3. Family Heirloom
My father’s oldest friend is a man named Emmet. He is the only one from the resistance who survived because my dad asked him to remain in the background. He tried to secretly protect me from the abuse of the old alpha and his minions and who saved my parents’ money and belongings for me. He was also the one to pay for my college tuition.
Annie and I grab the twins and walk to Emmet’s house. Since I’m with Annie, Jun was able to take a few hours off to spend with his mate and do some training.
“Luna Annalise,” Emmet greets us, already expecting us in front of his door. “And my sweet Ella. Please come in.”
“Hello, Uncle Emmet.” I allow him to hug me, although I’m not the touchy type normally, but Emmet is an exception. He is like family to me, the only connection to my family I have.
“You are finally ready, child?” he asks me softly.
“Took me long enough.”
“No, it’s alright. I’ve promised you I would keep everything until you are ready to face it,” he says, leading us inside and towards his living room. A few boxes are there, ready for us to go through. “I couldn’t save everything back in the day,” he says. “Your parents handed me all the necessary documents and access to the bank accounts before they passed. They wanted to be prepared in case something happened.” He pauses, swallowing slightly. He is always sad when he talks about them. It proves my parents’ trust in him, though… they handed him every valuable possession and trusted him to keep it safe, and he did.
“And these boxes?” I ask.
“There is stuff I managed to save from their private possessions,” he explains. “A bit of jewelry, miscellaneous and memorabilia, pictures… personal things.” He takes a small jewelry box out of the tightly secured safe in his wall, handing it to me. “This one is special,” he says. “Your mother told me to give this to you when you are ready.” He pauses. “It was months before she died. I think she knew she wouldn’t make it,” he adds quietly.
I swallow, opening the box to find a beautiful necklace in it. It has a ruby stone and a little pendant. I need a moment to catch my breath again and calm down my heartbeat and the overflowing sadness I feel for never having met my family. For not having one memory of them.
“It was her favorite piece,” Emmet says quietly.
“Thank you for saving it,” I mutter.
He nods, gesturing towards the boxes. “Feel free to make yourself comfortable.”
My heart jumps at the realization that he saved so many things. They might not be valuable in a financial aspect, but they are for me. Emmet leaves Annie and me alone and goes to the kitchen to prepare tea and make a few calls.
He is so sweet to have prepared a little playpen for the twins. Asteria is finally drowsy, so she falls asleep fast, while Annie keeps Aurora on a blanket where she can crawl around. She is obsessing over a plush elephant, so we are safe for now.
We start methodically, going from one box to another. “This must have been your mom’s engagement ring,” Annie says while inspecting a ring. “It’s beautiful.”
I take it, smiling when I look at it. I need to verify with Emmet, but I think Annie might be right. I look at some more items while Annie returns to going through her folders. It’s surprisingly fun to spend the morning like this. That is until I take a box with pictures into my hands. I just know this is going to hit differently. It’s one thing to hold objects my parents owned, but this… this is them…
Annie looks up, having noticed my tension. “Do you want me to leave you alone?” she offers quietly.
“No, please stay,” I mutter.
Annie nods, puts her work aside, and sits on the sofa next to me. We don’t talk at all while I go through the pictures. One after another, I’m faced with memories of my parents. I can’t remember them, but seeing these pictures makes me almost feel like I do.
Most of them have names written on the backside. I go through a whole bunch of them until I see a very young woman next to my parents and a baby. I turn the picture, eyeing it. It says Candy with Ella.
“Who is Candy?” I mutter when I show Annie the picture. “She is holding me here in this picture with my parents.”
“She must be close to them,” Annie muses. “Let’s ask Emmet.”
I nod, linking him to ask for his help. Fortunately, he has finished his calls and is eager to answer my questions. “You are taking a look at the pictures,” he analyzes, his eyes sentimental.
“Yes.” I hand him the picture with Candy and me. “Who is this girl?”
“Candy…” He frowns. “Oh, Candy… Candy…” He sounds frustrated while saying her name. “Wait a moment!” he exclaims. “It has to be Candance… she was your father’s daughter from his first mate. You know, he was older than your mother. He had a child from his first mate. Goddess, Ella, I am so sorry, I completely shoved that memory aside. I should have told you much sooner.”
