Or maybe it was when he took responsibility, a subtly different thing that only my brother and Matthew, among all the alphas I’d known in my life, had always done without hesitation.
When I got Matthew alone later, he wouldn’t know what had come over me.
Diaz and his lawyers had all started to protest. “I’m not done,” Matthew said, in a tone of command that silenced them all. “I’m going to call the shifter council. I’m going to tell them this was a premeditated act of war. Fenwick’s going to agree with that assessment. And in lieu of reparations, I’m guessing your pathetic excuse for an alpha pack leader’s going to be happy to make us, and Jessica and the kids, go away.”
“The shifter council will appoint a suitable alpha guardian!” Ferret Number One sounded like he’d finally hit his stride. “They’ll choose someone related to Mr. Diaz. This is pointless.”
“Unless an alpha from the Armitage pack volunteers to become their legal guardian.” Paul shot another glance at Matthew. “Ideally someone the shifter council would see as suitable.”
Silence fell for a half second before everyone burst into an uproar: Diaz raging, the ferrets arguing, Ian saying something about Paul having lost his mind, Jennifer trying to ask Angelo if he could get Fenwick on the phone, probably desperate for one other person with some common sense to help her restore order.
But it all faded away into background noise for the pounding of my heart and the stunned expression on Matthew’s face as he turned to me.
Become their legal guardian.
Adopt them, that meant.
Matthew would legally be their father, responsible for them—not that he’d take any power away from Jessica, I knew him better than that. He’d be there to give her legal cover, not to usurp her rights.
But we wouldn’t be the two of us anymore. We’d be a family of five. An extraordinarily odd family of five—and with one extraneous person in it, if you looked at it through the lens of what a pack leader was supposed to do according to these shifter laws and traditions we were arguing over. Nate and I had similar worries, something we rarely talked about but often talked around: that our alpha mates would want more than we could give them. Or something different than we could give them. Jessica and her children were exactly what we pictured in those moments. Instant family, just add water and a few legal contracts.
If I told Matthew not to do it, he’d respect my wishes. That would be the end of it.
And I’d know, for the rest of my life, that when I had the chance to save someone the way I’d been saved—twice, both by my brother and by Matthew—I’d let fear overcome my morality and my decency and my sense of karmic balance.
I’d never forget the type of desperation and despair that had led me to flee my captor and run to California, ending up entangled with Nate’s psychotic asshole father and Sam Kimball, and then finally finding a safe haven with the Armitages. The kind of desperation and despair that’d lead a woman with no resources to take off with her kids, leave everything behind, and pray for a miracle she didn’t really believe in.
I’d gotten my miracle: Matthew. Now I had to help him be someone else’s.
Wecould be someone else’s.
Matthew took a step nearer, and then another, leaning down until he was close enough to kiss, eyes clouded with worry and brows furrowed. “We don’t have to,” he said softly. “We can find another way to keep the promise we made to keep her safe.”
I couldn’t believe him sometimes. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was. “We,” I repeated. “We?Imade that promise. Without consulting you. You weren’t even angry. And now you—” My voice cracked. And now he’d chosen to take equal responsibility the way he always did.
Oh, gods, I’d be giving him the fuck of hislifetonight. I wanted to climb him like a tree right this fucking second. In lieu of that, I wrapped a hand around the nape of his neck, pulled him down that last two inches, and held him in place for a searing kiss, hard enough to bruise even an alpha’s lips.
“You said we,” I finished, whispering it against his mouth. “That’s all that matters. Yes. We’ll do it. Thank all the gods Jessica’s going to do all the work, though. I’d bail the first timesomeone cried. And the first person to cry might very well be me.”
Matthew laughed, and I knew down to my bones that light in his eyes had nothing to do with the prospect of becoming the legal guardian of a pair of snot-nosed kids and the legal co-parent to a nice woman, and everything to do with me. He swooped back in; another kiss sealed the deal.
“All right,” he said, and his hand found mine, our fingers tangling together, his big and strong between my slimmer ones. We fit perfectly, the way we always did. “Let’s go kick their asses the legal way.”
We turned to face what came next together—as we always would.
Chapter 9
Jared
The pack house lay in almost perfect, peaceful quiet, and I had the strangest urge to tiptoe down the stairs despite it being only nine—and on New Year’s Eve, of all the days for everyone to go to bed early.
Or maybe not too strange. We had babies in the house now, weird after so many years of our generation being the youngest in our immediate family. Matt and Ian and I had grown up in this house, drawing on the walls—over there, in the corner of the landing, I could still seeIan has poop on himscrawled in blue crayon at a seven-year-old’s eye level—and making it echo with our laughter and squabbles. A whole gang of the pack’s other kids had run in and out during the day and for parties. But at night it’d only been us, tucked into bed by my aunt Janet.
Since we’d grown out of the stuffed animals and bedtime stories phase, the house hadn’t been like this, with that particular kind of cozy silence you got when children were safely asleep.
And now there were Armitage babies again. Matt’s freaking adopted kids, with the paperwork all signed by Jessica, Matt, a bunch of lawyers, and who knew who else on its way to the shifter council in triplicate to be stamped and sealed. I’d have bet all of Calder’s diamonds against that ever happening, given that Matt had mated the person I’d vote least likely to want to become—
I stopped dead, my foot suspended in midair. My mouth dropped open.
