His brown eyes widened. “What!”
“Yeah.”
“That can’t be right. Mom said she was a third-generation Floridian.”
“We don’t think your mom knew. Actually, everything points to her parents might not have ever told her she was adopted.” She leaned over and snagged her tablet from the nightstand. Then she pulled up the info Badger had copied her on and showed it to Ken, telling him about all the evidence Badger discovered that pointed to Ken’s mom being the foundling.
Once she finished, he stared, stunned. She felt the murky confusion roiling in his mind. “What…what does this mean? What are you saying?”
“I don’t know what it means for sure. I doubt your mother was a full shifter. I can’t imagine a shifter abandoning their baby to humans who’d have no clue what might happen in the future. And had your mother been a shifter, she would’ve known.”
“Would she?”
“Well…” Doubt crept into her mind. “I mean, yeah.”
“How would she have known she could shift, if she was a shifter, if no one told her?”
Dewi stared at him, hating that she hadn’t really considered that. “I…I don’t know.”
“I mean, she could’ve been a shifter and never shifted, because she never knew it was something she could do. Or maybe she knew she could, but kept it a secret because she was scared for anyone to know.”
Dewi stared into his eyes. “It’s…possible.”
“But…can’t you tell if I’m a shifter? Or related to one? Wouldn’t you have sensed that the night we met?”
“Normally, yes. But when I met you, I was a little, eh,distracted. I was more worried about finding and killing Peckingham than I was if you were from shifter lines or not. And I pinged on you as my mate. The fact that we had a mate bond took me by surprise and shocked the hell out of me. Honestly? You could’ve been a peacock shifter, and I wouldn’t have realized it, under those circumstances.”
His gaze widened again. “There’speacockshifters?”
“I—” She took a breath. “Thepointis, yes, I was sloppy. I wasn’t paying close attention. I own that. But now that you’re mated to me, all I can sense is…well,me.” Her hand came to rest on her tummy. “And her, obviously. It feels like you’ve always been in my soul.”
“What about Badger? Or Duncan? Is there any way they can tell?”
She shook her head. “Same thing. They senseme. If I wasn’t a Prime Alpha, maybe it’d be different. The same thing happened with Peyton and Gillian. Even though she’s a shifter, all people can sense is Peyton, because he’s a Prime Alpha.”
“I-I gotta say, Dew, I’m trying not to freak out right now—”
“I know,” she gently said as she took the tablet from him and set it on the nightstand. “Itisfreaky.” She looked into his eyes. “The day you finally stood up to and beat up your stepbrother,” she said. “When he jumped you at the apartment. The way you stood up to Endquist, when he was aPrime. The way you marked me. The way you were able to keep yourself and Nami alive, and look how coolly you executed Manuel Segura. Da said you acted the same way when you executed Segura’s men in the woods.”
A shiver rippled through him. “Not two of my finer moments,” he muttered. “Can we drop those from the highlight reel?”
“My point is that…” She studied him. “Yes, you possibly have wolf shifter in you. Maybe a little, maybe a lot. We don’t know yet.”
“Or something else?”
“What?”
His gaze dropped, to her tummy, where he laid his hand over the swell of her belly. Their daughter.
“Or something else,” he quietly said. “Tamsin’s a corgi shifter. What other kinds of shifters are there?”
She laid her hand over his and gently laced fingers with him. “I don’t know how many are out there. I know the most common ones. I also know there are plenty of stories about some shifters that deliberately stay hidden because they’re afraid of other shifters. Like prey species. We might never know all of them.”
“That means if you’re right, I could even have some sort of shifter genes in me that aren’t canine.”
Her turn to shiver. “It…it’s possible. Maybe. Yeah. Wolves are the most common, with other canines after that, and then other kinds.” She shrugged. “Bears, large cats, corvids—”
“Corvids?”
