Gillian headed into her room while Dewi aimed for the nursery and…yup. The little miss definitely needed a new diaper, because she was in the process of dumping a load into it.
As she held the old diaper in place and waited while Adair finished her business, Dewi stared down at her niece and thought about her own mother, perhaps standing in this very room when Dewi was a baby and changing her the way she now changed Adair.
She bore no tangible memories of her parents. Just…whispers. Remembering feeling loved, protected.
Safe.
A dark cloud surrounded the events of that night, and then her next clear memories were as a toddler, growing up on the pack compound with Badger raising her.
As she put a new diaper on the baby, she sniffled back an unexpected wave of melancholy threatening to bring tears to her eyes.
I wish you were here, Mom.
Despite Dewi’s aunts, Gillian, and Asia all doing their best to try to step into a motherly role with Dewi, she’d always felt an emotional disconnect. One she hadn’t really recognized until Nami entered their life and then…
Yeah.
She definitely viewed Nami like a mom instead of a sister. Nami had automatically stepped into that role with her the way Badger had stepped into the role as her adopted father.
She froze as a whisper of air brushed the nape of her neck.
Love you, too, baby…
Dewi whirled around, but she was alone in the room with Adair. Nearly every hair on her body stood straight out, yet she wasn’t afraid.
Tears unexpectedly filled her eyes. “Mom?” she whispered.
But the voice, which definitely reminded Dewi of the one she’d heard on the family videos she’d watched countless times while growing up, didn’t return.
Okay, maybe I really do need to take time off.
With another shiver, she quickly finished dressing Adair and hurried out with her in her arms to rejoin everyone in the kitchen.
Chapter Nineteen
Peyton
This was far from Peyton’s first train ride, but it was his first on a train through Norway. He resented not being able to sit back and enjoy the gorgeous scenery flowing past outside, but instead had to focus on all this bullshit.
Maybe I should bring Gillian here once all this is over. She’d love it.
He felt beyond guilty about upsetting her, and she still wasn’t responding to his texts or picking up the phone when he called. He knew she was listening to his voicemails—or likely deleting them without listening to them—because it kept accepting messages when the ones he’d already left should have filled up her mailbox. Meanwhile, Ken was his eyes and ears on the ground and kept Peyton updated. Gillian wasn’t openly ranting about the situation, but Ken recognized she was not happy.
I owe her a fuckton of apologies and pampering when we’re through this shit.
Not to mention, he resented having to miss this time with their baby. He’d hoped he could take a few weeks off and just be a dad and husband the way Trent had for his previous pups.
At this point, if he were the one who managed to lay hands on Faegan first, he would make sure the man suffered even more while he died. No quick and easy death for that fucker. Especially not after all of this. As a Prime, he wouldn’t even have to do it with his hands—he could mentally torture him to the point the man begged for death. Even better, if there were clueless human witnesses around making a bare-handed decapitation impossible, Peyton could order Faegan to kill himself in a very painful way, and it would look like a suicide to anyone else.
He ordered someone to do that once, years ago. The man, a clueless human, had raped the eleven-year-old daughter of one of their packmates. Peyton tracked him down at work in Spokane. He was a rich, smarmy fucker, the failson of a banker who was used to his daddy’s money buying him out of trouble, and it wasn’t his first assault.
But it would most definitely be his last.
Peyton had ordered the man to email a suicide note confessing all his crimes to the local newspaper and law enforcement. Then he made the man climb onto the roof of a five-story building. Peyton stood on the sidewalk below and watched as he threw himself off the roof?—
And onto a wrought-iron fence below, impaling himself on it.
Peyton had rushed over as one of the “concerned bystanders” and verified the man was, in fact, dead.
