it.
Then I saw the name on the screen.
Mercy General Hospital.
The laugh died.
"Luna?" Priya sat up. "Hey, what's wrong?"
I could not answer her. I pressed the phone to my ear, and a woman's voice said the words that no one ever thinks will actually happen to them. Clinical words. Careful words. The kind of words people practice saying so they come out gentle.
My father. Cardiac event. Did not make it.
I heard every word. I understood every word.
And then I felt absolutely nothing.
I drove to the hospital myself. Priya begged to come. I told her no, got in my car, and drove for fifteen minutes in total silence, my hands gripping the wheel so hard that my knuckles hurt.
The feeling of nothingness lasted the whole drive.
It was only when I pulled into the hospital parking lot and turned off the engine that my brain caught up with my body. My chest caved in like something had been yanked out of the center of it. My dad. My dad. The man who made pancakes every Sunday, even when he was tired. The man who called me every Thursday night just to check in. The man who still signed birthday cards with a little drawing of a wolf howling at the moon, because it was our inside joke going back to when I was six years old.
Gone.
I pressed my forehead against the steering wheel and let myself cry for sixty seconds. Just sixty. Then I wiped my face, got out of the car, and walked inside.
The hallway smelled like cold air and cleaning products.
A nurse pointed me toward the family waiting area on the third floor. I took the stairs because I could not stand the idea of being trapped in a small box right now. My sneakers were quiet on the steps. My heart was not.
I pushed open the stairwell door and stopped.
He was already there.
Caden Wolfe stood in the middle of the hallway as he had grown out of the floor. Still. Solid. Impossibly tall in a dark shirt with his sleeves pushed up and his jaw tight enough to crack. His eyes were fixed on the window at the end of the hall, and the light from outside caught the line of his face in a way that made him look like something carved, not born.
I had not seen him in two years.
My heart did the same stupid, traitorous thing it always did when I saw him. A long, slow pull. Like a tide that had no business moving but moved anyway.
I hated myself for it. My father was dead, and my chest was doing something embarrassing because of this man.
Caden turned his head.
For one second, just one something moved through his eyes when he saw me. Something sharp and quick that I could not name before it was gone. Then his face went back to what it always was around me. Careful. Polite. Closed.
"Luna." His voice was low. Quiet.
That was it. Just my name.
I crossed the hallway toward him because I did not know what else to do. He had been my father's best friend for twenty years. He was the person who should be here. He had more right to this hallway than almost anyone.
"When did you get here?" I asked. My voice came out steadier than I expected.
"About an hour ago." He paused. "Your father called me earlier tonight. He said he was not feeling well. I told him to go to the hospital. He said I was overreacting." Something shifted in his jaw. "He was not the type to admit when something was wrong."
No. He was not.
"Neither are you," I said before I could stop myself.
Caden looked at me for a moment. A beat too long. Then he looked away.
We stood there in silence. Two people who barely knew how to exist near each other, stuck together in the worst hallway of my life.
I had known Caden since I was a little girl. He had always been there at family dinners, at holiday gatherings, the big steady presence beside my father who laughed too loudly at their shared jokes and scared off anyone who tried to get too close to my dad's orbit. He was twelve years older than me. He had always treated me the way adults treat a child they are fond of but do not quite know what to do with.
Polite. Distant. Careful.
When I was seventeen, I developed a crush so bad it kept me up at night. I never told anyone. Not ever. I ran it into the ground through sheer willpower and told myself I had killed it.
I had not killed it.
I had just buried it.
Standing three feet from him right now with my father dead down the hall, it climbed back out of the ground as it had never left.
I was a mess. A complete, pathetic mess.
A doctor came out of the room at the end of the hall. Older man. Tired eyes. His gaze went across both of us quickly, and then he looked at Caden.
"Mr. Wolfe," he said. "Could I speak with you for a moment?"
I blinked.
The doctor did not look at me. Did not say, and you must be the daughter. Did not acknowledge that I was standing right there with the actual family. He just looked at Caden like I was furniture.
Caden's eyes flicked to me for half a second. Something moved across his face too fast for me to catch. Then he nodded once and stepped away with the doctor, moving to the far end of the hall.
I stood there alone.
I watched them.
The doctor kept his voice low. I could not hear a word. But I watched Caden's face the whole time because Caden had a face that gave almost nothing away, and that nothing was usually enough. Right now, as the doctor spoke, that face changed.
His eyes went still first. The kind of still that is not calm but controlled. His chin dropped a fraction. His hand, hanging at his side, closed slowly into a fist.
Then he looked up and straight across the hall.
Straight at me.
And I knew. Before a single word was spoken. Before anyone explained anything. I knew the way you know bad things in the middle of the night when your phone rings and the feeling in your gut already has the answer before your brain does.
My father had not just died.
Something else had happened.
Something Caden already knew.
Something they had decided in the space of thirty seconds to tell him and not me.
He started walking back toward me, and his face was smooth again. Put back together. Every door is locked.
"Luna"
"What did he say?" My voice came out sharp. Sharper than I planned.
"We should sit down."
"Caden." I stepped toward him. "What did the doctor say?"
He looked at me for a long moment. The hallway was very quiet. The light above us buzzed once, faint and low.
"Your father's heart gave out," he said carefully. "That is what the official report will say."
Official report.
Two words. Tiny words. But the way he said them, the small, deliberate weight he put on official made the floor feel like it dropped an inch beneath me.
"What does that mean?" I asked.
Caden held my gaze.
"It means," he said slowly, "that it is what the paperwork will say."
My blood went cold.
"And what will the paperwork not say?" I whispered.
He did not answer.
But the look on his face that locked, careful, guilty look said everything.
My father did not just die tonight.
My father was killed.
And the man standing in front of me, the man my father loved like a brother, already knew it.
Caden wraps a firm hand around Luna's arm when she turns to go demand answers from the doctor herself. His grip is gentle but immovable. He leans down, voice barely above a breath against her ear: "Do not ask questions in this building. Do not trust anyone in this building. And do not leave my side tonight." Luna's heart is slamming. Her father is dead. And the most dangerous, untouchable man she has ever known is looking at her like she is suddenly the most important thing in the room and the most at risk.