He paused, gathering the words that felt like stones in his throat.
“That’s where I met Lilani’s mother, Tabitha. She was a human working in a tavern by the spaceport and I’d never met anyone like her. I thought… I thought she cared for me.” A bitter, self-mocking smile touched his lips. “Or maybe I just wanted her to. For a while, I let myself pretend I could have a different life. That I could be someone else.”
Her hand came over to rest on his knee, a small, warm point of contact in the cool cave air. She didn’t speak, but her presence was an anchor in the sea of painful memories.
“She got pregnant,” he continued, his voice lower now, roughened with the old pain. “I was ecstatic. I would have a child, a family of my own. Something that belonged only to me. Something that was mine.” He let out a harsh breath. “But the Vultor are possessive. Tabitha didn’t understand the bond I felt with our child, even before it was born. To her, it was a complication, a mistake that could ruin her plans. Her plan, I eventually discovered, was to attach herself to a wealthy merchant—a man who could give her the wealth and status I couldn’t. She’d been using me to pass the time.”
He could still remember the sickening lurch in his gut when he’d seen them together, Tabitha laughing up at the older man, her hand resting possessively on his arm. The memory was a physical ache, a phantom wound.
“I confronted her. She told me the baby meant nothing to her, that she’d planned to get rid of it, and that the only reason she hadn’t was because I was paying for her medical care.” His fists clenched, claws digging into his palms. “My beast took over. I didn’t kill the merchant, even though I wanted to. I just… made sure he’d never touch what was mine again. But I threatened Tabitha. I said if she ever tried to leave me, to take my child, I would hunt her to the ends of the universe. I thought I was protecting my family.”
The shame of that admission was a familiar, bitter taste in his mouth. The young warrior he’d been, so arrogant and so broken.
“She ran anyway. She left Port Cantor, left the entire sector, and I never saw her again.” He stared down at his hands, at the scars that marked a history of violence and poor choices. “But months later I finally tracked her down. She’d died in childbirth, alone in a cheap clinic in a backwater town. She’d never even told them my name.”
Her fingers tightened on his knee. “Oh, Valrek.”
“When I held Lilani for the first time, everything changed. All that mattered was this tiny, perfect little child.” His throat tightened. “I went home, determined to make a new start for her. But my pack wouldn’t accept her.”
The memory of that day was etched into his soul—returning home with a screaming infant in his arms, only to be met with cold stares and muttered accusations. He had expected shock, perhaps, but not outright revulsion.
“They called her an abomination,” he said, the words tasting like ash. “A pollution of the Vultor bloodline. The elders said they would only allow me back into the pack if I abandoned her.”
Her skin glowed with a sudden, fierce anger—indigo and crimson mixing in a storm of protective fury. “They wanted you to abandon your own daughter?”
“To them, she wasn’t my daughter. She was a mistake. A reminder that one of their own warriors had defiled himself with a human.” He looked up, meeting her furious gaze.
“And your grandfather?”
“He turned his back on me. Told me I’d brought shame on the name of our ancestors.” The old wound, scarred over but still tender, began to throb. “He said if I chose the half-breed, I was no longer his grandson. I was no longer Vultor.”
He had stood there, in the center of the village square, with his daughter wailing in his arms, surrounded by the faces of the pack he had known since birth. Faces that were now as cold and hard as the winter stone.
“So I chose her. I’ve always chosen her.” The decision had been simple. Brutally, devastatingly simple. “I walked away and never looked back.”
“And you’ve been alone ever since.”
“We’ve had each other. That’s enough.”
He watched as her anger slowly faded, replaced by an expression of such profound empathy that it made his chest ache. She understood. More than anyone he’d ever met, she understood the pain of being rejected for something beyond your control, the loneliness of being different.
“You’re not alone anymore,” she whispered. Her fingers traced a new path on his knee, a slow, deliberate circle that sent heat spiraling up his thigh. “You’re not the only one who’s been made to feel like an abomination.”
The word hung in the air between them, stark and ugly. He hated that she saw herself that way, hated the father who had carved that belief into her soul with scalpels and indifference.
“You’re not an abomination, Ariella.” He caught her hand, bringing it to his lips and pressing a kiss to the center of her palm. “You’re a miracle.”
Her breath hitched, and he watched the color on her skin shift from sympathetic blue to a warmer, more uncertain gold.
“I have to go back,” she said, and the words were like a bucket of ice water thrown on the fragile hope that had been growing in his chest.
“You don’t.”
“I do.” She gently pulled her hand from his grasp, and the absence of her touch was a physical ache. “Merrick expects me to complete the deep dive tomorrow. He’ll be monitoring my progress.”
“He’ll be monitoring a piece of equipment. Not a person.”
“It doesn’t matter what he thinks he’s monitoring. If I disappear, he’ll come looking. And he’s not the kind of man who comes alone. He’ll bring security, high tech devices, people who will tear this coastline apart until they find me.” She looked around the cave, at the simple furs, the rough-hewn stone walls, the small alcove where Lilani slept. “I can’t put you and Lilani in that kind of danger. I won’t.”