I had no idea! Okay, I didn’t ask Emmet anything either, because I still needed time before facing everything, but now I’m starting to realize this might have been wrong.
Funny, both mom and we were second-chance mates, Nefeli muses. Seems to run in the family. Not to mean it in a bad way, we got an awesome mate.
“She is my half-sister,” I whisper. “Where is she?”
Emmet’s eyes cloud over in sadness. He doesn’t need to tell me for me to know.
I grasp Annie’s hand, feeling a bit calmer when she squeezes it gently. “How did it happen?” I ask quietly.
“The old alpha found her and killed her,” Emmet says quietly. “I saw her body. There is no doubt it was her.”
Sadness fills me for the sister I never met. I roam through the pictures before another one of Candy appears. She is a bit older than in the one with me as a baby. And my eyes widen as I see she is holding a baby again. This time, it isn’t me though. “Who is that?” I ask Emmet.
Emmet takes the photo from me, his brows furrowing. “It’s Candy again… but the baby…”
“You haven’t seen it before?” I ask when he hands me back the photo. I turn it slightly. “Candy and Charlie.”
Something in my stomach tugs. Nefeli, do you think…
It’s a possibility, she answers.
“It could be her baby,” I whisper. I might have a nephew out there in the world. “I mean, it’s a stretch, but it could be!”
Annie and Emmet exchange a gaze, both looking appalled. “I wasn’t aware of this,” Emmet breathes out.
“You said Candy was killed. We can only guess how old she was in this picture… As for the baby, I’d say it’s not even a couple of weeks old.”
Emmet takes the picture again and frowns. “The scar on her shoulder. She got it during a fight.” He seems to count in his head. “If this is truly her child, then it’s probably around thirteen or fourteen now, maybe a bit older.”
“It could be any child,” I hear myself say.
“But you think it isn’t?” Annie prompts me.
“A feeling,” I admit. “Why would she send a picture to our dad with her and Charlie if it’s just any baby?”
“Then we need to research it,” Annie says.
“What?” My eyes widen. “Do you mean it?”
“Absolutely. This is your family, Ella. Do all you need to do!” Annie’s brilliant mind kicks in again. “Emmet saved the birth certificates of your parents for you; maybe he has Candy’s somewhere too. It should help you to prove that you are related.”
Emmet meanwhile goes further through the box, his expression one of shock as he brings forward a few more pictures. “I didn’t know Candy had a child… Why didn’t Deacon tell me about his grandchild? I would have tried to find the boy.”
“This is just a guess,” Annie says while inspecting the pictures. When I take them, I can see that it’s a few of Candy and Charlie, one of them in a hospital bed, probably after she gave birth. My heart squeezes. He is out there, my nephew. I just know it. “But going by the writing, the pen she used, the size of the pictures…” Annie analyzes. “She could have sent them in the same envelope on the same day. And maybe Ella’s dad didn’t have the time anymore to tell you, Emmet.”
“You are probably right, Luna,” Emmet says quietly. “It didn’t even cross my mind that Candy might have had a child. When I retrieved everything from Deacon’s place, I put everything in the boxes and never opened them again. They were Ella’s belongings, and I didn’t want to inquire further, and I also couldn’t bring myself to face the past.”
“Something we both share,” I mutter. “Is this the reason you never told me about Candy?”
He nods, sadness and guilt flashing in his eyes. “I didn’t mean to lie to you, Ella. Truth is… I pushed it out of my mind, almost like it didn’t exist anymore. I remember when I saw her dead body. I was terrified the same fate would befall you.”
“So, she was on the run,” Annie mutters. “Do you know why?”
“No,” Emmet says. He pauses. “Do you think Charlie is still out there somewhere?”.
“We have no reason not to believe that,” I say. I’m terrified to find out he is dead, but I want to cling to this hope, and I certainly want to try to find him before making assumptions. “But where to start searching?” I frown. “I guess I could try to track where Candy went when she fled from here before Alpha Marcus found her and killed her.”
“That’s a good start. We have a few good trackers. Also, we could ask friends from the Council to help you.” Annie takes the photo from me and looks at it thoughtfully. “This was made in Florence,” she says before looking at another one. “And this… in Vienna maybe… No, it’s Vienna for sure; there is the cathedral in the background. They were on the run.”
