“What are you doing down there?”
“Just thinking. Did I wake you up?”
He swung over the side of the bed, then knelt beside me. It reminded me of how Giselle had taken a similar position in the kitchen, and those conflicted feelings rose within me again.
“No. Just had a bad dream.”
As usual, my son’s needs instantly blanked out any of the turmoil I was feeling, giving me a break from the maelstrom inside my heart and head.
“Another nightmare?”
“No. Just a bad dream.”
I sat up myself, opening my arms to him, and he crawled into my lap. In a few years, he’d be far too cool to cuddle with his father, but I was so grateful we weren’t there yet.
“What’s the difference, little man?”
“A bad dream is when I can’t remember how to tie my shoes, or there’s a test I didn’t study for, or I can’t remember how to read. Nightmares are”—I felt his heart thud, and it reminded me of the fight Giselle’s had been having with her rib cage—“not like that.”
He didn’t have to elaborate. Although I hadn’t been there, I was acutely aware of all the things my son had heard going on above his head. While the chamber under my wife’s craft room was meant to be large enough to cram at least six kids in there, there’d only been time to cram him and Veronica in it. He’d had to hold his hand over a wailing baby’s mouth while everything he knew was destroyed right above him.
Millia had hoped to test out the chamber, make sure it was safe with no risk of suffocation, then build several more in prominent areas around the pack community. I supposed it was a good thing that she never got that far, because if shehad, Charles would have known, and he probably would have dropped burning logs in there or some other horrific thing.
I shook my head. How had I ever loved that man like a brother? He truly had been a monster!
But he’d fooled us all. Every single member of our pack. It was insane how people could change like that. If it hadn’t happened to me, I wouldn’t have believed it.
“I understand,” I said, hugging him a little more tightly. “Do you wanna get back in bed and have me read you a story?”
“Can we sleep in your room? I don’t wanna be alone.”
Some people would insist my son was far too old for that, but they could all shut the fuck up. Junior had been through something no person, let alone a kid, should go through. So, if he wanted to spend the night in my room, then he was going to spend the night in my room.
“Sure, buddy. Why don’t you get a book we can settle in with?”
“Okie. Did you remember to charge Veronica’s baby monitor?”
“I did, but Natalie has one as well.”
“Right, I forgot she was here. She seemed kinda sad today.”
“Did she?” I asked, then I remembered what month it was. “Ah. Her sister’s birthday is next week. She’s probably got a lot of complicated feelings.”
“Her sister. That was Auntie Morganthau, right?”
“Yeah, it was.”
My son made a tiny sound somewhere between a sigh and something else entirely. “She was nice. She’d always make me lemon squares when she visited. She liked kids a lot, didn’t she?”
“She did.”
While I hadn’t known Natalie’s sister well, I had been determined for her to feel welcome in our pack even though she was an entirely different species. I couldn’t believe her ownpeople had rejected her for something as simple as not being able to have children, as if the only use for a woman in a pack was to reproduce. Utter insanity. I knew shifter numbers were dwindling since humans had become the dominant species in more ways than one, but that was the cycle of nature. Exiling our own forbullshitreasons wasn’t going to help anyone.
“It makes me sad, Daddy.”
“I know, Junior. I know.”
“Do you think you could call me Benny? Everyone else does.”
