Chapter 17 - Dorian
The wailing, incessant cries of a baby have me pushing past Amelia and marching into the lakehouse I found her in.
Though I’m glad I found her in the place Jackson suspected she would be after coming to his senses and remembering his familial love and care for his sister, the loud cries are all I can focus on as bleat in my eardrums.
A baby…?
How is that even possible?
“Dorian! Wait!” Amelia cries desperately behind me as I walk through the cottage, following the baby’s cries until I find myself outside a closed door. I stop, only to control the pace of my unsteady heartbeat with a deep breath. The impulse to walk through the door is stronger than the pull I feel toward Amelia thanks to the mate bond.
“Dorian!” she pleads, placing a hand on my shoulder. I shrug her off only because I can’t let her touch interfere with me trying to make sense of this nagging pull.
I don’t want to believe it, but the sound of its cries is too imminent to ignore. So, with another deep breath, I push the door inside only to find another woman cradling a baby in her arms.
“No… It’s impossible…” I murmur in disbelief, walking into the room on quivering knees until I’m a few inches away from the child.
My heart pounds with panic rising in my throat like poisonous bile. Is the child mine? And if so, is it just like Jackson—a rabid hybrid who shouldn’t be in the world?
When I’m close enough, the child turns its head to me, meeting my eyes and disarming me with how familiar its rich brown eyes are. Placated by its lively gaze when it stops crying, I sink to my knees and my worries slip away.
Nothing about the baby appears abnormal. But more than that, my inner wolf awakens as it's drawn toward the baby, murmuring sweet nothings of contentment. Instinctively reaching out for the baby, the woman who has it passes it to me.
The moment I take the baby into my arms, my intuition already tells me that the pup is a girl, and my inner wolf whispers her name.
“Damita…” I say aloud, and the woman on the bed nods before slipping away and disappearing behind me. I hear her speaking to Ameia in hushed tones, but I’m too mesmerized by the newborn baby’s hypnotizing eyes that can’t seem to leave mine.
Her little smile indicates that she recognizes me as her father while the tug in my heart draws me toward her as my innate wolf recognizes her as my blood. The feeling is so profound that it brings tears to my eyes, my heart softening in ways that I never imagined it could be subdued.
“She’s mine…” I whisper in awe, unable to stop the tears from falling down my cheeks as I hug the tiny pup to my chest, a newfound sense of wanting to protect her washing over me.
“She’s yours, Dorian. She’s your child,” Amelia says with disappointment in her tone. I’m finally able to stand on my feet and turn, only to find her with her head hung bashfully.
“How is it possible?” I ask in surprise.
Amelia sighs, and the door closes behind her before she drags her feet to the bed and plops on the edge. “The pill didn’t work,” she shrugs.
“It wouldn’t have worked against an Alpha.”
“Apparently so…” she laments as she nods at our baby. “But she’s a normal, healthy baby, even if I gave birth to her in under three months.”
There’s a sadness evident in Amelia’s voice that sends a pang of guilt riding through me as a million thoughts race through my mind all at once. I can’t even imagine what she’s been through all this time, and how she must have struggled while saying off Jackson’s radar all this time.
My inner wolf compels me to do what’s right as I straighten up and take a deep breath, keeping Damita pressed to my chest.
“You and Damita will return to Fort Smit at once,” I declare boldly, and Amelia lifts incredulous eyes at me as she frowns.
“F-Fort Smit?” she asks in a quivering tone. “That’s where your pack is…”
“Yes,” I concede with a firm nod. “You will become the Nightclaw Pack’s Luna, and we will raise Damita together.”
Amelia blinks slowly, her mouth agape as she stares at me with a dumbfounded look that I suddenly think is cute.
“B-but…” she pauses on her protest, seemingly trying to find one.
“But what, Amelia? There’s no question about it. You had my child.”
Amelia continues to stare at me, perplexed. “I’m not your mate…” she murmurs, her frown deepening.
I open my mouth to say something, when the rejection I uttered before in the warehouse enters my mind like a taunting echo.
“You are not my mate, Amelia! You’re just a human! I could never consider you my mate!”
That must be why she’d been begging me to leave just now. It’s because I rejected her in the warehouse, though it shouldn’t have affected her the way it would have affected a she-wolf.
Unless…
She must have been pregnant by then, and the rejection worked on her the way it works on werewolves. My brutal words of rejection must have shattered her heart, and she had to survive a pregnancy with a werewolf pup while her heart was breaking from the torment of being rejected.
That means that she does care about me, and it eases my doubts. She would have had me, after all.
With the way she’s looking at me, glowering now with eyes that spear daggers at me, I know that I can’t tell her anything to change how feels about our mate bond. I won’t be able to explain that the only reason I rejected her was to give that final push for her to escape without me.
I’ll have to rely on my innate Alpha—the authoritative and dominating nature that comes as a perk of being the leader of a wolf pack.
Straightening my spine and squaring my shoulders, I clear my throat and compose my voice. “I marked you as my mate, Amelia Ramirez.”
She shakes her head slowly, eyes bewildered as they grow wider. “It doesn’t mean anything. I’m human, it’s not like—”
I put a hand up to stop her, and Damita gurgles in my arm as if she’s pleased that I’m not taking “no” for an answer from her mother. Even though she’s just a newborn, I can feel her emotions and the calm she feels around my presence. It’s the Alpha blood in her that allows me to feel drawn to her more profoundly than I’ve ever been drawn to anyone.