My heart skips a beat, and I thank the goddess for Annie having been to the Lycan Council in Europe and learning more about the European werewolf packs. “Maybe she tried to find a safe place for her child.”
“That’s a good thought,” Annie says. “I know if I were on the run, knowing someone was out there to kill me, then I’d make sure that at least my babies were safe.”
I gaze at the pictures of my half-sister and her child, feeling how my breath hitches. It’s just so overwhelming… Fuck… I never really met my parents, and then I find out I had a sister, just to realize she died before I could meet her. And now there might or might not be a child still alive…
Please let Charlie still be alive. Goddess, don’t make me look for my nephew just to realize he was killed too.
It becomes incredibly difficult to breathe as my thoughts spiral downwards. Annie takes my hand, but she is barely able to ground me.
Our meeting was shorter than expected, which was due to Liam cutting it short, claiming he had another one to attend and couldn’t stay for lunch. Back in the car, our driver, Emerson—a mutual friend of Liam and me—sets off instantly without asking too many questions.
“You look kind of dead, Alpha,” I comment.
“I certainly feel dead,” he grunts. “The girls were up almost the whole night.” He turns to look at Emerson. “How were you able to keep up with yours?”
“Fleur was a bit fussy too,” Emerson explains. “But it helped that it was just one, Alpha; you have two at the same age.” He pauses. “But when we adopted Emily, there were some issues with Emi being a bit jealous.”
“I guess everyone has their own problems,” Liam concludes. He turns to look at me. “Did we cover everything today during the meeting?”
“Yes, we should be fine,” I say, going through our folder once more. “We are not going to benefit from the alliance much now, but at a later point it should be beneficial, just like we discussed beforehand.”
“The fact that it’s a pack tied to a werecat pride makes it very valuable in the long run,” Liam agrees.
He has tremendous foresight about business decisions and alliances with packs. The alpha we talked to today, Alpha Ezra, is the leader of a relatively small pack. They had a lot of problems previously, which only came to light because Dave’s mate was hunted by them. Ezra stepped up after his father was imprisoned and forced to retire, and he shows promising skills. Furthermore, he has already helped us once, which is more proof of his loyalty.
His brother is tied to a werecat pride and mated to its queen, which might also be beneficial to us.
“Will we make it for lunch, Emerson?”
“I am afraid we won’t make it in time, Alpha Liam,” Emerson says.
“Then let’s halt somewhere and grab something,” Liam says. “I think Annalise said she will spend the day with Ella.”
“I will take something for Ella, too, just to be safe,” I muse. Man, I still feel like shit for having woken her up last night, particularly for disappointing her again. After I met Ella and realized she was my second chance, I swore to myself never to do wrong by her, to make sure she was safe and happy, and that her feelings would always come first.
In theory it’s a lot easier said than done.
Don’t be so dramatic. Sylvan yawns as he pops up in my mind. Nefeli and Ella have forgiven us already, as they proved last night.
We still need to try harder, I point out.
To this day, it still feels weird for me to talk to Sylvan again. Sometimes I even forget it’s an option to speak to him and instead don’t discuss things with him. When our first mate and unborn pup died, he almost retreated completely, and I was greeted with silence every day. It took us years to connect again, and even now, the connection seems shaky.
Sylvan lets his ears hang down, probably knowing what I’m thinking, but he doesn’t say anything. We could get them their favorite dessert, he says.
That’s not a bad idea. Ella loves strawberry tiramisu. “I think I’ll get something from an Italian restaurant,” I say.
Liam tosses me a smirk, well aware of why I chose Italian. “Fine with me,” he says. “I will grab a portion of seafood pasta for my luna. She loves it. As to why… it beats me.”
I chuckle. “You have always hated seafood, even as a child. I still remember when your father tried to make you eat shrimp. You were three, and you threw it at his head.”
Liam raises his brows. “If you start telling embarrassing stories of my childhood, you’ll need to get out of the car and walk the remainder of the way.”
I snort but don’t tease him further. Between Liam and me, there are approximately eight years. Ever since I saw him as a baby, I knew we shared a special bond. It was like it called out to me that I needed to become his protector. From that moment on, he was like a little brother to me. My parents never had more children. Unfortunately, my father died, and my mother… that’s another difficult topic.
Liam’s been my only family ever since.