He looked older, exhausted in a way that went bone deep. But I could see what I’d been too naive to notice before - the predatory grace in his movements, the inhuman stillness when he stopped moving. He was a werewolf. Had always been a werewolf. And I’d been too stupid and horny to notice.
He froze completely when he saw us. His gray eyes moved from my dying body to the children pressed against my sides. His nostrils flared, taking in their scent, and I saw the exact moment recognition hit him.
His face crumbled. His hands started shaking. He looked at them with an expression of devastation that made me want to claw his eyes out.
“Lina,” he breathed, voice rough with emotion. “Baby, I-”
Baby?Baby?He did not just call me baby after what he’d done.
I’d thought I could do this. Thought I could let him help me for their sake. But seeing him there, looking at MY babies with wonder and regret, hearing him use endearments he’d lost the right to, the memories from that morning crashed over me. His cold eyes. His cruel words. The way he’d reduced me to nothing.
Rage gave me strength the fever had stolen.
“Get out,” I rasped, the words scraping my throat raw.“Get out!”
But he was already moving forward, desperation clear in every line of his body. His hands reached out, whether for me or the twins I didn’t know and didn’t care.
“No,” I snarled, trying to shield them with my body even as black spots danced in my vision. “You don’t get to look at them. You don’t get to save me. You don’t getanythingfrom us!”
He jerked back as if I’d slapped him, but his eyes stayed locked on the twins. Cataloguing every feature, every similarity, every piece of evidence of what I’d hidden.
The room tilted violently. My body was done, poison winning the war for my bloodstream. But I had enough left for one more truth.
“I hate you,” I whispered as darkness crept in from the edges. “God, I hate you so much...”
The last thing I saw was his stricken face before everything went black.
19
— • —
Knox
I dropped to my knees beside Lina’s unconscious form on Noah’s kitchen floor, my legs giving out at the sight of her. Gray skin, black veins spreading from the bite on her shoulder, heartbeat so faint I had to strain to hear it. She was dying. My mate was dying right in front of me.
But that wasn’t what destroyed me.
Two small children pressed against her sides, shaking her limp hands and sobbing with the kind of abandonment only children could produce. Raw, desperate sounds that tore straight through my chest.
“Mama won’t wake up!” the little girl wailed, dark hair falling across her face as she pulled at Lina’s arm. “We tried so hard but she won’t wake up! Mama, please!”
The boy was quieter but no less devastated, clinging to his mother’s other arm with tears streaming down cheeks that had my exact bone structure. My jaw. My nose. My gray eyes staring back at me from a tiny face twisted with grief.
“Mama is not waking up,” the girl continued, her voice breaking on each word. “She - she doesn’t open her eyes. Why won’t she open her eyes?”
The scent hit me then, cutting through the poison and fever and fear. Coffee and vanilla I knew so well, Lina’s signature that had haunted me for years. But mixed with it were two other scents that made my wolf go absolutely feral with recognition.
Pine and rain with hints of honey from the girl. Earth and woodsmoke with vanilla from the boy.
Our scents. Mine and Lina’s combined into two perfect little beings who were crying over their dying mother.
OURS. CUBS. OURS.
My wolf’s roar nearly brought me to the floor completely. The math destroyed what was left of my sanity. They looked about four years old, maybe a few months more. Born nine months after that night. Nine months after I’d called her a warm hole and walked away.
“Are you the doctor that will make Mama better?” the girl whispered, turning those dark eyes to me with desperate hope.
I couldn’t speak. My throat had closed completely, choked by the magnitude of what I was seeing. What I’d done.
