Not tonight. I couldn’t hold one more thing tonight.
25
— • —
Finneas
The hospital room was too bright. Fluorescent buzz above my head, the smell of disinfectant mixing with flowers someone had brought to make the place feel less like what it was. Three days ago. Before the magazine, before the rejection, before any of it.
My mother was in the bed. IVs in both arms, monitors beeping in a rhythm I couldn’t stop syncing my breathing to, her dark hair with its gray streaks spread across the pillow. She looked smaller than I’d ever seen her. Margaret Kingsley, who commanded rooms, who made grown Alphas drop their eyes with a look, lying in a hospital bed with her skin the color of ash, trembling.
I sat in the chair beside her and held her hand. My wolf was howling, throwing himself against my ribs so hard I could feel the impact in my chest. She was dying. The healers confirmedit, the doctors confirmed it, and I was sitting in a plastic chair holding her hand like that was going to do a goddamn thing.
Andrea was in the hallway. She’d insisted on coming, refused to let me walk into this alone. She was sitting in a plastic chair surrounded by people who didn’t want her there. I was terrified, because my mother was dying on one side of the door, the woman I loved was on the other, and I could feel the walls closing in.
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” my mother said, her voice so thin I had to lean forward to hear it. “I didn’t want you to find out this way.”
“How long have you known?”
“A few weeks. The healers ran tests when I started feeling tired. I thought it was just age.” She squeezed my hand, barely any pressure behind it. “I didn’t want to worry you.”
I stared at our hands, hers small and gray inside mine, and I didn’t know what to say because there was nothing to say.
“Your father would have been here,” she said, and her eyes filled. “He would have known what to say. I miss him so much, Finneas. Every day. And knowing I’ll see him again soon is the only thing that doesn’t terrify me about this.”
My throat closed. My jaw locked so tight my teeth ached. “Don’t talk like that.”
“I have to. I have to say these things while I still can.” She turned her head on the pillow to look at me, and her eyes were wet but focused, sharpened by something I couldn’t identify yet. “I haveone thing I need to ask you. One thing. And I need you to hear me out before you answer.”
“What is it?”
“Marry Lorraine.”
The monitors beeped on, slow and regular and indifferent to what she’d just said. My wolf went still inside me, the howling cutting off like a switch flipped, and in the silence that followed I could hear every machine in the room, every drip of the IV, every breath she took.
“Marry her, Finneas. Before I’m gone. Let me see my son married to a woman who will stand beside him the way I stood beside your father. Let me see that before I go.”
“Mother...”
“Please.” She was crying now. Not the controlled tears from our phone calls, not the careful wetness she used when she wanted me to feel guilty. This was raw, ugly, her chest hitching under the hospital gown, her face crumpling, and I felt it in my own chest because she was my mother and she was breaking in front of me. Her hand gripped mine with a strength that didn’t match her frail body. “I know you don’t love her the way a husband should. But she loves you. She understands our world. She will protect the pack, the legacy, everything your father built. That’s what matters when you’re running out of time.”
“That’s not all that matters.”
“It’s what matters to me.” Her voice broke on the last word. “Your father and I talked about this before he died. You andLorraine, what it would mean for the families, for the pack. It was one of the last conversations we had. I have been holding onto it for eight years because it was the last plan we made together, and losing it would feel like losing him all over again.”
I closed my eyes. My wolf was screaming at me again, shoving images so fast I couldn’t block them. Andrea smiling, the dimple on the right side. Andrea in my kitchen in my shirt, barefoot, laughing about burnt pasta. Andrea saying “I’m falling for you” in a bathtub with steam in her hair, her eyes wide and scared and honest. The bond was pulling me toward the door, toward the hallway where she was sitting in a plastic chair waiting for me, toward the woman who made me feel like a person instead of a king.
I opened my eyes and looked at my mother. Gray face, tears running into her hair, monitors beeping. She was dying. The woman who raised me, who held my hand at my father’s funeral, who pushed too hard and manipulated too much but who was still my mother, was lying in a hospital bed asking me for the only thing she wanted before she died.
“Okay,” I said.
The word came out hollow. My wolf howled, raw and gutted, and I flinched from the inside. My mother’s face broke into relief. She pulled my hand to her cheek, pressed it there, whispered thank you over and over. I sat in the chair staring at the wall above her head while the monitors beeped and my heart turned to ash.
She told me to send Lorraine and her mother in. She wanted to tell them herself.
I walked out. Andrea was standing up from her chair, concern all over her face, reaching for me, and it nearly broke me right there. My wolf was clawing at me to tell her, to grab her, to say “my mother asked me to marry Lorraine and I said yes and I’m sorry, I’m so fucking sorry.”
I told Lorraine and her mother that Margaret wanted to see them. They went in. Lorraine threw a look at Andrea over her shoulder on the way through the door, a small satisfied smile that made my fists clench at my sides.
