“Then how come my scent wavers?” I pulled off my ring and then put it back on again. “See? Without it, I scent like a shifter, and I smell latent when I pop it on.”
“That’s because you’re bonded to me and you’re carrying our baby. I’m scenting our child.” He put his hand on my belly. “It means our baby’s probably a shifter. You said it yourself earlier than the scent was because of the baby.”
Being a shifter meant that our child would be accepted. I didn’t have to worry about our little one being rejected in shifter society, even if I was discovered as human. Shifters protected their own, and our little one was one of them.
If all things were equal, I’d have happily welcomed a human or shifter baby. But they weren’t human, and being a shifter was invaluable for our baby’s future.
“My gut tells me hunters are real,” I said, pushing myself to stand and pulling my pants back up. “If they’re not, why don’t you help me prove they’re not?”
“How can you prove something isn’t? You can prove somethingis.”
If he was going to get all fact-based, I could do that too.
“Well, then, how about you prove that they are real? Come and look at what I’ve been doing.” I went and showed him the papers.
“This just looks like old stuff people are too hesitant to throw away. Every family has this.”
“Yes and no. Come with me.” I grabbed his hand and dragged him down into the basement. “Look at all this.” I indicated the mounds of boxes that remained in the basement after I’d brought a lot upstairs. “We need to go through all of it, because if hunters are real, it’s gonna be in one of these.”
Phelan looked at me like I had two heads.
“Rawlins had always kept me from this place. There had to be a reason.”
“Bugs? Rats? Things that go bump in the night? Not gonna lie, Rawling, it wouldn’t be hard to keep me out of here, not even as an adult.” He grabbed the back of his neck. “This basement’s kind of creepy.”
“It’s not kind of, it’s 100% creepy. But that’s beside the point. There’s something here that we need to find. Please. Help me.”
“Don’t you think sometimes secrets are better left buried? You dig up the past, a past that was before your time, you might unearth something that you don’t want to know.”
“But what if it’s something we need to know? Something that will protect the baby?”
He stood there looking at the piles for what felt like forever before saying, “Okay, tell me what to do.”
I had him lug the rest of the boxes upstairs. There was no way I was going to be allowed to carry heavy boxes with Phelan there. I had to give him that, he was already being very protective.
We found more pictures, a box of random takeout menus, and some old journals someone scrapbooked in, wallpaper samples. Just random stuff.
That was until we found a property transfer agreement. On the surface it was another random document. I went to put it with the other papers, but the house was in a different town, not far at all. That wasn’t the weird part, Rawlins probably had assets all over the place I hadn’t figured out yet. But what caught my attention was that it had Charlotte Dempsey on it, the same name as from the bank papers, and also an Arnie Guthrie. It wasn’t new, but it wasn’t extremely old either. It was from seventeen years ago.
Why was it there? And once again, I asked myself what this woman had to do with Rawlins. She had to be a relative with the same family name.
“We need to check it out,” I said. I wasn’t asking. It was a must and for no reason I could explain.
“What good would seeing a house do?”
“I need to see it.”
“Why? Give me one logical reason why.”
“Because… hormones.”
He immediately agreed. I was going to have to put that in my back pocket. Next time, lead with hormones.
It wasn’t a long drive, and I didn’t know what I was expecting by going there, but it was more than I got, which was nothing. I didn’t recognize the town, the street, or the house. Not from living near here and not from any of the pictures I’d spent so much time culling through. It was just a random building.
“Can we go see if they’re home?”
Phelan wasn’t keen on the idea, but he agreed. We walked up to the door. It was a horrible shade of brown, and it was peeling. The place wasn't being well taken care of.
