Page 36 of Moonlit Nights & Northern Lights
Annoyance prickling through me, I reached over and turned the radio down.Somethingabout the morning—maybe the hangover, maybe the worry about Dev, maybe too much time with Maxwell—had cracked something open in me.
“Kit, do you remember the moment you found out Dad was dead? How did you feel?”
His head whipped around, his eyes wide with shock. The car swerved slightly before he corrected it.
“Can you just leave all that stuff?” he snapped, knuckles whitening on the steering wheel. “It’s early and I’m trying to drive.”
Resisting the urge to tell him I had a missed call from Mum, I turned away, staring out the window at the grey London morning. Buildings blurred past as we drove, my reflection ghostly in the glass.
I remembered so clearly the day Kit left home at twenty-three to join the military as part of a small, highly classified shifter unit. Mum had screamed, Dad had roared. Our father had explicitly forbidden it, but Kit went anyway. Broke his pack bonds by doing so.
He never said goodbye to me. Just… vanished.
For a while, I’d been happy. With perfect Kit out of the way, having disappointed and betrayed them so thoroughly, surely my parents would finally see me? Love me? Accept me as I was?
I was wrong.
Everything got worse. Suddenly I was the future alpha of the pack, the only son left. They needed me to finally buckle down and be the wolf they knew I could be. No more “ADHD rubbish,” no more acting out, no more being myself.
It went so badly that eventually I left too, after my father threatened that if I did so, I’d never be welcome back again. Barelytwenty and sleeping rough in Glasgow, trying to find a new pack that would take me in. No one wanted the Thorne pack rebel, though. I’d snapped the tethers that bound me to my family, and found nothing to replace them with.
Until Kit found me, and whisked me off to London. Until Killigrew Street. Until Seb. Until Issac, Priya, and now Felix and Flynn.
I glanced at my brother, his jaw still clenched tight, and turned the radio back up. It wasn’t his fault he couldn’t talk about it with me, as much as I wished he would.
There were many topics filed under “Things Kit Thorne Refuses to Discuss,” including his time in the military. My uncle Alex’s ex-wife, Moira, had been the one who connected him to a friend of a friend, who got him into a covert programme that exploited shifter abilities under the guise of “enhanced tactical operations.” The few times he started telling me a bit about it, he’d often stop mid-sentence, his eyes fixing on something invisible, fingers drumming a rhythm against his glass before he’d change the subject entirely.
I did know that Kit believed the whole programme was so black ops there wasn’t even a hint of a paper trail. And whatever happened there had left him with scars that ran deeper than the physical ones.
“I could use some fresh air,” said Kit when I started to recognise some of the streets as Greenwich. “Let’s park up and walk the rest of the way. When we get to Meridian, we’re going to casually walk past it, not gawp up, okay?”
“Sure thing, boss.” I gave him a grin and a salute. A rush of gratitude flowed through me that Kit was doing this for me. “It’ll obviously be closed anyway, because Saturday.”
“Maybe, maybe not.” Kit shrugged. “But we arenotgoing inside.”
Kit found a parking spot on a quiet residential street lined with terraced houses.
“We’re about ten minutes away,” he said, checking his phone. “Remember, casual stroll, not reconnaissance mission.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
As we walked, I found myself fidgeting with the zip of my jacket, my mind flashing back tothatnight. Meridian Medical Research Centre sat at the edge of Greenwich Park, named after the famous Meridian Line that ran through the park itself—that invisible thread marking the boundary between east and west. Seemed fitting for a place that might be straddling the line between legitimate research and something much darker.
“The night Dev and I broke in,” I said quietly as we turned onto another tree-lined street. “We approached from the back, through that grassy bank behind the building. Dev had wedged open one of the fire doors earlier that day when he’d gone in pretending to be a delivery guy.”
Kit shot me a look. “And today we’re approaching from the front like normal people,” he said pointedly.
“Like normal, law-abiding citizens who definitely aren’t planning anything,” I agreed with a grin.
We rounded the corner, and there it was—part of the four-storey building visible at the end of the street. Meridian’s modern glass façade stood in stark contrast to the surrounding architecture, all sharp angles and tinted windows. My heart started racing, memories flooding back. The harsh blare of the alarms. That awful fight with the security guards. The sickening snap of handcuffs around my wrists.
“Here we are,” I hissed to Kit, slowing down as we approached.
Kit gripped my arm, his voice low but firm. “Remember what we—”
Kit’s words died in his throat. I followed his gaze. The car park of Meridian Medical Research Centre stretched before us, a flurry of activity where there should have been weekend emptiness. Three large moving vans stood with their rear doors open, and about eight people in dark uniforms scurried between the building and the vehicles, carrying cardboard boxes and office furniture.
“Holy shit!” The words burst from my mouth before I could stop them.
