I was somewhere between real and imagined, between waking and slumber, my body and mind fully separate from each other yet forced to exist in proximity. I wanted to sleep. I was terrified to sleep. I wanted to hold my son and weep into his hair. I wanted to run away and never look back again.
That last part was the hurt speaking. The fear. My children were my only reason for living, and I would never,everabandon them. Truly, I would rather die.
My heart was still racing like it had during the fight. The fight I had been losing before Giselle interfered. Just the fact that another wolf was manhandling me was proof of how far I had fallen.
Giselle...
How could a woman I’d gone on a single date with and talked to a grand total of three times occupy so much of my mind? Every few seconds, I replayed something she’d said, turning it this way and that so I could drain every detail out of it. She was amazing. After being hijacked, exposed to the supernatural world in a vicious wolf fight, getting involved in said wolf fight while having a medical crisis, she’d calmly ordered an Uber at the end of the night and gone home. Somehow, she’d ended up comfortingme.
That rankled my pride and my sense of decency. Giselle had been put into a truly dangerous situation, and I had done very little to make it better. If she hadn’t stepped in front of me, so calm and stoic, and explained that she needed her pills, I would have killed that man right in front of her. I’d been possessed, blinded and delusional, with one foot out of reality. Now that a few hours had passed, I knew it wasn’t Charles. Couldn’t be Charles. I’d ripped his heart out, crushed it in my hand, then immolated his corpse. There was no coming back from that. So, whether he was Charles’s brother like Giselle had theorized or some other connection, he wasn’t the beta who had betrayed me and everyone else I loved.
Just the fact that Giselle had known to do that was wild. After all, I had been a giant wolf at the time. She would have been fully within her right to run away screaming at the top of her lungs, or even to slap at me and curse me when I shifted into my human form.
But she hadn’t done any of that.
Maybe it was only because of her condition and her need to calm down her heart and take her medicine. Humans did have amazing survival instincts. But no, this was so much more than that.
You would have liked her, Millia.
They would have gotten along like two peas in a pod.
Millia, my darling wife, had been sweeter than sugar to those who deserved it, but hard as nails to anyone who was an asshole to the people she loved. She’d also had a fierce sense of right and wrong and had no problem telling someone when she thought there was a problem.
I always loved that about her.
Although I had been committed to being the best alpha I could be, sometimes I worried that I didn’t understand the complexities of situations enough to properly act upon them. That was where Millia and Charles had stepped in. They were my voices of reason, always explaining situations to me. And while they both advised me, neither of them directly demanded I do anything in particular. They’d given me the proper ammunition and trusted me to do the right thing with that.
Now, that was gone.
I miss you, my dear. So much.
It was all-consuming. Inescapable. The reason I picked up occasional gigs was to tire myself out and distract myself from the endless void inside me. Sometimes, I thought I should be more healed than I was, but I wasn’t sure therewasany healing from what I had gone through.
As much as I wished there wasn’t pain in every waking minute of my life, I was afraid that without it, I would forget. Forget how my wife’s auburn hair burned vibrant red when the summer sun hit it. Forget her heart-shaped face growing even rounder when she beamed at me. Forget how her curvy figure had softened even more after having Ben.
I wanted to remember all of that.
Even if it meant being in constant misery.
But perhaps the strangest thing of all was that I wanted to share her with Giselle. I pictured the two beside each other—Giselle’s elegant features a sharp contrast to my wife’s rounderones, and yet both inexplicably beautiful. Both incredibly kind. Both so goddamnperfect.
What do I do?I asked as if my wife would answer, but I had heard her last words long, long ago. I hadn’t known it at the time, and if I had, I would have done everything I could to circumvent our fates.I need you, Millia. There’s this hole inside me, and it’s eating me from the inside out. And I would let it swallow me, I really would, but I have to be here for our son.
I thought I could tough it out, but tonight proved that I can’t. And I know it’s way too soon, but there’s this woman…
Was I really bemoaning my attraction to a human to my dead wife? There was low, and then there was whatever the hell I was doing. But my darling Vermillia had always been my confidante. Even more than Charles. I had trusted her with everything and anything, so what was I supposed to do if not discuss things with her?
She doesn’t make me forget anything—nothing could make me forget you —but she makes it so much better. When I’m around her, I can think about my past with fondness instead of as these gaping wounds that will never close. I want to remember you and feel happiness, not this hell I’m in now.
Was that greedy? Was that far more than I deserved? Perhaps. But I needed better coping mechanisms if I wanted to continue being a good parent.
What if Junior was an alpha like me? It wasn’t guaranteed—as far as we could tell, designations didn’t seem to follow a genetic line—but it was a possibility. And if he was an alpha, eventually he would want to find or grow his own pack. He would have questions. He would need advice. And even though I considered myself a failure of an alpha, I still needed to be able to be there for him.
And that wasn’t possible in my current state of mind.
“Daddy?”
I blinked and glanced over to the bed. My son was hanging off the side.
