14. Ben
FOURTEEN
BEN
Confines of a Wounded Soul
I was lying on the ground beside Benny’s bed, Veronica’s spare baby monitor on my chest. Natalie had the other one, but she was fast asleep in the guest room, and I had no intention of waking her.
I wasn’t really sure I had any intentions at all.
I was somewhere between real and imagined, between waking and slumber, my body and mind fully separate from each other yet forced to exist in proximity. I wanted to sleep. I was terrified to sleep. I wanted to hold my son and weep into his hair. I wanted to run away and never look back again.
That last part was the hurt speaking. The fear. My children were my only reason for living, and I would never, ever abandon them. Truly, I would rather die.
My heart was still racing like it had during the fight. The fight I had been losing before Giselle interfered. Just the fact that another wolf was manhandling me was proof of how far I had fallen.
Giselle...
How could a woman I’d gone on a single date with and talked to a grand total of three times occupy so much of my mind?
Every few seconds, I replayed something she’d said, turning it this way and that so I could drain every detail out of it.
She was amazing. After being hijacked, exposed to the supernatural world in a vicious wolf fight, getting involved in said wolf fight while having a medical crisis, she’d calmly ordered an Uber at the end of the night and gone home. Somehow, she’d ended up comforting me.
That rankled my pride and my sense of decency.
Giselle had been put into a truly dangerous situation, and I had done very little to make it better.
If she hadn’t stepped in front of me, so calm and stoic, and explained that she needed her pills, I would have killed that man right in front of her.
I’d been possessed, blinded and delusional, with one foot out of reality.
Now that a few hours had passed, I knew it wasn’t Charles.
Couldn’t be Charles. I’d ripped his heart out, crushed it in my hand, then immolated his corpse.
There was no coming back from that. So, whether he was Charles’s brother like Giselle had theorized or some other connection, he wasn’t the beta who had betrayed me and everyone else I loved.
Just the fact that Giselle had known to do that was wild. After all, I had been a giant wolf at the time. She would have been fully within her right to run away screaming at the top of her lungs, or even to slap at me and curse me when I shifted into my human form.
But she hadn’t done any of that.
Maybe it was only because of her condition and her need to calm down her heart and take her medicine. Humans did have amazing survival instincts. But no, this was so much more than that.
You would have liked her, Millia.
They would have gotten along like two peas in a pod.
Millia, my darling wife, had been sweeter than sugar to those who deserved it, but hard as nails to anyone who was an asshole to the people she loved. She’d also had a fierce sense of right and wrong and had no problem telling someone when she thought there was a problem.
I always loved that about her.
Although I had been committed to being the best alpha I could be, sometimes I worried that I didn’t understand the complexities of situations enough to properly act upon them.
That was where Millia and Charles had stepped in.
They were my voices of reason, always explaining situations to me.
And while they both advised me, neither of them directly demanded I do anything in particular.
They’d given me the proper ammunition and trusted me to do the right thing with that.
Now, that was gone.
I miss you, my dear. So much.
It was all-consuming. Inescapable. The reason I picked up occasional gigs was to tire myself out and distract myself from the endless void inside me. Sometimes, I thought I should be more healed than I was, but I wasn’t sure there was any healing from what I had gone through.
As much as I wished there wasn’t pain in every waking minute of my life, I was afraid that without it, I would forget.
Forget how my wife’s auburn hair burned vibrant red when the summer sun hit it.
Forget her heart-shaped face growing even rounder when she beamed at me.
Forget how her curvy figure had softened even more after having Ben.
I wanted to remember all of that.
Even if it meant being in constant misery.
But perhaps the strangest thing of all was that I wanted to share her with Giselle. I pictured the two beside each other—Giselle’s elegant features a sharp contrast to my wife’s rounder ones, and yet both inexplicably beautiful. Both incredibly kind. Both so goddamn perfect.
What do I do? I asked as if my wife would answer, but I had heard her last words long, long ago.
I hadn’t known it at the time, and if I had, I would have done everything I could to circumvent our fates.
I need you, Millia. There’s this hole inside me, and it’s eating me from the inside out.
And I would let it swallow me, I really would, but I have to be here for our son.
I thought I could tough it out, but tonight proved that I can’t. And I know it’s way too soon, but there’s this woman…
Was I really bemoaning my attraction to a human to my dead wife?
There was low, and then there was whatever the hell I was doing.
But my darling Vermillia had always been my confidante.
Even more than Charles. I had trusted her with everything and anything, so what was I supposed to do if not discuss things with her?
She doesn’t make me forget anything—nothing could make me forget you —but she makes it so much better. When I’m around her, I can think about my past with fondness instead of as these gaping wounds that will never close. I want to remember you and feel happiness, not this hell I’m in now.
Was that greedy? Was that far more than I deserved? Perhaps. But I needed better coping mechanisms if I wanted to continue being a good parent.
What if Junior was an alpha like me? It wasn’t guaranteed—as far as we could tell, designations didn’t seem to follow a genetic line—but it was a possibility.
And if he was an alpha, eventually he would want to find or grow his own pack.
He would have questions. He would need advice.
And even though I considered myself a failure of an alpha, I still needed to be able to be there for him.
And that wasn’t possible in my current state of mind.