The only thing that comes close is the way I feel pulled toward Amelia. I suspect that the only reason it’s not as intense as it should be is because the mating ceremony we acted out wasn’t the real deal. It has nothing to do with her being human.
“Did you forget that you and I are legally married?” I pose with a carefully raised brow. “I have the document that your brother forced us to sign. You can’t get out of it.”
Amelia’s jaw drops as she blinks discontentedly. “I want a divorce.”
“Not happening,” I say firmly as I begin rocking Damita in my arms and watch as her eyelids grow heavier. “As a werewolf, I can’t go back on a mate bond, and as a human man, I won’t let a marriage end in divorce. The only thing that would have severed the mate bond was death.”
I hope that my last statement is understood. Amelia has to realize that the only reason I rejected her was to save her life when I expected mine to end. Now that I’ve received a second chance at life, I’m determined to do what’s right by my mate.
I have to do what’s right by the woman I love, even if I can’t tell her that I feel that way about her.
When there’s a knock on the door, Amelia snaps out of her daze and gets to her feet.
“Excuse me, that must be—” she shakes her head timidly and heads to the door. “Never mind. I’ll be right back.”
Amelia leaves the room and closes the door behind her, leaving me to spend some time alone with our daughter, soaking up the peaceful waves in the air that Damita seems to send out as a powerful frequency with her little hiccoughs and sighs. When she falls asleep in my arms, I cross the room and gently lay her down in her crib in the corner and stand back to marvel at her.
Despite how tiny she is, I know she’s powerful because I can feel it. With her dark brown eyes and faint tuft of dark hair, the rest of her facial features are lost to plump cheeks and her newness. I have a feeling she’ll only share my eye color, while the rest will be a resemblance to her mother when she grows up.
I look forward to watching her grow up as a fierce and powerful Alpha child who will be the replica of the human I love. I love Damita already, and I’m only ridden with guilt for not being present when she was born.
It’s not like it was my fault, but Amelia can’t seem to grasp that while her judgment remains clouded by my rejection before. Even now, when she returns to the room, she doesn’t look my way and goes about the room picking up clothes and placing them in the laundry basket.
“Amelia…?” I call out gently, but she pretends not to hear my low voice since I’m whispering for Damita’s sake.
I walk up behind her, but she deftly moves away just as I’m about to reach for her shoulders. Following her out of the room, I don’t understand her hostility toward me, since I was expecting her to be glad to see that I was alive and well.
It doesn’t matter. I’ll take my mate and child to Fort Smit with me, and I’ll make up for lost time. That’s the only way forward, and I’ll do everything I can to be worthy of her love—if she’ll give it to me.
“I’ve decided…” Amelia says when she’s at the basin packing away cutlery and plates. I glance around the kitchen and notice that the other human woman who’d been babysitting our daughter is gone now.
“... I’ll come with you to Fort Smit. Damita deserves to have both parents in her life.”
“I’m glad you see it that way,” I say as I pull out a chair from behind the table. “I look forward to raising her amongst her people.”
“Hm,” Amelia hums flatly, continuing her chore while she doesn’t look my way.
I bite my bottom lip in contemplation, wondering if I should break the awkward silence that stretches between us. Tapping my fingers on the table and noticing little splinters of wood splatter off from the surface, I feel so guilty about how she’s been living for the past four months. I need to know everything that she’s been through, but I know that now isn’t the right time to bring it up.
She’s probably filled with anger and resentment toward me, while all I can do is feel relieved now that I’m breathing the same air as she is.
When she’s done with her chore, she finally turns around and accidentally meets my eyes. I know it’s a mistake on her part when she gulps nervously and braces her hands on the edge of the counter behind her as if to steady herself.
I tear my gaze away only to lessen her tension, but the air still remains dense with all the words either of us refuse to speak now. I scan the small cottage and spot an old, torn and faded mustard sofa in the corner against a window.
“Do you have a spare blanket?” I ask as I get to my feet.
Amelia clears her throat tentatively. “Wh-why?”
“I’m gonna take the sofa for the night,” I say as I nod toward the living room area.
“Y-you’re sleeping over?” Amelia asks hesitantly. When I glance at her, she’s wearing a skeptical frown with her head tilted to one side as she regards me.
“Yeah,” I shrug nonchalantly. “Tomorrow, we’ll head back to Fort Smit together.”
Amelia nods reluctantly as she peels herself off the counter and keeps her head down. I look away because the awkward tension is too much to bear and sends a shiver down my spine. I cross the kitchen toward the living room for the night, when I accidentally crash into Amelia.
Instinctively grabbing her arm to steady her on her feet, we lock eyes the moment she lifts her head.
Another bout of awkward silence stretches around us, but it doesn’t compel me to release her arm. It feels too good to feel her smooth skin beneath my palm once again, and I’m taken down a lane of memories filled with all the times Amelia and I had been together in the most intimate ways.’
It’s only when she wrings her arm free that I pull away and take a cautious step back, not wanting to lose the sweet tresses of her scent in the air I breathe.
“You should pack your things and get ready. We’ll leave first thing tomorrow morning,” I say, clearing my throat to jolt myself out of the thoughts whirling in my head—thoughts like wanting to grab her and pull her closer so I can crush my lips to hers.
“Y-yes…” she agrees with a timid nod before quickly turning on her heel and bolting for the bedroom.
I’m left staring after her,as she disappears into the room, sighing with a heavy heart that weighs on my shoulders and drops them.
At least she’s agreed to coming with me to Fort Smit. I can only pray that she’ll have me once again.