“Daddy?”
I blinked and glanced over to the bed. My son was hanging off the side.
“What are you doing down there?”
“Just thinking. Did I wake you up?”
He swung over the side of the bed, then knelt beside me. It reminded me of how Giselle had taken a similar position in the kitchen, and those conflicted feelings rose within me again.
“No. Just had a bad dream.”
As usual, my son’s needs instantly blanked out any of the turmoil I was feeling, giving me a break from the maelstrom inside my heart and head.
“Another nightmare?”
“No. Just a bad dream.”
I sat up myself, opening my arms to him, and he crawled into my lap. In a few years, he’d be far too cool to cuddle with his father, but I was so grateful we weren’t there yet.
“What’s the difference, little man?”
“A bad dream is when I can’t remember how to tie my shoes, or there’s a test I didn’t study for, or I can’t remember how to read. Nightmares are”—I felt his heart thud, and it reminded me of the fight Giselle’s had been having with her rib cage—“not like that.”
He didn’t have to elaborate. Although I hadn’t been there, I was acutely aware of all the things my son had heard going on above his head.
While the chamber under my wife’s craft room was meant to be large enough to cram at least six kids in there, there’d only been time to cram him and Veronica in it.
He’d had to hold his hand over a wailing baby’s mouth while everything he knew was destroyed right above him.
Millia had hoped to test out the chamber, make sure it was safe with no risk of suffocation, then build several more in prominent areas around the pack community.
I supposed it was a good thing that she never got that far, because if she had, Charles would have known, and he probably would have dropped burning logs in there or some other horrific thing.
I shook my head. How had I ever loved that man like a brother? He truly had been a monster!
But he’d fooled us all. Every single member of our pack. It was insane how people could change like that. If it hadn’t happened to me, I wouldn’t have believed it.
“I understand,” I said, hugging him a little more tightly. “Do you wanna get back in bed and have me read you a story?”
“Can we sleep in your room? I don’t wanna be alone.”
Some people would insist my son was far too old for that, but they could all shut the fuck up. Junior had been through something no person, let alone a kid, should go through. So, if he wanted to spend the night in my room, then he was going to spend the night in my room.
“Sure, buddy. Why don’t you get a book we can settle in with?”
“Okie. Did you remember to charge Veronica’s baby monitor?”
“I did, but Natalie has one as well.”
“Right, I forgot she was here. She seemed kinda sad today.”
“Did she?” I asked, then I remembered what month it was. “Ah. Her sister’s birthday is next week. She’s probably got a lot of complicated feelings.”
“Her sister. That was Auntie Morganthau, right?”
“Yeah, it was.”
My son made a tiny sound somewhere between a sigh and something else entirely. “She was nice. She’d always make me lemon squares when she visited. She liked kids a lot, didn’t she?”
“She did.”
While I hadn’t known Natalie’s sister well, I had been determined for her to feel welcome in our pack even though she was an entirely different species.
I couldn’t believe her own people had rejected her for something as simple as not being able to have children, as if the only use for a woman in a pack was to reproduce.
Utter insanity. I knew shifter numbers were dwindling since humans had become the dominant species in more ways than one, but that was the cycle of nature.
Exiling our own for bullshit reasons wasn’t going to help anyone.
“It makes me sad, Daddy.”
“I know, Junior. I know.”
“Do you think you could call me Benny? Everyone else does.”
I didn’t answer immediately, not exactly surprised by the request but not exactly ready for it either. “Why’s that, buddy?”
“I know Junior means I’m named after you, but Benny sounds better. More, uhm, I…”
“More like me?”
“Yeah. Daddy. I wanna be more like you.”
My insecurity flared so hot, I was surprised I wasn’t actually radiating heat, but I squashed it down. I had my issues, yeah, but my son didn’t deserve to have them projected onto him in the middle of the night.
“Thank you, buddy. But you should always try to be more like yourself, because let me tell you, you’re incredible.”
“I’m okay,” he murmured, tucking his head into his chest like kids sometimes did when they were being bashful. God, he really reminded me of his mother sometimes. “I’m gonna pick out a book. Do you wanna go brush your teefs?”
“Teeth, Ju- Benny. ”
“I know, I know. But teefs is more fun to say.”
He had a point.
I ruffled his hair and set him on his feet. He went to his crammed bookshelf while I headed to the bathroom. While I went about my nightly hygiene, which I only managed to do in order to be a good example to my kids, I made the mistake of looking in the mirror.
Who was the man staring right back at me?
Not to echo a certain Disney warrior, but what I saw there was so different than how I envisioned myself.
In my head, I still looked to be in my twenties.
I was a shifter, after all, which meant I didn’t age nearly as fast as humans.
But the man in the mirror looked weary. He had bags under his red eyes, mussed hair, and he’d dropped quite a bit of his muscle from his glory days.
“Ugh.” I splashed water across the mirror so I wouldn’t have to look at myself anymore.
I finished up, then headed to my room, where Benny was already settling into my bed. For a brief moment, I allowed myself to picture my wife there, a smile on her face as she held out her hand for the book.
We’d had our futures stolen from us. Ripped right out of our hands with no remorse or warning.
I supposed I had to decide if I deserved a chance at a new one.